A Lady’s Island woman’s quest to find her mother ... and a happy birthday

Andrea Sommerfeld Lee looked different.

Her mom and dad were tall with dark hair. Her sister was, too.

She was short — 5-foot-2 — and blond. And she had a tiny nose.

She didn’t look like anyone on either side of her family.

“Every single place I went, I always, you know, people-watched,” Lee, 54, said Wednesday as she recalled her teenage years in Texas. She sat on a couch in her Lady’s Island home, her shoulder-length blond hair burning bright around her tanned face. Clasped hands rested in her lap. Long nails capped the end of each finger.

“I people-watched for the faces,” she said. “I was always looking to see if someone looked like me.”

In high school she was named “most beautiful.” Her dad, she said, was happy for her.

“And I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I wasn’t adopted, and I was your biological daughter — I wouldn’t have won most beautiful,’” she said. “‘I wouldn’t look like me. I would look like y’all.’ And it was always in the back of my mind.”

She couldn’t see herself in anyone, didn’t know who and what had made her. It was almost as if her existence just ... happened.

A piece was missing.

So, she started searching for it. Off and on for the past couple of decades. And, just before her birthday — July 17 — she found herself closing in on it.

The loneliest punishment

A long driveway led to the home for unwed mothers in Des Moines.

Its exterior in the spring of 1962, as Carol Winters remembers it, was stone, gray.

Winters, of nearby Marshalltown, came to the home in April of that year, after her parents learned she was pregnant. She’d kept the pregnancy secret for a couple months, even after the father — her high school sweetheart of three years — was killed in a car wreck.

Allen Brockett died in November 1961 in California, Winters said. She was supposed to run away, meet him there, so they could start their new life. Now, at 17, she found herself in the home, sweeping floors and dusting window sills, hoping she didn’t gain more than two pounds a week — so she could go to the corner store for a Snickers bar and a Coca-Cola.

They could visit the store once a week for an hour, but only if they got their chores done. She bought magazines — “what People (Magazine) would have been back then” — with pictures of Hollywood stars.

They weren’t allowed to bring food back to the home. One time the girls pooled their money, bought a watermelon and snuck it in the front door.

“And we were able to eat that watermelon without the powers that be getting wind of it,” she said.

The people who ran the home — the name of which she can’t recall — treated her well. Her mother and sisters would sometimes visit, their two-tone dark green and yellow ‘53 Buick rumbling up the driveway. But, with the exception of visits to the corner grocery, she was bound to the home.

When she went into labor in mid July, a nurse she’d never before seen checked on her every hour. Other than that, she was alone. Like she’d been since she dropped out her senior year — when she lost most of her friends and the prank phone calls started.

“I always felt like that was my punishment for getting pregnant,” she said.

The walls of the delivery room on July 17, 1962, were green — “that dull, icky green.”

During the delivery, she kept her eyes closed.

“Because I knew if I looked at the baby just once,” she said, “I wouldn’t be able to give it up.”

It was a girl. Winters named the child Susan Elizabeth — what her mother had once wanted to name her.

The people at the Lutheran adoption agency told her the child’s name would likely change.

The gift of tears

Barbara Sommerfeld, 28 in August 1962, and her husband, Ray, picked up the child when she was 21 days old.

They named her Andrea. Not a family name, just a nice one — one that fit, Barbara Sommerfeld said.

The couple, who were living in Iowa City, working and studying at the University of Iowa, had learned they would not be able to have children of their own. So, they decided to adopt. The Lutheran agency vetted them for nine months, then called them to come pick up their child.

They took the baby home, to the two-story house, the second floor of which the Sommerfelds occupied.

They saw their downstairs neighbors the next morning. Their housemates had heard Andrea’s first cry, followed by two pairs of feet hitting the floor — one heading to the baby’s room, the other heading to the kitchen. They laughed.

“With tears in our eyes,” Sommerfeld recalled. “We were so thankful for this gift that had been given to us.”

She told her girls — Andrea and, later, her sister — early on that they were adopted. A friend of Sommerfeld’s had found out later in his life that he’d been adopted. He felt liked he’d been lied to.

“So he became distrustful of many things,” she said.

Stories and self-protection

“I guess growing up adopted, you kind of make your own story,” Andrea Sommerfeld Lee said.

Near her on the couch was Lola, her Boston terrier, who’d stretched out and settled in for a nap.

The story Lee made up about her birth parents involved a teenaged mother who got pregnant and gave up her child because she couldn’t give it the life she wanted. Lee pretended the woman eventually started a family of her own. And she envisioned her mother forgetting about the child she gave up — because that child was an embarrassment. A secret.

In June, when Lee decided to start looking for her birth mother again, she hoped she wasn’t a secret. If she was — and the woman’s family didn’t know about her — she wouldn’t intrude in the woman’s life, she told herself.

It was “self-protection mode,” something Lee could use as an out, to spare herself more hurt.

She’d done some searching before — she obtained “non-identifying adoption information” from the state of Iowa about 20 years ago, and she hired a search firm, OmniTrace, in fall 2008 to locate her mother. Still, the piece was missing.

In January her son used AncestryDNA to learn more about his roots. The process piqued her interest. She tried it six months later. Located a potential relative, who told her about Carol Winters.

She pieced together information she’d learned from her adoptive parents with details she’d gotten from Iowa with the relative’s story and an obituary she’d located.

The relative sent Lee a picture of Winters. Lee saw some of herself in the woman.

She wrote Winters a letter.

Birthday charms

“Just seeing your picture is enough,” Lee remembers writing in the letter.

An odd thing to write, perhaps, she said, but it was the first time she’d looked like someone — aside from her own children — in 54 years. And, when she sent the letter, she still thought she was a secret. In terms of a response, she kept her expectations low.

After Winters had given up her child in 1962, she’d earned her GED, settled in Iowa and later started a family. She had a daughter and a son and, “when they were old enough to understand but not too old to judge her,” she told them about the child she’d put up for adoption.

Now, decades later, when she learned Lee was looking for her, she asked her children to meet her in Des Moines. They went to a Texas Roadhouse. She made sure everyone had a beer or a glass of wine. And she told them that Andrea wanted to meet.

Her children smiled.

Winters called Lee after she left the restaurant on June 29 — the first conversation between mother and daughter.

Lee is planning a trip to Iowa for the middle of September.

“I think we’ll just be two women who love each other very much and have just discovered one another,” Winters said of the impending reunion. “Just to hear her, and not having to ask her for forgiveness — she never made me feel like I had to ask her for forgiveness.”

When Lee was a teenager, when the calendar turned to July and her birthday neared, she wondered about her mother, if the woman was thinking about her.

This year she received a package from Iowa. Inside was a ruby charm. On the charm, an engraving: “M.O.M.” “My Other Mother.”

Winters video called her daughter July 17.

And sang her happy birthday.

Update: Andrea Solmmerfeld Lee meets her mother

This story was originally published July 22, 2016 at 8:26 AM with the headline "A Lady’s Island woman’s quest to find her mother ... and a happy birthday."