A single encounter or loss, an event or crisis, even a book or news story can alter your course forever-or serve to solidify the path you’re already on. It is that lasting, life-affirming impact that makes it what we call a “moment of truth.”
Last July, we asked six high achievers to revisit the make-or-break turning points of their lives in hopes that their experiences would enlighten and uplift you as you go through your own (see “My Moment of Truth,” July 2003). The response was so overwhelming that we’ve opted to do that again. The following dynamic and successful individuals generously share the most meaningful-and in some cases, painful-moments of their lives. More importantly, they share how those moments affected them.
One lost a parent, one lost his health, another lost her way, and one sought the family he thought he’d lost forever. Although the personalities and lifestyles of these successful professionals and entrepreneurs are vastly different, all of their stories testify to the fact that what doesn’t kill us not only makes us stronger, for better or worse, it also makes us who we are. Here are their stories of guts-and glory.
Her Mother’s Daughter
When Fran Harris was asked to identify her most significant moment of truth, she didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t in 1988, when her dreams caved in as she narrowly missed making the women’s Olympic basketball team. Nor was it in 1997, when she came back to beat more than 200 top competitors in securing a spot on Houston’s first WNBA team, which went on to win that year’s championship.
For Harris, the pivotal moment of her life occurred when she was just 16, and, at 38, she is still constantly reminded of its rippling effects.
“I had gotten into a student exchange program where you went to live with a family in Mexico for a month,” Harris recalls. “My mother was so excited about it. From the beginning, she kept saying, ‘You have to go. Don’t worry about me. Just go.’ I can so clearly remember her dropping me at the airport and saying goodbye.” Harris boarded the plane from Dallas to Mexico City. Her mother went home, had a heart attack, and died.
“That night, I had a dream and woke up and ran into the bedroom of the people I was staying with and said, ‘I have to call my mother.’ I was in such a state because I knew something had happened to her, but they didn’t have a phone.”
The next morning Harris was told that she had to return home because her grandmother was ill. She knew in her gut that wasn’t true. As she packed, she overheard the family she was living with say in Spanish that her mother had died. She then made the trip home to Dallas alone, swallowing hard against that odd mix of dread and hope-hope that it somehow wasn’t so.
But it was. The minute Harris looked through the glass airport doors and saw her sister waiting for her instead of her mother, she knew. Bessie Harris, who had asthma, had not felt well when she got home from the airport the previous day. Rather than go to the doctor, she took some medication. Her death was quick and completely unexpected.
“I had always been a very independent child, but as independent as I was, in the back of my mind I thought my mother would always be there,” Harris says. “I instantly felt different. This had never happened in my family before. None of us knew any children who’d lost their mother.”
Bessie was a devoted, no-nonsense homemaker who had the highest expectations of her children while commanding their total respect. Earlier that year, Harris’ admiration for her mother had intensified when, during the breakup of her marriage, Bessie went to cosmetology school and opened her own business. “That was a defining moment for her and for me,” Harris says. “My mother had never worked, but she just did it and I thought that was incredible.”
The fourth of five children, Harris had always been a high-achieving, forthright child. The sudden loss of her mother-her rock and primary role model-devastated and could easily have derailed her. “She was responsible for cultivating this confidence in me and now she wasn’t there,” says Harris. “I felt alone in the world.” Nonetheless, Harris became more determined than ever to excel, and on her own terms.
“When a child loses a mother, especially a girl, I think a lot of people say, ‘Well, now what’s going to happen to that girl?’ People treat you differently, they talk to you differently, they don’t know what to say or how to be with you. Surely I’d become more promiscuous, I’d become a teenaged mother, or a rebel. You could see what they were thinking on their faces. That really bothered me and made me determined to prove them wrong.”
After her mother’s funeral, Harris returned to Mexico. “I still appreciate my older brother’s asking me what I wanted to do. My parents had always been the type to just tell their children, ‘This is what you’re going to do.’ It was very empowering to be asked and I wanted to go back. It allowed me to escape all that sadness.”
Harris did fine in Mexico and returned to finish high school as a standout both academically and athletically, earning a reputation for being “strong,” a label she despises. “When someone endures a great loss or disappointment, to tell them to be strong is to lay a huge burden on top of the one they already have,” she says. “Black people, and black women especially, get saddled with that a lot, and it’s unfair.
“Forget those fools who tell you to be strong. Be with your pain. Fall apart. Not doing that is completely counterintuitive to what we need emotionally.”
Harris learned that bit of wisdom firsthand. After a characteristically impressive start as a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, she was soon overcome by feelings of loss, loneliness, guilt, anger, and fear. The grieving she’d deferred was finally catching up to her. “After she died, I just kept going,” Harris says. “And so did everyone else in my family. We never discussed it, not once. We just all suppressed our feelings.”
With no one to talk to, Harris began to sink into a deep depression that was affecting her studies and her game. “I just felt such emptiness,” she remembers. “For the first time, I wasn’t doing well and I was so depressed that I was starting not to even care.” That’s when she decided to seek therapy.
“My mother was very much in that what-goes-on-in-this-house-stays-in-this-house mode, and she didn’t show her pain to her children. I had seen my mother cry three times in my life: once when Martin Luther King was assassinated, once when her dad died, and then when Ronald Reagan was elected president,” says Harris, laughing at that last one. “I always wondered, what did she do with her pain? She was a woman who ‘got it done,’ so I was very much a woman who ‘got it done,’ and didn’t need any help. But I was in so much pain; I finally realized I did need help.”
Harris sought counseling on her own, but didn’t say anything to her family for a long time. The therapy’s positive impact was felt instantly, as she began to tap into and share her feelings about her mother and her mother’s death for the first time. She felt guilty about not having been there, about not having been able to help her, about leaving for Mexico. “I felt somehow that maybe if I had been there, my mother would still be alive,” Harris recalls. “I was angry, afraid, confused about what exactly had happened to my mother and why.”
Harris was in therapy for about a year. Therapy allowed her to unload it all-enabled the dam inside of her to break. It relieved her loneliness and sense of utter isolation and validated what she was going through. She learned that all of her feelings were perfectly normal, given her experience; she learned
strategies to cope with her feelings; and-most of all-she learned the benefits, even the deep necessity, of sharing those feelings, which was something her family did not do.
Therapy got her through that harrowing time. But her mother’s life and loss continue to serve as both motivation and touchstone for everything Harris does-and she’s done a lot.
She went on to earn both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Austin. She played professional basketball in Switzerland and Italy, becoming fluent in Italian. She parlayed her academic and WNBA championship successes into a sports broadcasting career for radio as well as ESPN, Fox Sports, and Lifetime Television.
Today, the founder and president of Austin-based Tall Tree Productions is also founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Families of Incarcerated Loved Ones, and creator and executive producer of America’s Fitness Show, which airs locally in Texas. She recently published her sixth book, Crashing Hollywood: How to Keep Your Integrity Up, Your Clothes On & Still Make It in Hollywood (Michael Wiese Productions; $24.95).
But Harris has no doubt what her mother’s reaction would be to her successes. “She would so not be surprised,” Harris says, laughing. “People say, ‘That’s amazing that you did that.’ My mother would say, ‘Of course you did that. That’s what you’re here to do. That’s who you are.'”
Soul Survivor
The third of four children in a rambunctious family, Anthony Pinado had survived more than his share of brushes with catastrophe as a kid. “I can’t even count the number of times my parents had to take me to the emergency room,” he says.
There was the day he fell off a neighbor’s swing, slicing a gash in the back of his head. And the time he was playing superheroes with his brothers and launched himself into the air only to collide with the coffee table face first. He first had his stomach pumped at age 3, after mistaking St. Josephs orange flavored aspirin for candy-and the list goes on. But all of that just made for a “great childhood” in Pinado’s view, and he had no reason to believe his future would be any less so.
In May 1991, Pinado’s outlook couldn’t have been brighter. The Morehouse alumnus had just received his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan. He was engaged to marry his longtime love, Melanie King, and he was planning to relax with her for a while before moving to Dallas to begin working at ARCO Oil & Gas Co. All was right with the world-or so they thought. Little did they know of the terrifying shift that was on the horizon.
Pinado and King were enjoying a month-long vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, when a call came in from ARCO’s medical department. The results of his routine pre-employment screening were troubling. “They said I needed to have new blood tests immediately, that their tests showed a serious problem, but that I’d seemed so healthy otherwise, their results could just be a mistake,” he says.
Unfazed and feeling fine, Pinado was retested in Hilton Head. The results were shocking. “They told me I either had AIDS, sickle cell anemia, or leukemia, and that I needed to get to a large metropolitan hospital right away,” he says. “They said the situation was so dire that I should fly, not drive, because in the event of a car accident, even a minor injury would probably cause me to bleed to death.”
Against medical advice, Pinado drove the five hours home to Atlanta anyway. “I felt fine,” he says, still sounding unable to reconcile how he was feeling with how sick he actually was. “I was kind of mad over the inconvenience of it. I just kept thinking, ‘This is a mistake.'”
Back in Atlanta, he endured about nine hours of testing and examinations at Emory University Hospital. This time, the results were undeniable and devastating. Pinado had a rare and acute form of leukemia. It was so serious that he was admitted to Emory that night to begin a series of intensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, doctors told him that his chances of beating the disease were slim.
“That was probably the first moment when I started to realize this was really happening,” Pinado says. “I cried, and I remember being scared, but as time went on I think the people around me-my parents, Melanie, my friends-were more scared for me than I was for myself.
“Once I understood what my illness was and how they were going to treat it, I put my trust in the people around me and just sort of resigned myself to getting through it,” Pinado continues. But getting through it would prove nightmarish at times. The chemotherapy made him feel weak and sick, he lost his hair, and began losing weight. As various treatments were tried and failed, he also struggled against the overwhelming tide of emotions that rolled like a rollercoaster through moments of high hopes and deep fears. But through it all, Pinado believed he’d pull through.
“I thought of it as a disruption, but I never thought of it as the end of everything. I knew so many people who had difficult lives growing up, and I’d always had it so easy. I started to see this as me having to pay my dues for having such a good life. I definitely got depressed at times, but things had always worked out for me. I really thought they would this time.”
Pinado spent eight months battling for his life. He was in and out of the hospital, and he endured several unsuccessful courses of treatment and medical crises as well as the harvesting and replacement of his own bone marrow. Ultimately, an experimental drug that his future mother-in-law read about in The New York Times sent his disease into remission. Pinado’s primary doctor, hematologist-oncologist Elliott Winton, called his recovery a miracle. Pinado doesn’t dwell on it, but he doesn’t disagree.
“I’ve always lived my life within morally ethical guidelines, but I didn’t go to church with any regularity,” he says. “In the hospital I started to pray, and it was an amazing thing. I had become friends with another patient. She was an Egyptian doctor, and she had what I had. I used to lie in my bed and visualize prayers until I could see them actually take form and move down the hall and into her room, making a connection to her.”
Pinado laughs, conceding that some of his friends would say he was tripping off of all the medication he was on. But to this day, he believes it was real, and he’s not the only one. “She told me later that she could feel it and her whole family believed it helped her. [The prayers] helped me too.” Like Pinado, she beat the odds and survived.
“I prayed a lot, but more for other people than for myself, and it was the most healing thing I did,” says Pinado. “More than anything else, that distracted me and made me feel good.”
Pinado was finally released from the hospital in January 1992. The following May, right on schedule, he
got married. That July, exactly one year from his original start date, he reported to his job at ARCO. “The company held my job for me,” he says, adding, “They were incredible throughout the whole thing.”Pinado wanted nothing more than to get back to normal in every way, but that proved challenging and frustrating, and he had very little patience with the process. The people around him were kind and understanding, but, ironically, that was hard to take, too. “I had to get my blood tested once a week,” he recalls. “People treated me very delicately. I had some real short-term memory problems so I’d get confused easily. It was very difficult.” But Pinado made steady progress.
In 1994, he took a job with Coca-Cola and moved back to Atlanta. In 1995, his daughter, Kori, was born. In 1997, five years after his ordeal began, a clean blood test rendered him off
icially cured. Pinado, 41, is currently a management consultant and his family now includes a son, Cole.
“I have the life that I always thought I’d have and I’m so grateful for that, but I’ve never reflected on it much. I just haven’t had time, and I guess it’s really just not my way,” he says. “I know that after what I went through, people expect you to be different in some deep way, but I’m not. I was so focused on getting my life back to where it left off, that that’s what I did and now I just keep moving forward.
“I’m probably more cautious, especially with my kids-which is pretty funny given how I was as a kid. I guess I know now that things can happen. Maybe it’s a false confidence, but I definitely feel like, whatever does happen, I can handle it. I can handle anything.”
Try Anything, Fear Nothing
Zola Mashariki’s résumé reads like a high achiever’s dream: president of her Brooklyn Technical High School senior class, award-winning student at Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and so on. Looks like a seamless ride from Brooklyn to the big leagues. But, like any résumé, what it doesn’t show is the crises of faith along the way-or the moments of truth.
After a friend dropped out of Harvard Law, Mashariki was so shaken that she sat down at her computer to try to assess in writing where she was and where she was headed. “One of my best friends [had left the school] and I couldn’t figure out why I was still there,” she says. “I had been a mostly creative person in undergrad, and in law school I felt unfocused. So I wrote a personal statement to figure out who I was. I wrote it as if I was applying to school-‘My name is Zola, I’m 21 years old, my goals are … , my activities are …’
“When I got to goals, I realized that nothing was related to law. It was all about theater and film. I had these great ideas about how to revolutionize the film business and I wanted to give myself a chance to try.”
Throughout law school, Mashariki constantly went back and revised her personal statement, always trying to refine her goals and get a clearer sense of her dreams. When she heard about the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California, which offers a master of fine arts in film, she added it to her list and promised herself she’d go. “I didn’t have a clue what a producer did, but I was told that they were a combination of business and creative,” she says. “I didn’t even know what that meant, but I was hoping it would be a way for me to merge my legal background with my creative interests.”
As her law school graduation neared, Mashariki applied and was accepted to the Stark Program, but when she also snared a high-paying corporate law job at Proskauer Rose L.L.P. in New York, she forgot all about her personal statement and “went with the flow.”
Before long, Mashariki was living a quintessential buppie lifestyle that included a Harvard classmate fiancé, a great apartment, a BMW, and an enviable job doing mergers and acquisitions work. While it may have looked like a natural next step on the outside, it all represented quite a departure for Mashariki, who grew up in a family that helped found The East, a group of African Americans who, in the ’70s, changed their names (Zola means productive, Mashariki means East in Swahili), started their own schools, and sought to create a self-sufficient, culturally authentic community.
“I remember riding the train to work with my fiancé, wearing our nice suits, carrying our nice briefcases, and feeling so disconnected from who I was, but so happy at the same time,” she says.
That feeling lasted about a year, when, one day, while transferring some computer files, she happened upon her old personal statement. “It was amazing to read it again and remember how I felt when I wrote it, and what I wanted to do with my life,” she says. “I realized I’d gotten too far away from that. Once I found it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew I still had to try.”
So Mashariki applied to the Stark Program and was again accepted. Sure that destiny was calling and that this would be her last chance, she packed up and flew away from every sure thing-her job, her home, her close-knit family, and a lifestyle she enjoyed-to pursue something she knew almost nothing about. Her fiancé went along.
It quickly became clear that the move was a disaster. The Stark Program wasn’t what Mashariki thought it would be. For the first time, she was older and woefully less knowledgeable than her classmates, most of whom had grown up in and around the film world. Unfamiliar with even the most basic film terminology, she felt like they literally spoke a different language. Almost a year into the two-year program, she was miserable and feeling no closer to-or clearer about-having a career as a producer.
“I was confused everyday,” she recalls. “I had always been able to make whatever situation I was in work. I had been raised to believe I could do anything. Here I was, as close to failure as I had ever been. And I still had no idea what a producer did.” Mashariki began to rethink her decision. “The truth was I didn’t have a plan,” she says. “It had never occurred to me that I would need one.” She considered dropping out.
Then she heard about another student who was going to direct a short film in Cameroon and needed a producer. Mashariki signed on. “I still didn’t know what a producer did, but it was spring break and I wanted to produce something, so I went.”
If Mashariki thought she couldn’t get any more miserable than she already was, she was wrong. “It was two weeks of total hell,” she says. “I was a woman in a world where men don’t take direction from women well, I had no idea what I was doing, and the schedule was really tight.”
Mashariki was used to managing people but the film crew either spoke thickly accented English or French, so basic communication was difficult. She also had no idea how to manage the elements, like the weather, which at times interrupted shooting and transportation, causing them to fall behind schedule. She encountered every possible type of challenge-financial, logistical, physical, even racial (“The mostly Cameroonian crew was more eager to take orders from my white cinematographer than they were from me,” she says)-but Mashariki pushed through them all.
“I cried every day. But, in the end, I figured out what a producer does and, unlike most of my classmates, I had produced my first film.”
She arrived home to find she also had her first job offer-for a $300-a-week summer internship with Fox Searchlight Pictures. She was thrilled. Her fiancé, given the meager salary, was not. They agreed that after the summer she’d go back to law.
The internship was hectic. The company had a new president and was aggressively pursuing new projects. She spent her days doing every manner of administrative work, from fetching coffee and answering phones, to reading scripts and sharing her opinions about them in meetings where she was sure that no one noticed or cared what she said. “It was discouraging,” she says. “At the same time, I was getting a bird’s eye view of what the film world was about.”
As the internship wound down, the president of the company offered Mashariki a job as his second assistant. She was floored. Her new husband was not and she had already been offered a position with a Los Angeles law firm, so she turned Searchlight down.
Then Searchlight came back with an offer she couldn’t refuse. It was for a creative executive position, which meant she’d be finding writers, developing scripts, bringing them into the company, and advocating for their purchase. Over her husband’s objections, she took it.
“I literally went
from coffee girl to having an office, reading scripts, and making real decisions,” says Mashariki, who was involved in the development of Denzel Washington’s directorial debut, Antwone Fisher, and whose upcoming projects include a supernatural thriller called My Soul to Keep, to be directed by Rick Famuyiwa of Brown Sugar, and October Squall, a feature film that will star and be produced by Halle Berry. “The first time my boss told me to go buy the film I’d [recommended] I had to sit in my office for 10 minutes and figure out what that meant. I had a nice title, but my salary wasn’t high and I didn’t know if I was coming or going, but I was having a great time.”
The experience and the euphoria it invoked brought Mashariki back to her first week at Dartmouth, when she’d gone on a freshman kayaking trip, having never kayaked in her life. “I had the best time. I walked away from that experience thinking my new motto would be ‘Try anything, fear nothing.’ And I spent the rest of those college years doing all sorts of things I had never done before-horseback riding, directing plays, studying abroad.
“Something happened to me at Dartmouth that made me say to myself, ‘Of course I should be studying in Spain, of course I should be teaching at Harvard, of course I should be a filmmaker, making films with Halle Berry and Nicole Kidman.’ I really felt that I could do anything, and that I owed it to myself to try,” Mashariki continues. “Finding my personal statement reminded me of that. I didn’t just write that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wrote that I owed it to myself to try.”
Some attempts have been marred by disappointment. Mashariki’s marriage was short-lived and, although she loves her job, Hollywood is still heavy on hype, tough on hope. “My marriage didn’t meet my expectations,” says Mashariki, now 29. “Hollywood didn’t meet my expectations. But I met my expectations and I now know that you can fail and that you can come back and do great things after you fail. All of that makes you more fearless. I go out on the ledge a lot, and I don’t look down anymore.”
Lost and Found
Tony Shellman is one of those rare people who seem 100% comfortable with himself, no matter what setting he’s in. And why shouldn’t he be? Confident and as fun loving as he is hard working, Shellman has founded and run not one but two successful hip-hop clothing companies-Mecca and Enyce-both of which have made millions and left their lasting mark on the pages of hip-hop and fashion history.
At 37, it would be easy for Shellman to have lost himself to the hype of the hip-hop circles in which he travels, or to define himself by his impressive feats in business. But success is not the source of Shellman’s self-esteem. For that, he gives kudos to his parents, Lenzie Shellman, a retired longshoreman, and his late wife, Betty, an English teacher, who adopted Tony from Catholic Charities in Seattle when he was 2 years old.
“I was living with nuns, and then, on Christmas Eve 1968, I went home to my parents,” Shellman recalls, grinning from ear to ear. “December 24th was my mother’s birthday, so my dad always said I was her birthday present that year. From day one, I knew I was adopted, but they always said, ‘We love you more than anything. You’re our special, precious gift.’ They knew nothing about my birth parents, but they always said they’d support me if I wanted to look.”
Over the years, Shellman thought about searching for his birth parents at times, but never pursued it. Popular and athletic, he was too busy having fun. He became interested in fashion early, modeling before moving to New York to attend college at Parsons School of Design. While there, away from home and his family, he began thinking of his birth parents more and more. “I had two great parents, a great brother, an all-American childhood, but something was missing,” Shellman says. “I just didn’t feel complete.”
Shellman hired a lawyer who quickly returned with bad news. Washington is one of about a dozen states where adoption records are completely sealed. All Shellman got was some non-identifying information such as confirmation that both of his birth parents were black. Beyond that, he says, “everything shut down.”
Disappointed, Shellman let it go. With a partner, he started Mecca, his first company, building it up to $25 million in sales before the partnership fell apart. Then, in 1996, he co-founded Enyce. No sooner was the hot new hip-hop brand up and running than Shellman, personally, hit a wall. “I turned 30 and I shut down,” he says. “Here I was, a successful businessman with a wonderful family and a great life. But something big was still missing. I needed to know more about where I came from, who I came from, what had happened. Luckily, my parents taught me to follow my heart and to find what’s true, so I decided to stop everything so I could do that.”
Shellman took time off from work and began feverishly researching his options. He learned from a network of adoptees online and from adoption search groups that a certified independent (CI)-a professional with no stake in his adoption who is certified to open closed records-could gain access to the same records that a lawyer couldn’t, and for a lot lower fee. Shellman hired a CI and was stunned at how quickly the response came.
“I was in Hong Kong on business when she called me on my cell phone and said, ‘I found your people.’ I got on a plane that night and headed to New York.” The CI told him the first names of his birth parents, but couldn’t release any contact information until she checked with them. So she urged Shellman to write them a letter, which he did. She sent it out just before leaving for vacation.
“She was about to leave, so I really had to put the letter together quickly,” Shellman says. “I wrote that I was looking to complete myself, that I’d had a good life and didn’t need anything from
them except closure. I said, ‘I love you and thanks for having me,’ and I put in a picture of myself, then sealed it up. I was so busy focusing on the letter itself that I didn’t even realize I printed it out on my letterhead, with my address and phone number at work.”A few days later, with Shellman’s CI still away on vacation, his assistant answered a call. When she asked who was calling, she was told, “It’s his father.”
“I was in a meeting, but the rule in my office is that if anyone in my family calls, put them straight through. So, she buzzes me and says, ‘It’s your dad.’ I pick up, thinking it’s my adoptive father of course, saying, ‘Hey man, what’s up,’ and I hear these people saying, ‘Anthony?’ I say, ‘Who’s that?’ Then I heard this woman’s voice and by instinct I just knew it was my birth mother. I said, ‘Cora?’ She said ‘Yes,’ and that was it. I dropped the phone and walked out of my office in tears. I could barely breathe.”
Shellman’s assistant, fearing the worst, picked up the phone and found out what was going on. Once Shellman got himself together, he got back on the phone and they talked, in a series of calls among family members, for the next seven hours.
In those conversations, he learned that his parents, Cora and Charles Brown, were young, married with a daughter, and struggling both emotionally and financially when Tony was born. They were into the Black Panther movement, partying, and hanging out when they were pressured by Shellman’s disapproving maternal grandmother into giving up their second child so that he might have a better life than they could offer. It was his grandmother who delivered him to Catholic Charities-his distraught birth mother wouldn’t do it. The Browns went on to have two more children and, at one point, lived five miles from the Shellman family, before leaving Seattle for Portland, Oregon.
“They never looked for me,” Shellman says. “They didn’t
have the resources and they felt real guilty. They felt I would be mad at them. And I was, for a minute.”
Indeed, the revelation of the events that led to his adoption was hard for Shellman to take. A part of him was angry that his parents didn’t resist his grandmother more and then didn’t look for him. When he talked to his birth father about it, Shellman never got any answers that truly satisfied him. “He said that they just couldn’t afford to keep me,” Shellman says, recalling one conversation. “He wasn’t working at the time; good jobs were hard to come by, and he wasn’t going to sweep floors for a living. This sent me into a rage, because my [adoptive] dad had worked two, sometimes three jobs at a time to provide for his family-and sweeping floors was once one of them.”
An incensed Shellman literally jumped in his Porsche and sped from Portland to Seattle to his dad’s house. When he got there, he told his adoptive father about the conversation. Shellman says his dad, who is a good bit older than the birth father, calmed him down and said, “Look, I’m from another generation. We did what we had to do-that’s just who I am. [Your birth father] was from a different time and circumstances. You have to try to understand and then just let it go.”
It took a while, but Shellman says that with the help of some wise counsel from his adoptive father, he came to believe that Charles and Cora Brown did the best they could do at the time. Besides, he says of his birth parents, “My mom is such a sweet lady and my dad is such a cool guy.”
Two days after that first marathon phone conversation, Shellman and his younger sister, who lived in Minnesota, both flew to Seattle to meet. “She got off the plane and I was looking at the faces of all these people and then, there she was-the female version of me! We’ve been supertight ever since. We stayed up all night talking. It was if we had been best friends for years.”
Two weeks later, he drove to Portland to meet the rest of his family and, again, there was an instant bond. But there were difficult truths to face up to as well. His closeness to his newly found younger sister contrasts with more complicated relationships with his other siblings. They have their own resentments, especially given how well he’s done in life. His older sister feels that he got lucky because he was brought up in better circumstances than she was. And frankly, Shellman agrees that as much as finding his birth family has enriched his life and his sense of completion, getting adopted is the best thing that ever happened to him.
On the other hand, finding his birth parents did exactly what Shellman needed it to do. It filled the empty space he’d felt despite a life that was full to the brim. It completed him. The experience also taught him a few things.
“As corny as it may sound, this let me know that there truly is a God and that if you pray for it-whatever ‘it’ is-you’ll get it,” he says, his eyes filling for a moment. “It also reinforced for me how truly important family is. We take for granted our families and how much they love us. If my adopted family hadn’t loved me and nurtured me and totally embraced me, I would never have been prepared to embrace anybody else.
“True love is when somebody has the choice whether or not to love you and they choose it,” Shellman continues. “My adopted family did that for me, I was able to do that in return, and my birth family has chosen that now, too. What’s better than that? Not Enyce, not all the success and money in the world. Nothing is better than that!”
Fran Harris
When a child loses a mother, especially a girl, I think a lot of people say, ‘Well, now what’s going to happen to that girl?’ People treat you differently, they talk to you differently, they don’t know what to say or how to be with you. Surely I’d become more promiscuous, I’d become a teenaged mother, or a rebel. You could see what they were thinking on their faces. That really bothered me and made me determined to prove them wrong.
Pinado Anthony
They told me I either had AIDS, sickle cell anemia, or leukemia, and that I needed to get to a large metropolitan hospital right away. They said the situation was so dire that I should fly, not drive, because in the event of a car accident, even a minor injury would probably cause me to bleed to death.
Zola Mashariki
When I got to goals, I realized that nothing was related to law. It was all about theater and film. I had these great ideas about how to revolutionize the film business and I wanted to give myself a chance to try.
Tony Shellman
I was living with nuns, and then, on Christmas Eve 1968, I went home to my parents. December 24th was my mother’s birthday, so my dad always said I was her birthday present that year. From day one, I knew I was adopted, but they always said, ‘We love you more than anything. You’re our special, precious gift.’ They knew nothing about my birth parents, but they always said they’d support me if I wanted to look.