Secrets and questions: Daughter, birth mother find each other

Trina Songstad was born July 17, 1962, at Seattle’s Swedish Hospital. Her mother never saw her.

In the 53 years since, Songstad has struggled in many ways.

She was adopted twice as an infant. The first family couldn’t keep her, but before her first birthday she was adopted by Louella and Edward Songstad, who lived in Everett.

“I was so, so very different. I was nothing like them. My (adoptive) mom is German. All the cousins call her ‘Sergeant’,” Songstad said. “She’s a tough old lady, she’s 84.”

A mother herself, Songstad has an 18-year-old son and a daughter who is 20. Still, she said Wednesday, “I’ve always felt like a lost puppy. Nobody understands unless they’re adopted.”

Last month, she learned the answer to her life’s central mystery — her birth mother’s identity. They have talked by phone, and Songstad hopes they’ll soon meet.

From her Southern California home Thursday, the 71-year-old woman who gave Songstad life shared the wrenching experience she went through in 1962.

Now a retired teacher, she asked that her name not be used. Some members of her family never knew that as a teen growing up near Seattle she became pregnant. It was shrouded in secrecy.

“I was 16 when I got pregnant, and had just turned 17 when she was born,” said the woman who was called “Lisa” at the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers. The facility just south of Seattle operated from 1899 until 1973.

By the’70s, single motherhood was becoming more accepted. In 1962, “there was no way I could have brought her home,” Lisa said. “I never saw her. They said if I saw her, I wouldn’t give her up.”

With her adoptive mother’s help, Songstad sought information about her birth mom for years. In 1990, she received a letter from Medina Children’s Service, now Amara, a nonprofit adoption agency in Seattle.

It contained background information, but not the full names, of Songstad’s birth parents. According to “the social worker’s description,” the letter said, “Lisa is a rather attractive girl. … She is half-German and the other half English and other Northern European nationalities.”

The social worker reported Lisa had a 3.8 grade average in high school.

Songstad learned that her mother, the eldest of four children, was petite like she is, 5 feet, 2-inches tall with blue eyes and light brown hair.

And her father? “Your birth father’s name is Richard,” the 1990 letter said. “At the time of your birth, he was age 23. … He is a high school graduate and was then working at Boeing.”

For Lisa, time can’t erase painful memories. “I had a crush on him,” she said. He drove a sporty Studebaker — she can still recite its license plate number. “He lived with the people I babysat for. I’d never had sex before. I never had been in trouble.”

She said he wanted her to get an abortion, which was then illegal, but she wouldn’t do that. She ditched class at Highline High School to go alone to a doctor. Her parents didn’t find out about her pregnancy until she was four months along.

“It was scary. The whole thing was scary,” said Lisa, who finished high school while at the Florence Crittenton Home. Soon after the baby was born, she enrolled at Western Washington University in Bellingham. She would go on to teach middle school in Southern California for 35 years.

Lisa married an older man, divorced a few years later, and never had other children. “I always thought I would, but I didn’t. I have cats,” she said. Years ago, she wrote to Dear Abby asking how she might find the daughter she gave up. She didn’t get the answers she needed.

Songstad, a 1980 Cascade High School graduate who has worked as a bartender and veterinary assistant, was about 8 when her parents told her she was adopted. They had moved from Marysville to the Silver Lake area. In school, she said, “the boys found out I was adopted, and I remember them teasing me.”

Two years ago, I wrote about a change in Washington law. It allows adoptees 18 and older who were born in Washington to request original birth certificates without going through the court system. Songstad read that column and kept a copy.

Recently, a counselor helped her reach out to the state Department of Health. By April 6, she had the birth certificate with Lisa’s full name. With the Internet, Songstad and her adoptive mother soon had the California woman’s phone number.

And just like that, Songstad called — after her adoptive mother called Lisa first. “I was so excited. We were both talking so much, for a good hour,” Songstad said. “We couldn’t stop talking.”

They discovered some shared health issues. Songstad learned that she has an aunt and other relatives. For Lisa, there are two grown grandchildren, Colton and Karissa, in Snohomish County.

“I had 200 students each year, a lot of kids,” the California woman said. Three years ago, she wrote to an adoption agency in search of the child she never knew. “I’d kind of given up,” she said.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.