Unlocked Family Secrets Season 1 Episode 2
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Short filmTranscript
00:00It felt like a world collapsed.
00:02That day would change my life forever.
00:06Your past sometimes will catch up with you.
00:08That storm is coming.
00:11It was just overwhelming.
00:13Then I just, I blacked out.
00:15I'm a firm believer in things happen when they're supposed to happen, how they're supposed to happen, whether you understand it or not.
00:36I definitely was raised by a mother who was strong and resilient, but we didn't really know that she was sick.
00:45Between March and May of 2017, it just went really fast, and then she passed away.
00:57With my grandmother passing, I know my mom felt a void, like something was missing at that time.
01:04There was a secret of, you know, her origin.
01:09For me, the goal became finding out where I came from.
01:15But I remember, my mother said to me, be careful, and make sure that you're ready for what you might find.
01:22All right, guys.
01:36Let's hurry, hurry, hurry.
01:38Let's go.
01:38While we're standing there, we got a backpack.
01:40Let's get it in a locker.
01:41I am an assistant principal at a public high school in the south suburbs of Chicago.
01:49I started teaching 34 years ago.
01:53I was one of the first African-American teachers certified in the building.
01:59All right, here come my crew.
02:00Good morning.
02:02Can you hurry up?
02:03The bell already rang.
02:04As a teacher, I've always kind of gravitated toward what we call the at-risk students
02:10because I understand very clearly struggling with challenges.
02:18My trauma stems from the hidden history within my family.
02:23Secrets from before I was ever born.
02:26I was born in August of 1966.
02:32I came home with my parents December 6th.
02:38There were pictures of me when my dad's holding me at Christmastime.
02:44I was raised in a good home.
02:48I remember my grandfather had a farm.
02:50We had a pony that my grandfather had for us when we would come visit in the summer.
02:56And then I have this memory from around kindergarten, five years old.
03:04It was just, I don't know, like a little doctor's office.
03:08I was sitting someplace that I overheard a conversation where my mother said I was adopted.
03:15I knew what the word meant, but I didn't understand maybe fully how that, you know, was me.
03:28I remember asking my mom, so she explained it, yes, you're adopted.
03:35And so I remember going to school and telling kids, I'm adopted, I'm adopted.
03:46One of my schoolgirls on the playground, she said to me,
03:51well, that means your brother is not really your brother.
03:54And it was hurtful.
03:58You always want to know, you're always curious about who your parents are, where you come from.
04:06Much of my life has been centered around one question.
04:11Who is my birth mother?
04:13I was in junior high, maybe 10, 11 years old.
04:17I would snoop.
04:18My mother would have drawers that she'd keep things in.
04:22I found my birth certificate.
04:25And at that time, you could not access your original birth certificate that was issued at birth.
04:32So the only name that's on that birth certificate would be your adoptive parent's name.
04:37Even the hospital was not there.
04:41So I thought maybe I could find out what hospital I was born in.
04:48I began dialing into hospitals and asking them if they could tell me how many baby girls were born on my birthday.
04:58And there were so many people born the same day as me.
05:03Like, I think I just realized how futile that was.
05:08I remember thinking, if my birth mother gave me up for adoption, then maybe there was a reason why.
05:17And maybe this isn't going to be this fairytale ending.
05:21And it was like, pump the brakes.
05:23Over the next 25 years, life happened.
05:29I got married, had my kids, Cameron and Colin.
05:33Still, I never gave up on my mission.
05:36To uncover the truth about my birth mother.
05:39Nobody's eating my vegetable, that my salad.
05:46This is a beautiful salad.
05:48Look at my salad.
05:48Today is our cheat day.
05:51Um, I think it is interesting to reflect on where we started and then where we are now.
06:00My dad said, Jen, she's adopted too.
06:07And having this cousin who was also adopted, there's a sameness there.
06:13I appreciated that.
06:15And that set the seeds for what was to come.
06:18Like, you were a tutor, Jennifer.
06:20Like, you prepared me for the inevitable and you set it off.
06:27Well, you know, I feel honored that you trusted me.
06:30So in 2011, adoptees in Illinois could request the original birth certificate.
06:36I got my original birth certificate in 2012.
06:39So I think I got mine January, February 2012.
06:43From there, it was just, we were, we were in it.
06:50After 30 years, I finally got it.
06:53My original, unredacted birth certificate.
06:58It had where my birth mother was living at the time.
07:03And it had her name, like, oh, we have it.
07:07Oh, my God.
07:08Like, that's her name.
07:11Deborah.
07:12And the name that I was born with was Kelly Ann.
07:16My mother's age was there.
07:19She was young.
07:20She was 15.
07:21The father was not listed.
07:25Once I was able to see my birth mother's name, then it was like, okay, now I have some place to go with this.
07:35I remember being in the room, like, in her room.
07:39When she had opened it, there was excitement.
07:42Like, this is the first step to kind of getting, you know, some more information.
07:46So, the very first thing was, if my birth mother was born in Harvey, what high school would she have gone to in 1966?
08:00There were two.
08:02One of the high schools at the time was predominantly white, so I'm like, nope, that's not going to be it.
08:09Then another high school, that's where I hit.
08:15I remember touching the yearbook and just thinking, this person is real.
08:22So, this name, now I can put a face to it.
08:33I got her transcript.
08:36That was the golden ticket.
08:38It had Debra's address at the time, her parents' names, what both parents did for a living.
08:47I was excited to have the information and excited to share it with my mother.
08:54But I held off picking up the phone and calling her because by now, we found out that my mother had cancer.
09:02In May of 2017, my grandma passed away.
09:14We were all very sad, devastated.
09:19Having lost my mother, now to go look for another mother, I felt guilty about that.
09:28And so, I stopped.
09:32When you're grieving, you want to be surrounded by family.
09:40So, when talking to my mom, I told her, into the new year, we should probably start looking again for your birth mother.
09:53I found the service that would do background searches on people.
09:58So, I put in my birth mother's name, and it populates people who are associated with her.
10:07I would cross-reference to Facebook.
10:15Ben Chambers.
10:17Was he my sibling?
10:19Was he the person who could connect me to my birth mother?
10:22Ben Chambers.
10:28I can see all of the people that Ben follows on social media.
10:34People that also came up in the background search.
10:39These could be my siblings.
10:43We figure out that Ben goes to a church that's really nearby.
10:48I made a decision to go to the church.
10:54When I drove into the parking lot, I was like, my God, what do I do?
10:58I'm not sure I want to do it.
11:03I was like, okay, this is really happening.
11:07Get it together.
11:07It was a big moment for Lisa.
11:12Now or never, really.
11:14What, was I coming back the next weekend?
11:18No, we're going to do this today.
11:19The woman walks up to me, and she says, are you Reverend Ben?
11:33Can we talk for a minute?
11:36And I say, hey, we can talk right here.
11:39The woman says, do you have a place that's a little more private?
11:45So this is like all the flags.
11:47But I feel like this nudge.
11:49And you should sit down and talk with this lady.
11:53That's when I started thinking to myself, well, what if this is not what you think it is?
12:02What if this might get real?
12:04Are you ready for that?
12:06So I sit down.
12:09The lady sits down, and she moves her chair closer.
12:11So I'm like, oh, crap.
12:12Like, what's about to happen?
12:15I was nervous.
12:19And so she starts talking, and she says, I think that you and I are related.
12:26I've got cousins I've never met before.
12:31So that didn't alarm me.
12:33What alarmed me was what she said next.
12:37She says, I believe that we are brother and sister.
12:41She's laying out all of this evidence.
12:52She's laying out all of this evidence.
13:04As we're talking, and I'm giving him this information, I literally had it spread out on the table.
13:10And he was like, okay, okay, okay.
13:15In that moment, this woman started to look like my mom.
13:20I'm starting to recognize this woman's eyes and her cheekbones.
13:28And so I felt like this nudge, just like, yes, she's telling the truth.
13:35So I don't know how long the pause was.
13:37It felt like a lifetime.
13:39And I'm sitting there like, okay, like, what is happening?
13:41I wanted him to understand very clearly, I don't want anything from you.
13:48But I do want my birth mother to know that I'm fine.
13:53And then, to me, it was just like this rush of emotion.
14:01Ben told me that in 2004, our birth mother had died of cancer.
14:09So I was never going to meet her.
14:11So we both were emotional.
14:17It was the rush of emotion of, at that time, not knowing the details about how Lisa came into existence.
14:28He says something like, well, let's exchange information.
14:32And I was like, okay.
14:37So I called my sister, Camille.
14:40I said, do you think it's possible that mom would have gave birth to a daughter in the 60s?
15:03And Camille was basically like, yes.
15:07I always knew that there was something that happened to my mom.
15:17Growing up, I was always with my mother and my grandmother.
15:22They would be in the living room talking, and I would be upstairs.
15:28They would be talking in kind of cold.
15:33You know, they would say, well, you know, he, you know, did this, or he would say this.
15:39And they would always say he or him.
15:42I remember the frustration that I felt from my mother and kind of like a dismissiveness from my grandmother.
15:53And then as a child, I really didn't put it together.
15:56But it seemed like that day, everything just started coming back.
16:00Finding out what really happened to my mom, it scared me.
16:11This is a lot.
16:12Like, this is going to take a lot to unpack, a lot to figure out.
16:16So Camille, she starts immediately like Sherlock Holmes.
16:19I immediately called our uncle, my mother's brother, said, did my mother have a child at 15?
16:31And I felt like he was pushing me off.
16:36You know, why are you asking me this?
16:39He kind of paused, and he said, you know, you should talk to your dad.
16:43I was on my way to church, and my son called me.
16:52And he said, do you know a lady named Lisa?
16:55I said, no, I do not.
16:56And he said, well, this lady cornered me in church.
17:00She might be my sister.
17:02And mom is her mother.
17:04See, the other day, a minister of the church, he was talking about your past will sometimes catch up with you.
17:21And then it dawned on me, it came back just like daylight.
17:26That storm is coming.
17:29It was an awakening of what is to come.
17:34So the search is complete.
17:42Who has my birth story?
17:44That's what I was looking forward to at that point.
17:47You know, the things that my siblings could tell me about my birth mother.
17:53Ben said he was going to call me.
17:55So I think it was just this nervous anticipation, hoping that I would get the call.
18:01She felt a good vibe at first.
18:05But then it was kind of like, okay, now what?
18:07Now what's next?
18:08So then day number two.
18:11Now I'm beginning to feel like, hmm, we might have a problem here.
18:16She's telling me I haven't heard anything from them.
18:20Like, oh, they hate me.
18:21There is rejection.
18:22They're rejecting me.
18:23You know how your mind is going a thousand miles.
18:31Why all of a sudden did this woman show up?
18:36She finally found this.
18:38My dad is basically like, yes, this is true.
18:43Your mom did have a daughter.
18:45Gave the child up for adoption.
18:47Yes.
18:48It made me angry.
18:49It made me feel like, you know, why didn't anyone tell me?
18:54I had to come to grips with the fact that mom took this family secret to the grave.
19:05So that week, talking to my dad, talking to my siblings, at the time I was still the only point of contact for Lisa.
19:16So my call to Lisa was to say, hey, let's get together.
19:20And it just kind of snowballed from there.
19:22Every piece of information I learned about my birth mother, Deborah, was priceless.
19:30It was crazy to learn that she had grown up in Markham, Illinois, not far from where I had settled down and raised my own family.
19:40So from what I understand of the family history, Deborah's mother met her stepfather and they got married when Deborah was about three years old.
19:52Then Deborah's stepfather and her mother went on to have two more children.
19:58And so Deborah and I, we were high school sweethearts.
20:01We attended Thornton Township High School, which is located in Harvey, Illinois.
20:09She was a great person to me.
20:11Very exciting to be around, cheer for most of the time.
20:15A friend of mine introduced us.
20:17And I know that my mom initially was not that interested in him.
20:25When my dad writes a letter to my mom's mom, like, hey, please tell Deborah to reconsider.
20:31Like, I'm a really nice guy, like all these things.
20:34And obviously it worked.
20:36The summer of 1966, I went by there to her house one day and her mother told me she was visiting her grandmother.
20:50I thought maybe she'd be gone about a couple of weeks.
20:53It was really the entire summer that she was gone.
20:58And she didn't come back until school started again.
21:04And she wasn't the same.
21:11She wanted me to accompany her to Christ Temple Church.
21:16She wanted to go to talk to the minister there.
21:21So I stood outside until she finished.
21:29And then walking home, she didn't talk about anything.
21:38After that, we both attended Thornton Community College.
21:43We were still dating, having fun.
21:48One day, I had went on and proposed to her.
21:51I said, what do you think about getting married?
21:55And she said, let me think about it.
22:01Some months passed.
22:04And Deborah asked me, have you ever wondered, really, was I at my grandmother's house during the summer that she wasn't there?
22:13I said, no, I just believed that you was at your grandmother's house.
22:19She said, after I tell you something, you may not want to marry me.
22:25She was very blunt.
22:26I am not a virgin.
22:30And she didn't get into who the person was.
22:34She just said that she had a child.
22:37But I had to give her up for adoption.
22:44I got quiet for a few minutes.
22:48And then I said, so.
22:53I said, I'm marrying you as you are.
22:56A lot went on in that house.
23:05I was sworn to keep my mouth shut.
23:10But after Lisa found us, the kids kept asking me stuff.
23:16So finally, I told them exactly what happened to her.
23:19So my dad kind of filled in the blanks of what we were missing.
23:29Enough for the full weight of the story to kind of come down like, okay, this is pretty nasty.
23:36Like, this is pretty ugly.
23:37There is this euphoria when you are looking for something and you find it.
23:52But when you get an answer, you have more questions.
23:56Now the time had come to meet the rest of the Chambers family, my family,
24:02and find out why I had been given up for adoption.
24:05I arrived to the church.
24:08Camille and Ben were already there.
24:11And as soon as she walked through the door, I was like, oh my God.
24:16Like, that is my mother walking through the door.
24:19Just like with Ben, I brought all of the artifacts that I had.
24:26When I saw that birth certificate and I said, this is for real,
24:30it was a goosebuck moment seeing that.
24:33I was super nervous.
24:35My face was hot.
24:36I felt like I was shaking.
24:39There was just this anxiety in the air immediately.
24:44And then transitioning to questions about what they knew and what they didn't know.
24:52I asked, well, do you know who my father is?
24:58I remember Camille did a lot of the talking.
25:01She's in this place where it's raw.
25:05You can't, like, just throw the truth on other people.
25:08But this secret needs to come out.
25:11And so I'm listening to Camille say, our mother's stepfather is your father.
25:21And she said, you know, the sexual assault, it happened as early as, you know, like seven or eight years old.
25:36And it was, you know, over the course of several years.
25:39Your biological father raped your biological mom.
25:46And this is how you were brought into this world.
25:48It was just like, it was, it was information overload.
26:00It was just so overwhelming.
26:04Then I just, I blacked out.
26:06It was just too much.
26:08I remember saying that I want to stop.
26:10I need to take a break.
26:14And then I started weeping.
26:18The weight of the circumstances surrounding Lisa's birth, it felt like a world collapsing.
26:25I felt pain projecting what she must have gone through.
26:32You know, thinking about the sexual abuse, thinking about carrying a child that you, you know, maybe you didn't, well, at 15, you don't have a choice.
26:41She wasn't given a choice.
26:42I called our uncle because he was in the house.
26:49He's her sibling.
26:51He would know directly.
26:52It felt like he was squirming as he was talking to me.
26:56Like, why are you asking me this?
26:58He, he just kept rejecting it.
27:06You know, and to have him just loft it off.
27:11And it's like you're protecting your father, who's not only a pedophile, a rapist, but you're protecting this.
27:19And I, and I couldn't understand that.
27:21At one point, he did tell me my mother was not the first woman that his father stepped out on his mother with.
27:35I was just like, woman?
27:37You know, mom was a child.
27:39This was not like, you know, she was dating an older guy and she got pregnant as a teenager.
27:47This was her stepfather that had children with her mother.
27:56You know, we're talking about a, you know, a 50-plus-year-old secret.
28:01But the reality is there, there are people who are very content with taking this to their grave.
28:10And that does not help the victim at all.
28:15It gives power to the victimizer.
28:18I just remember, like, just really sitting at home and having a difficult time.
28:24Just realizing the age my daughters were at at that time, that my mother at that age was being sexually abused, raped by an adult.
28:37I absolutely felt betrayed by my uncle.
28:41I would travel out to visit my uncle, stay in the house, and we would go to church, and we'd reminisce about mom and about granny.
28:50This never came up.
28:52And, you know, and then when it does, he's being this, you know, protector of his father.
28:58And it was just like, who are you and what is really going on?
29:10Woke up that Sunday, and now I know that I am a product of this sexual assault.
29:17And with that truth came this enormous pain to my siblings who didn't even know I existed.
29:27The reality of it hit me in such a way that I remember feeling like maybe I should not have tried to find them.
29:37Because now they are carrying the weight of this truth about a sexual assault that happened to our mother.
29:46And I remember, I was weeping about that.
29:50It was like, so what do I symbolize?
29:53Am I the sister or am I now, you are this horrific thing that happened to our mother?
29:59It was a very, very heavy and dark couple weeks to navigate and kind of deal with.
30:12You start to think about how, like how could this happen?
30:16How could this persist?
30:17After all this time, I'd been given this gift of discovering my birth mother, only to learn about the trauma she went through to bring me into this world.
30:31To be this 15-year-old, you're pregnant with your stepfather's child, how is this possible?
30:40When we were dating, I remember Debra didn't want to go home at certain times and she didn't want to be there.
30:47So, you know, we would go out driving until almost the time when her mother would get home.
30:55Because her mother, Mildred, worked nights.
30:59This went on, this took place because she wasn't there.
31:03She was working nights and he had just total control over her.
31:12She was at an age, 15 years old or so.
31:16So, what could she do?
31:22When Debra told me that she had a child, one thing this led up to, that it was her stepfather.
31:30And Danny Don don't make, okay, that's why he had a smirk on his face every time I was over there.
31:41You know, like, it was a laughter smirk.
31:44She went to her mother, but she said, I don't think my mother believed me at first.
31:55It was her word against his word.
31:59He, you know, he denied it.
32:00And then there's the pastor.
32:07Debra stopped going to the pastor for counseling because he said she must be enjoying doing it, being with her stepfather.
32:17And she must be because he came to him and not the police.
32:22In my mom's situation, I feel like there are multiple settings in which she was failed.
32:32From the home front to the church setting, the two places where my mom should have got hope, help, she got none of that.
32:46I can't imagine my mom being 15, navigating this.
32:51So at some point, I did speak to Debra's half-brother, who would be my uncle.
33:07He asked me, was I interested in meeting my birth father?
33:15And I said no.
33:17When you kind of realize who your father is, how that came about, it was definitely a hard pill for all of us to swallow.
33:29And being a woman, you know, you kind of are heartbroken about just what Debra had to go through.
33:37It was even harder to deal with the fact that while my birth mother had suffered so much,
33:43my birth father, her abuser, was still alive.
33:48She died without ever seeing him brought to justice.
33:52We wanted to fight back for our mother because, you know, we're doing what she couldn't do.
33:58There's no statute of limitations.
34:01Why aren't we trying to press charges, get this guy arrested?
34:05Ben and I went on this journey.
34:15We went downtown and we searched records for if there was any court case, anything in the files.
34:24The only thing that we could find was our grandmother's divorce proceedings.
34:29It looked like it was brought up that the 15-year-old stepdaughter was pregnant and, you know, can we press charges?
34:38What can we do about this?
34:41And the court actually said no, nothing.
34:46Because he was a family member, charges couldn't be pressed during the divorce proceedings.
34:52If we couldn't do it in court, I suggested that we make signs and go down to his house and get a bullhorn and say,
35:03a pedophile lives here, a rapist lives here.
35:07I don't care how old he is, he's a pedophile.
35:10You were a pedophile then, you still are a pedophile.
35:13You are a rapist.
35:14And I just, you know, just had these thoughts of, you know, him looking and saying, who is this?
35:21And, you know, us being able to say, we're Deborah's children.
35:25But I couldn't get anybody to do that with me.
35:30I came to this conclusion that, like, we're fighting for her and maybe that's not really what she wanted.
35:37Maybe what she wanted was us embracing Lisa and bringing Lisa in.
35:47I feel like that would have been something that mom would have done.
35:54It's painful to know that my birth mother, Deborah, died without ever seeing her children in reunion.
36:01But we are all committed to keeping our new family bond strong in her honor.
36:09You're meant to be.
36:10Yeah.
36:10Right.
36:11Sometimes I call her daughter.
36:13I say, I'm going to start calling you daughter.
36:16And, uh, Deborah, she wanted to adopt her when she found her.
36:21Bring her into the family.
36:23So I was committed to that.
36:31This is a picture of all of us.
36:32Oh, yeah.
36:34No, it's not in there.
36:35This is pre-Civil Rights era.
36:36All five of us.
36:38Yeah.
36:38You know what they say, things that are done in the dark always come to life.
36:42The truth always surfaces.
36:44Yeah.
36:45I'm glad we can look at pictures and resemblances because, you know, Sunday after I talked to you guys,
36:54um, like, I felt guilty about, um, you know, bringing you this information that I was a sister that you didn't know about.
37:07Did you all ever have any regrets about, you know, the secret, so to speak, coming out?
37:14I'm glad that it was out.
37:16The secret was out.
37:18Yeah.
37:18You know.
37:19You are glad it's out.
37:20Because I, you know, after she had passed away, I was wondering, will we ever really meet you?
37:27Mm-hmm.
37:29And I'm glad that we was able to meet you.
37:34Mm-hmm.
37:35We talked about that a lot, like, as we were navigating the space, being able to verbalize that the, it's not, the issue is not with you.
37:43Mm-hmm.
37:43The issue is with everything else surrounding the situation.
37:48Yeah.
37:48The beauty that came out of meeting you, who you are, and who Cameron is and Colin is, I just think that that was able to cover a lot of what mom went through.
37:59But it's like, oh my gosh, we have another sister and two more, and other niece and another nephew.
38:04Like, this is awesome.
38:06I'm glad that I had a desire to find my family.
38:10I'm glad that someone desired to find me.
38:14You know, it could have gone a lot of different ways.
38:16Easter 2018 was tough because it was a year to the date almost of when my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
38:31I remember sitting on the couch at Ben's house thinking that I'd lost everything.
38:38But if we think about what Easter represents with, you know, rebirth and renewal, I think it was a good first holiday or celebration or family gathering to have because it symbolized a new family.
38:54The connection that I wanted, that I wanted, that I hoped for, had Deborah still been alive, I don't think I'll ever be able to capture that because she's just not here.
39:08But as I find out things about my birth mother, things like she was also in education, things like Camila said our hands look alike, and my kids even saw a picture where they said, they gave them chills, we look so much alike.
39:28And I think maybe that is a level of connectedness.
39:34If my birth mother was here, the message that I gave to Ben when we met that Sunday would pretty much be the same.
39:44We're supposed to do that other one.
39:45You know, I would just basically want her to know that I've had a good life, I've had a happy life, that, you know, I feel like the strength that I have is in my DNA.
40:00I definitely was raised by a mother who was strong and resilient, but then to find out that I was birthed by a mother who also had this resiliency and just incredible strength.
40:13I just take heart, you know, that I can be a part of that legacy and keep it going.
40:25Why does he not want me to be around his family?
40:28That's what started making me feel like, is he hiding something from me?
40:33He just said to us, thank you who he is, but you don't know who he really is.
40:37This was big front page news for weeks.
40:43Man, you was able to do that and nobody knew for so long?
40:47I was taking this secret to my grave.
40:50I went, oh my God, this is not real.
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