Mother battling breast cancer helps adopted son find biological family

Battling breast cancer for the second time, 60-year-old Angela Farley of Harris County decided she had to more seriously face the possibility she won't survive this round.

Her older son, Jamaal, has plenty of relatives, she thought, but her younger son, Maurio, is adopted and might not have someone to turn to without her.

"In case something does happen to me, or when something does happen to me," said Angela, a business management instructor at West Georgia Technical College, "I want him to have another family."

So about six months ago, Angela found the Georgia Adoption Reunion Registry while searching on the Internet. She printed the forms and showed them to Maurio.

"I was up to it," said Maurio, 32, who works in logistics for the Caterpillar branch in LaGrange. "I had wanted to do it on my own, but the process was so hard to do as far as who you contact."

Angela said the registry, a state agency connected to the Division of Family and Children Services at the Georgia Department of Human Services, made the process easy. "The social worker did all the work," she said. Maurio signed the papers, got them notarized and mailed them to the registry.

Several months later, a social worker from DFCS called and told Maurio she had reached one of his sisters and had located the other two.

Maurio wondered, "What sisters?" He knew he had a single mother and two brothers in his biological family. They were in the photo album DFCS had given Angela when she adopted him. He didn't know about the sisters. They weren't in the photo album.

'Different route'

Angela dreamed of having two children, a husband, a comfortable home and "everything that was supposed to be in that picture. Fate chose a different route."

She wasn't married when she gave birth to her first son in 1977. Her labor was so painful, she said, "I promised myself, my mother and God that I would never, ever hurt like that again."

Seven years later, Angela was 30 and working as a clerk for BellSouth while living in College Park. She still was single, but she obtained that comfortable home and wanted to share her blessings with another child. Then she heard a guest speaker at Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta promote the need for more foster parents with the "each one reach one" slogan.

Angela felt called to be one. She noticed more billboards, TV commercials and ads on buses advocating the cause, and she made this vow:

"Lord, this is what I can do. I will share my life, my love and my home; I will be a foster parent."

A week later, Angela called DFCS, met with a social worker and discussed the pros and cons of possibly bonding with a child and having to let that child go at a moment's notice.

"To become close to a child, love that child and then lose that child was not a chance at heartbreak I wanted to take," she said.

But she still wanted to help, so she made a more permanent commitment and became an adoptive mother instead.

"After going through the classes, home inspections and paperwork," she said, "Maurio was placed in my home and cemented in my heart."

The adoption process took about six months.

'My son'

Maurio was born premature in 1983 as the fifth of six children to an unwed mother who had a drug problem, Angela said. He stayed in an Atlanta hospital for two months, then went to foster care.

Two years later, Angela got the call she had been waiting for from DFCS. She met Maurio at the home of the foster parents in Atlanta.

"He was tiny," she said. "He had long braids. He was 2 years old and could not say a word. All he would do was mumble."

Angela was concerned, but she understood the environment he had been in wasn't stimulating enough.

"He got his point across by pointing and making noises and stuff," she said.

Within a month of living in a more nurturing home, Angela said, "once he started feeling comfortable, you couldn't stop him from talking."

One of Angela's relatives referred to Maurio as "that boy" she adopted.

"I made it clear that he was my son and how that happened was not important," she said. "There was never any doubt that he was my son and my family never, ever treated him differently other than that one incident with my grandmother. He closely resembled my oldest nephew and gossip had it that my sister had the baby and gave it up for adoption to me."

In 1995, BellSouth laid off Angela, and she returned to Cataula, where she was born and raised. She worked as an administrative assistant for Family Connections in Phenix City, then back with BellSouth, this time in Columbus. Five years later, however, she was laid off again. After teaching business management part time for four years as an adjunct instructor at West Georgia Technical College, she was hires as a full-time faculty member in 2010.

Maurio graduated from Harris County High School in 2002. He served in the U.S. Navy from 2003-07. His ship was stationed in Jacksonville, Fla., and he was a seaman for six months in 2004 off the coast of Iraq and Afghanistan on the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier. After leaving the Navy, he worked at Rent-A-Center as a customer account representative and at Walmart as an overnight stocker in Jacksonville.

Now divorced, Maurio has returned to Cataula and lives with Angela as she battles cancer again.

'Explained right'

Angela never kept Maurio's adoption a secret from him or anyone else.

"From the day he could understand, from the beginning," she said. " I wanted it to come from me and not from the streets. I wanted it explained right."

She told him, "You're my child; you just didn't come out of my stomach."

Along with Maurio, DFCS gave Angela a book containing photos of some of his biological relatives, but their names weren't disclosed. All that Angela knew about Maurio's birth mother was that she was single and the state took all of her children because of her drug problem. But she didn't discuss the reason with Maurio.

"It was never important," she said.

In fact, she said, folks remark how much Maurio looks like biological members of Angela's family.

"We forget," she said. "When we were in the hospital (for Maurio's hernia operation this year), the doctor was doing a family history and asked him if he had a history of diabetes in his family. He said no. I said yes you do. My mama has it. I actually forgot."

Maurio can't remember the time he realized he was adopted. He thinks it was when he was in middle school, but he isn't certain. That makes sense, because it wasn't a dramatic moment.

"I knew that I was part of the family," he said, "but I knew I wasn't biological-wise born into the family. I felt the love from my mom and my family members, so it didn't really feel kind of strange to me, like an outsider."

Maurio had that photo album of his biological family, but he didn't have enough words to completely tell the story of those images, especially his birth mother.

"The only thing I knew was that she couldn't afford to take care of so many children," he said. " For a while, I felt like, 'Why me?' But I never really knew the whole situation."

Besides, he didn't fixate on the issue.

"At least somebody took care of me," he said. "That was the most important thing."

And at least he had that photo album. It meant, he said, "I had extra family members. I had other brothers and sisters, and they look just like me. It was kind of surreal to me."

'No doubt'

Angela was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in 2007. Her disease went into remission after treatment, but the cancer came back stronger in 2011 - stage 4.

She has finished her second round of treatment.

"I knew that she was going to beat it again," Maurio said. "I had no doubt about it. She's a fighter."

"I'm doing good," Angela said. "I've got some issues now we're dealing with, but I'm good. I've got some spots in my stomach that they're looking at."

This summer, the DFCS caseworker gave Maurio mixed news. First he heard that his birth mother had died in 1994.

"I was sad and just had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her," he said, "but I never had that chance."

He was comforted, however, in learning that his birth mother's name was Barbara Columbus, and he ended up living in the Columbus area.

"It's weird," he said with a smile.

A month later, the caseworker notified Mario that she still hadn't located his biological brothers but she did find one of the biological sisters he didn't know about, Santiva Watkins, who lives in Atlanta. The caseworker arranged a phone call between them.

"It was weird," Maurio said. "Once we got to talking, I couldn't stop crying and she couldn't stop crying. We were just feeling so much emotion going through us at the same time."

They talked for a few minutes with the social worker on the line. Then they exchanged phone numbers to talk privately -- and they talked for about an hour.

They are 13 months apart and discovered they like the same TV shows, such as "Power," "Scandal," "How to Get Away with Murder" and "Law & Order: SVU." Both struggled in math but refused to give up until they got it right. And, most amazing coincidence of all, Maurio said, Santiva gave her daughter a name eerily similar to his: Amauri.

'So much to take in'

Maurio and Santiva set up a time in July to meet in Atlanta along with the two other sisters.

Angela offered to accompany Maurio , but he chose to go alone.

"I wanted to meet my sisters by myself," he said. "I wanted to meet them first before I wanted them to meet the whole family. There's so much to take in all at one time. I wanted to take it slow."

During the drive, Maurio's anticipation grew.

"I was nervous when I joined the military and went to boot camp," he said, "but this was a different type of nervous."

After he arrived at Santiva's apartment, Maurio said, "I started crying as soon as we gave a hug to each other. It just felt good."

He also met 7-year-old Amauri. They laughed about having similar names with similar spellings. And the hugging and crying repeated when another sister arrived.

They drove to a nearby Golden Corral to meet more relatives and eat a celebratory meal. No awkward moments. No disappointments.

"Good vibes all around," Maurio said. "We all kind of bonded and connected with each other."

In advance of his Oct. 5 birthday, Maurio scheduled another celebration, this one at a restaurant in Newnan, the halfway point for his adoptive and biological families to meet.

"It's going to be pretty cool," he said.

It will be "a relief," he said, "knowing I have two families. I would like all our family to just get together and get to know each other."

Angela welcomes that moment.

"I'm excited because I've talked to one of the sisters on the phone," she said. "She even calls me Mom, so I've bonded with her. I haven't talked to the other two yet. All of my family will love them."

Angela insists she never was jealous or concerned that Maurio's newfound family would interfere with her relationship with him.

"That never even entered my mind," she said, "because I'm his mother. That's just another part of him. That has nothing to do with my role."

But her role has everything to do with this gift. Now, the woman who conceived this idea while she fights a life-threatening disease has given her adopted son a chance to have more love in his life.

"He has sisters now that will always take care of him," she said. "Even if he never gets married again, he has those sisters."

No regrets?

"No regrets," she said.

Epilogue

Last month, Maurio tried to look for that photo album, the one that provided his childhood's tangible link to his biological family.

He couldn't find it.

A few weeks later, the photo album still was lost, but Maurio was focused more on the family he did find.

"I guess without the book, I still get the chance to know my family and being in touch with my sisters and cousins and aunties and uncles," he said. "I guess the book was something about my earlier life, but it's not really as important now. What's more important now is knowing my biological family."

Mark Rice, 706-576-6272. Follow him on Twitter@MarkRiceLE.

This story was originally published October 3, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mother battling breast cancer helps adopted son find biological family ."