eNewMexican

‘You have found me’

Woman, 52, who was adopted as an infant, tracks down her biological dad, a Santa Fe artist

By Robert Nott rnott@sfnewmexican.com

Woman who was adopted 52 years ago celebrates second Father’s Day with biological dad after tracking him down in Santa Fe last year.

Terry Colby looked at the email and thought, “Spam. It had to be spam.” The April 4, 2020, electronic missive was sent by Sue Ann Averitte and the subject line said, “Introduction.”

Colby opened it. The first sentence was innocuous enough.

“I hope this letter finds you safe and healthy in the era of coronavirus,” it read.

It was the second sentence that grabbed Colby’s attention.

“I’m writing because I believe you are my biological father.”

The email included a brief synopsis of Averitte’s life, her birth date, who her biological mother was and enough other information to make Colby realize, “There’s just a little too much information for this to be spam.”

He went online and found a video of Averitte, who lived in Austin, Texas, at the time.

“Man, that looks like her mother,” he recalled thinking. “This is my daughter.”

And so she was.

That June, Colby and Averitte enjoyed their first Father’s Day together.

Such get-togethers are a rare thing in the world of adopted children, who often never meet their biological parents.

But Averitte, who said she was fortunate to have loving adoptive parents — now deceased — was determined to find her biological mother and father.

Just over a year after their first in-person meeting in Santa Fe, they met at Ahmyo River Gallery on Canyon Road — which Colby, who lives in Santa Fe, manages. They looked at the email that brought them together and Averitte’s journey in finding her dad.

Flashback to 1966, when Colby, a student at the University of Kansas, met Averitte’s mom — whose name they are not revealing, since she has shown no interest in reconnecting. The affair was “torrid,” Colby said. He was in a bar over Thanksgiving weekend when the bartender told him he had a call on the pay phone. Colby was thrown, since no one ever called him at the bar. The caller was Averitte’s mom, and the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was playing on the jukebox in the background.

“Terry, I’m pregnant,” she said. “I left her with my home phone number in Kansas, but she never

called. She disappeared,” Colby said.

Averitte was born Aug. 15, 1967, and adopted eight days later by Bill and Helen Schweitzer of Wichita, Kan.

Sue Ann Averitte, who recently moved to Colorado with her husband, Randy Averitte, said she had a loving childhood. But after her adoptive parents died, she began wondering, in the early 1990s, who her biological parents were.

“It is hard to describe knowing your whole life you are connected to somebody else [you don’t know],” she said. “You don’t know if you look like them, you don’t know what their mannerisms are like, what their values are.

“It’s like walking around with a lottery ticket that you can’t cash in. You know it’s huge and significant, but you can’t do anything with it. There’s no place to take it and cash it in. It was heavy; it was a lot.”

Through a public records request in Kansas, she obtained her birth certificate, which had her biological mother’s name. The certificate said the father’s name was withheld at the mother’s request.

She tracked her mother down in the early 1990s and, though she never spoke with her, an advocate with an adult adoptee program offered to talk with her to get some basic facts, including about health issues, from the woman.

“She wasn’t in a life place where she felt comfortable meeting me or talking to me,” Averitte said of her biological mom.

She took some time off from her search before finding her father with the help of genealogy websites, including ancestry.com. Her search led her to reach out to someone she thought might be her cousin, her father’s nephew.

She was right. While that person did not help her further, she managed to find enough background information on Colby — who has his own website with personal information on where and when he was born — to assume he was her father.

She sat on the information for a while before sending off that email last year. His response, the next day, made her feel her search was vindicated.

The subject line had been changed. It now read, “You have found me!”

Her gut reaction was immediate: “I cashed in a little bit of that lottery ticket,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was gonna win $20 million or I was gonna win $100, but I knew I was gonna win something.”

For Colby, the excitement and anticipation was similar. He began wondering, “What does she look like, sound like, what are her values? Is she anything like me?”

A few days later, they talked by phone. That turned into a Zoom meeting. Averitte realized she and her husband had often driven through Santa Fe from Texas to Colorado and suggested a firsttime visit in Santa Fe.

They set up a dinner date at Santacafé in early June 2020.

They were joined by Colby’s partner, Kathy Eagan, and Randy Averitte.

“There were people everywhere [around us] and nobody knows that this [moment] is happening where a 52-year-old woman for the first time gets to meet her father,” Sue Ann Averitte recalled.

They talked about their lives, Sue Ann’s mother and becoming a family — or at least part of a family — again.

They discovered their moral and political values are in alignment, they both like whiskey, they both like to fish and they have similar-looking feet. (They compared foot notes when taking off their footwear to put on wading boots for fishing.)

For Colby, the reunion assuaged concerns he had regarding his child’s fate.

“I didn’t even know if she [Sue Ann’s mom] had a baby,” he said. “She could have miscarried. She could have obtained an illegal abortion. I had no clue.”

For Sue Ann Averitte, finding her father allows her to enjoy a ceremonial holiday.

“Father’s Day actually means something now that it hadn’t meant for well over half my life,” she said.

One last challenge, she said, was how to pick out a Father’s Day card for her dad in June 2020.

“I mean, they don’t make cards that say, ‘To my father, who I just met two months ago,’ ” she said.

FRONT PAGE

en-us

2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://enewmexican.com/article/281801401921241

Santa Fe New Mexican