Growing up, Patricia Knight Meyer’s mother used to issue her a warning:
‘If anyone ever comes to the school, or pulls up to you on the street and tells you to get in the car, you do not go.’

Jacqueline lived in fear every day, terrified that her daughter would be taken away and returned to her biological mother – because she knew where her baby had come from.

The truth was Patricia had been trafficked – although her mum and dad believed they had simply skirted the proper channels. 

‘Growing up, I knew there was something missing. Even though my parents always told me I was adopted, I definitely felt like there was some kind of mystery – something I wasn’t being told.

‘There was a feeling that things were being held back,’ she tells Metro from her home in Texas.

Her father, William, was a meat inspector and the family didn’t have much money. Meanwhile, Jacqueline drank and was prone to explosive violence followed by tearful apologies. 

Patricia’s earliest memories are of arguments and shouting, smashed plates, the electricity being cut off and a filthy home.

‘My mother was a drinker before I ever came along, but I do think living with the threat of having their only child taken from them exacerbated their addictions.

‘I knew that these people were not okay and I didn’t quite understand why. I often wondered: How did I get placed in this family? I knew other adopted children who had very nice homes – yet there were fleas and roaches in the house that I grew up in.’

Patricia learned that she didn’t have a birth certificate and her parents didn’t even know when her actual birthday was (Picture: Supplied)

‘ I kept thinking, what kind of system would place me in a family like this?’

When Patricia was 12 she asked her parents if she could get a Social Security card to appear in a professional play. Her father William admitted it wouldn’t be possible – they had never received her birth certificate, and didn’t even know when her real birthday was.

In an instant, any trust she had in them was broken. 

‘I started worrying: Was I stolen? Where did I come from? Is there a mother out there whose baby went missing from the hospital? I was terrified that I would be taken away and put into the foster care system, but I also grew up in a home of abuse and neglect.’

Patricia’s parents end up paying $30,000 for their daughter (Picture: Supplied)

When she was 18, Patricia learned that her parents sought the help of a lawyer called Bob*, after discovering they couldn’t have a biological child. She believes they knew they would have struggled to pass the scrutiny of a conventional adoption process.

‘They should have known when he told them to show up in front of the hospital and just pick up the baby with no paperwork and no documents signed and to drive away with me that Bob was a bad guy,’ she says.

Bob continued sending William and Jacqueline invoices, ostensibly to cover Patricia’s birth mother’s expenses and hospital fees, under her parents’ understanding that once they had paid off the $15,000 debt, he would send them the baby’s paperwork.

By the time they had paid $30,000 without receiving it, they cut ties.

‘I don’t think they ever thought of me as a trafficked child, but they realised at this point they had been deceived and were now complicit in a black market adoption,’ Patricia, 56, explains. 

Patricia’s mum told her that her biological mother had been a ‘special lady’, who gave her up to go to university (Picture: Supplied)

‘My parents had secrets to keep. I grew up understanding that they were broken people,’ Patricia says.

Jacqueline did, however, tell the little girl stories about her birth mother – a ‘special lady’ from a prestigious, wealthy family, who had ‘grown her in her tummy’, but had been unable to look after her because she needed to go to university and get an education.

Patricia now believes this background came from Bob’s own lies. She spent years looking at strangers and wondering whether they were relatives.

William died of congestive heart failure when Patricia was 25, while Jacqueline passed away in 2008 from complications of alcoholism. Just over a year later Patricia learned that Texas birth records were digitised for the first time, meaning she could locate her birth mother. 

She searched for all no-name and no-father births listed within a four-week period in her own county, and found one baby girl born to a woman named Dinah*.

Enlisting the help of a search angel, she found the woman’s married name and tracked her down on a high school reunion website which listed her address and email.

Patricia managed to track down her birth mother (Picture: Supplied)

Patricia wrote to Dinah saying she believed she was her mother and emailed her too. Within 24 hours, the woman had replied and the pair agreed to meet at a Texas catfish restaurant suggested by Dinah.

It didn’t go well.

‘I imagined my reunion would happen, maybe in a hotel lobby, a cafe or a park,’ explains Patricia. ‘But suddenly I’m standing in this dusty parking lot in front of this fried fish place, and I’m thinking: “None of this is the way I imagined it would be”.’

While she recognised her birth mother’s eyes and smile, Dinah was not what she had imagined.

‘The woman that stood before me did not look, sound or act like the woman I had been told to expect.

‘I grew up believing she was going to be a certain way, but I very quickly realised it was all based on lies – presumably fed by the attorney – designed to sell a baby. I felt duped, betrayed and confused.’

When Patricia asked about her father, Dinah told her matter-of-factly: ‘I wish I had better news, but I was raped.’

‘It was a gut punch,’ remembers Patricia. ‘I knew you can truly damage a woman if you question their experience of sexual violence, but my intuition told me that it wasn’t true.

‘She was telling me that while she was eating a sandwich, in the first 30 minutes of meeting me. It was just said so flippantly.’

Patricia has written a book about her experiences growing up (Picture; Supplied)

After that disappointing first meeting, the pair tried to forge a relationship over the year, but Patricia found Dinah overbearing and self-involved, ‘because she was struggling with her own trauma and years of shame and secrecy around the adoption’.

She also remained troubled by unanswered questions about her paternity.

‘After a year of walking on eggshells, I felt like I couldn’t be myself or say how I truly felt about things, because the minute she cut ties with me would mean I would never find my birth father. So I had to go along, hoping she would finally be truthful with me,’ explains Patricia.

Eventually, the relationship tapered off, but not before Dinah sent an email suggesting that perhaps Patricia’s birth father was not who she had previously identified, but someone else, and offered up an email address for a man named Jerry Knight. 

Patricia messaged him and the same day received an emotional reply from Jerry. After a DNA testing later confirmed he was her father, Patricia approached their reunion differently.

She read about the complexity of meeting birth parents and connected with adoption support organisations that provided guidance, such as speaking on the phone before meeting face to face.

Their eventual reunion at Jerry’s Texas home was everything her first was not.

‘It was a magic memory when I met him. I felt like I had known him my whole life. We had so many similarities,’ remembers Patricia.

‘We thought alike. We could finish each other’s sentences. Our favourite ice cream was pistachio. It truly just felt like I was meeting the male version of myself.

‘When I met him, he said he thought he had five good years left, and I told him I bet he had ten.’

Patricia was right. Jerry died in 2021, a decade after they first met. 

They had a wonderful few years reconnecting, with her father even attending the birth of Patricia’s daughter Victoria’s two sons, his great grandsons. 

Patricia traced her father through a DNA test (Picture: Supplied)

Patricia’s father Jerry died a decade after they first met (Picture: Supplied)

‘Victoria and I became part of his family, and his wife Susan became the mother I always wanted that I never got. She’s in her 80s now and I spend time with her, helping her.

‘I absolutely believe that this was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

Patricia has since written her memoir, ‘Wonderland – Memoir of a Black Market Adoption’, which she jokingly refers to as ‘a handbook for how not to do in a reunion’.

Today, she serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents, speaks nationally on adoption topics and advocates for adoption reform. She also recommends that other US adoptees and donor-conceived people seek support before searching for biological relatives, including through organisations such as the National Association of Adoptees and Parents, Adoption Knowledge Affiliates and Concerned United Birthparents. 

Patricia – who has designed a set of digital greeting cards for people in non-traditional relationships – tells Metro that she believes the lawyer involved in her own adoption may have concealed the origins of other children, and encourages anyone who feels they may have had a similar experience to get in touch.

Although she hasn’t spoken to Dinah for 10 years, she has no regrets about searching for her birth mother.

‘Not only did my experience bring me to do the advocacy work that I do in the adoption community and help thousands of people, but I truly healed through reuniting with both of my birth parents,’ Patricia explains.

‘From Jerry I got that support, stability and biological connection that I had been seeking my whole life, and that was just so incredibly healing.’

Wonderland – Memoir of a ‘Black Market’ Adoption, by Patricia Knight Meyer, is available for preorder now

*Names have been changed