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A Note about the Journey

When my teenage daughter was away for a year at boarding school, she began to ask questions about my past. I sent back edited answers that I hoped would inspire her to trust herself and feel the support of a nurturing family. When I became a mother, I vowed to give my children every comfort and concern for their wellbeing. A promise meant to reverse the neglect and disparagement of my childhood.

I grew up in an immigrant boarding house run by my Polish mother in Hartford, Connecticut—a bizarre outcome for Mother, who had once been the privileged daughter of a patrician family in the Old World. My father Juzo, who’d grown up in Poland among hardworking farmers, emigrated to the New World and forged his way into working class America.

When I was a teenager, my much-older sister lured me from Hartford with promises of a liberated life with her in the Arizona desert. However, Arizona brought trauma and instability, along with one joyful year and the kindness of remarkable strangers. At age nineteen, I fled from my dysfunctional family—and arrived in the New York City of the 1960s.

There my reinvention began—first as a stereotypical Madison Avenue office girl and then as a glamorous Pan American Airways stewardess. When I accepted a marriage proposal from a promising young executive, I returned to my parents to share my joyful news. Instead, they delivered a diabolic wedding gift—they were not my birth parents. My true birth mother had been a young, pregnant, unmarried boarder. After she gave birth, she surrendered her newborn to the care of her landlady. There was nothing official or legal about it.

For the next three decades, I buried my parents’ revelations deep in my psyche. And I poured myself into all-consuming roles: international corporate wife, aspirational career woman, and mother of two adopted children. Until all sense of my authentic self nearly disappeared. At age fifty-seven, I made the hardest decision of my life—to leave my thirty-two-year marriage in order to save myself. When aloneness overwhelmed me, I finally began to search for the one person who might love and rescue me. My birthmother.

Letters to my daughter had revealed only the surface of my past. Plagued by unfinished business, I spent years examining, writing, and reckoning with flaws and weaknesses, adversity and growth, vulnerability and strength—in myself and others. Revelations shaped into stories. Confronting truths deepened my compassion and helped make sense of my peripatetic life. Revisiting my past gave me the chance to fulfill longings: to hold the small hand of the lonely child in an adult world; to hug the courageous young woman who fled and reinvented herself; to comfort the unfulfilled wife who nearly lost herself. And to nurture the insecure mother who dismissed her self-worth. I’ve honored my journey by giving my stories a place to belong—in A Life of My Own, A Memoir.

Today, I give away millions of dollars of my personal money to humanitarian causes. Why I’ve pursued altruism as a mission remains a mystery to me. I have no guidelines to offer, only stories to share, and a message to the reader:

If you choose to travel with me, I hope my journey will inspire you to celebrate your life. By acknowledging the people, the experiences, and the transformations that shaped us, we honor who we are, we confirm why we are here, and we define where we are going. These are gifts that only we can give to ourselves.