A Life of My Own. Donna Wilhelm

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.

       Boarding House Life

      360 Fairfield Avenue

      Hartford, Connecticut, where I grew up, was founded by immigrants who never stopped coming. In the 1600s, Dutch and English settlers arrived, and for three centuries, others followed from all over Europe and beyond. In the early 1900s, my father Juzo and my mother Hania, more than a decade apart in age and from different social backgrounds, joined streams of refugees fleeing oppression in the Old World and seeking freedom in the New World. At Ellis Island, New York, they were processed, documented, and sent forward to their unknown futures. Many traveled onward to nearby cities like Hartford, where broad industries and small business opportunities flourished, and where immigrants found work and clustered by ethnic affinities. Hartford was the city where Juzo and Hania would meet and eventually marry.

      Young and determined Juzo worked his way up the assembly line as a mechanic at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Company. His young wife Hania saw an opportunity to meet the needs of immigrants for cheap, temporary housing. During the next half-century of her life in America, she would convert successive family homes into Boarding Houses #1, #2, and #3—an enterprise that would shape her life and the futures of vulnerable souls whom she chose to rescue.

      Immigrant Hania in America, 1911

      In the 1920s, itinerant down-at-the-heels Irish and off-the-boat Eastern Europeans came knocking at the door of Boarding House #1, aka “Polish Hania’s on Webster Street.” If they didn’t speak Polish or basic English, they’d negotiate renting a room by hand gestures and offers jotted down on scraps of paper. By any standard, the Webster Street house was large—US Census data indicates that as many as twenty-one people had lived there at once, including my sister Edith, who was thirty years my senior and grew up on Webster Street in a different generation.

      When I was born in 1943, Mother was by then fifty-one years old, Dad was sixty, and my parents had sold Boarding House #1 to the Farley Funeral Parlor. Its warren of rooms would continue to house short-term residents, only none of them came by choice.

      Boarding House #2 was where I grew up. It was a three-story brick with dark green awnings spanning the long front porch of 360 Fairfield Avenue—a significant upgrade of neighborhood from working class Webster Street. The new locale was distinguished by Trinity College, located just three miles west. Founded in 1823, it was the second-oldest private college in America, next to Yale University.

      My fondest memories of Boarding House #2 was the backyard apple tree, with an inviting low limb, just right for me to climb and hide from Mother. Tucked in my leafy lair, I’d gorge on crunchy apples and survey everything around me: the neighboring cherry tree that no longer bore fruit; the adjacent vegetable garden of cabbage, tomatoes, and corn that Dad tended; and the fertile beds of voluptuous peonies that would always be my favorite flowers.

      I remember the house itself as snapshot moments—a deeply shaded front porch, where on hot summer days, I sat on the canvas sofa watching neighbors, strangers, and assorted kids walk along Fairfield Avenue or pass by in cars, buses, and delivery trucks. The interior was designed for separate use: ground floor for family and upstairs for boarders. The entry vestibule opened to a hallway flanked on one side by an over-worked radiator. In cold weather, its noisy heating cycles clanked away under the long, dark metal radiator cover. There, Mother also tried to hide the “boarders no use!” shiny, black rotary telephone. Although many of them wanted to make a surreptitious call, few would risk provoking Mother’s notorious temper.

      The downstairs belonged to Dad and Mother, Great Dane Brutus, and me, aka “Little Danusia.” Our family’s rooms were multi-purpose—especially the kitchen. Every day, Mother stood at the big enamel stove, long wooden spoon dipping and stirring unsavory contents in assorted pots. “Is good for you,” she’d say as she doled out large servings of “good Polish food” to family or invited others who sat in wait at the linoleum-covered dining table. Between meals, I’d retreat to my childhood desk wedged underneath the kitchen window niche that had an enticing view of the entire back yard. Sometimes I did my homework. More often I drew in my sketchbook, but most often I daydreamed about living somewhere peaceful and beautiful.

      The former dining room was converted into Mother’s bedroom/hiding place for “Danusia-no-see” things. The enclosed, but unheated, side porch served as Dad’s sleeping room. At the front of the house were two “for company” rooms. On the left was a living room with heavy blue velvet draperies that hung across the doorway. There, Mother’s aristocratic past was reflected in her best antique furniture and the ebony upright piano. On the right was a smaller parlor that held a mish-mash of furniture including Dad’s well-used chair and a wooden floor lamp. When Dad’s relatives visited, they’d sit in the parlor to gab away in Polish while sipping hot tea in tall glass mugs. A small but indispensable downstairs space was the family-only water closet angled tight under the stairway. It was so cramped that we had to squeeze ourselves in for “private business” and barely had room to turn around for cleanup at the petite pedestal sink.

      Floors two and three housed the boarders. Whether singles or couples, they paid one week’s rent in advance for rooms. All of them had shared use of the enclosed sun porch/Pullman kitchen with its jammed-in Formica dining table. Views from the upstairs windows depended on location, either in front or in back of the house. However, no boarder was permitted to actually sit outside on the front porch or in the back garden. Mother decreed the outdoors was “Nie zezwolenie!”—off limits to boarders. There was, however, a major equalizer at Boarding House #2. The only full bathroom was on the second floor, meaning our family and all the boarders had to compete for bath times. During my fourteen years of living at 360 Fairfield Avenue, not once did I get a relaxing soak in the big enamel bathtub without constant banging on the door from a boarder shouting, “How much longer you in there!”

      Despite Mother’s rules to separate our family from the boarders, my bedroom was the exception—I slept in a room on the second floor, right next to the boarders. During childhood, I didn’t think that was unusual, and