Mary Ellen Gambutti
About the Author
Mary Ellen is one of about four million adopted persons of the "Baby Scoop Era" (1950-'75) and an adoptee rights advocate. She was born in South Carolina and raised by an Air Force couple in a sealed adoption. When she was forty, before access to the internet and without her original birth certificate, she successfully searched for her first mother, her half-siblings, and cousins. Years later, she discovered her paternal family through DNA testing. Now she has the family she has always longed for. S.C. law has finally allowed adult adoptees to apply for their birth records.
The strength she earned from gardening and health care careers served her in rehabilitation from a hemorrhagic stroke at fifty-seven. Since retirement, she has pursued her love of words, focusing on writing personal essays and memoirs, many of which have been published in literary journals and books. She is a life partner, mom, nana. A tiny apricot toy poodle named Timmy is usually nearby. Follow Mary Ellen on Substack and Social Media.
Reviews​
"...A deeply heartfelt memoir about her adoption journey ... a road map to finding your family, with or without the help of the state where you were born ... It gives testament to never giving up, and even if what you find is not so pretty, it is still yours: "The euphoria of our fall reunion rose like a phoenix from years of pain and loss." -- Lorraine Dusky, Author, Hole In My Heart, Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption
"...true examples of the diverse ways people...handled adoption differentness; the various levels of acceptance Mary Ellen experiences after adoption into her new family...I highly recommend this book to adopted people and their parents, both birth/first and adoptive, as well as pre-adoptive parents, and child welfare professionals, for its authenticity, readability, and wealth of information."-- Joanne Wolf Small, Author, The Adoption Mystique - Adoptee, MSW, LCSW-C
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"...The complexity of the adoptee's search for a place and self in this world is universal and powerful." -- Paige Adams-Strickland--Adoptee, Author; Akin to the Truth, and After the Truth
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Memoir
I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls
Travel across the years in this inspiring and lyrical collage memoir. In post-WWII South Carolina, chance and choice connected a childless Air Force couple with an abandoned baby girl. Seventy years on, she framed a deeply personal narrative in vignettes, poetic prose, and original correspondence, reflecting on maternal severance, the injustice of sealed birth records, and the ills of secrecy. Documenting her family transfers, she has connected her growing anxiety and vigilance in the turbulent 1960s to primal separation, and the encultured discipline of her father's Intelligence career. At forty, she realized the need to know her origins. With help from adoptee advocates, she launched the search for her natural mother. DNA testing set her on a parallel journey of self-discovery decades later, and she began to reconcile her adopted and biological identity and her true heritage.
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Mary Ellen Gambutti,
I Must Have Wandered Book Photo Gallery Complement to the 2nd edition.
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