FEATURE
Reunited
22-year-old Orlando man meets his birth mother for the first time.
By Ryan Dixon
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would come.” Di’Costa admitted that he had no hard feelings toward whoever his mother was when he decided to search her out earlier this year. “I wanted to let her know I was okay and that she doesn’t have to worry about my safety.” “When I first realized he tried to contact me I couldn’t believe it,” Loretan said. “It
finally felt complete.” According to Di’Costa, their first day together was like any other day. They went to a pumpkin farm to pick some pumpkins and then went out to a local gay nightclub later that night. “It was kind of overwhelming being in the club with your accepting mom dancing on the pole.” When asked about giving birth to
definitely be seeing more of each other” he said. “It will be kind of hard to visit a lot due to me living in South Florida and her living all the way in Philadelphia. We will have to work on getting her more to South Florida as soon as possible.” The take-away from this is for Loretan is that life decisions affect all those around us in one way or another, but that we should
Photo courtesy of Julia Wilkinson
L
ife is full of firsts: Your first day of school, your first date hopefully followed by your first kiss, first triumph and your first failure. Many adults look forward to having their first child. Benjamin Di’Costa had all of those firsts, and got to experience one that not many people like him in the world do, he sought out and met the woman who had given birth to him before giving him up to another family. “I found out I was adopted when I was seven years old” Di’Costa said. “For some reason I had a weird fascination with my mother’s labor experience and I kept bugging my mom. She finally had to own up to it.” Di’Costa had been living with the same adoptive family since he was but nine months old, before which he was in foster care. Being young and learning difficult things was no different for Di’Costa’s birth mother, Tara Loretan. She was eleven days past her seventeenth birthday when she gave up Di’Costa to an adoption agency. “After three days of labor and a C-section to get baby Benjamin to join the world, I decided that I could not go through with it. I wanted to keep my baby.” Things quickly changed after Loretan brought her baby home, though. With little to no emotional support and suffering from post-partum depression, she decided to give Di’Costa a chance at a better life. “God, my conscience or whatever you would want to call it — I call it God — whispered in my ear and told me that I need to be selfless and allow him to have a better life than I could offer,” Loretan said. “So after almost a week I called the agency and let them know. They came and picked him up.” She never saw her baby again. Loretan, who is now a nurse in a hospital psychiatric ward, said the most difficult thing for a mother is not know if her child is safe while putting the needs of that child first. “I believed that he had most likely formed a bond with another family. Who was I to interrupt that process?” She said, adding that as time went on she would think about him not wanting to know her for whatever reason, whether it was being content, being angry or not wanting to hurt his adopted family’s feelings. “I had to talk it out a lot of times and just wait and believe that this day
finally reunited after
had been long time of wishing, waiting and praying. It was a dream that finally came true.” 22 years later, 19 years to the day she left Di’Costa’s father, a mother met her son again, but this time as he walked off a plane in Philadelphia — not into a delivery room. Loretan said she cried every day from the time she read his first message to her until the day she picked him up at the airport. “I had tears of gratitude. However, I did not really cry when saw him. I was expecting to cry when I saw him but I felt nervous and at peace when we hugged,” she said. “I
22 years, son benjamin di’costa and mother tara loertan share their first embrace
a son who turned out to be gay, Loretan said she was so excited. “All I ever wanted was a gay son. I’d love him even if he was straight.” After a lifetime apart and a few days to reconnect, what comes next for the newly united pair? “I already didn’t want him to leave on Monday (Benjamin’s trip was lengthened three days courtesy of Hurricane Sandy). I hope that this is a new beginning of building a life-long relationship,” Loretan said. Di’Costa said that visiting often won’t be too easy. “We hit it off pretty well so we will
never regret the choices we make. “If I could change anything, I would not have ever let him go. I wish that I had more community support and that I wasn’t so young,” Loretan said. “I tried on so many occasions to kill myself and then tried to numb the feelings with drugs. Last time I used was on Benjamin’s 5th birthday and I’ve been clean the 17 years since.” When asked to sum up the whole experience, Loretan said, “Nothing else in my life ever mattered more. I feel so blessed and whole now.”
October 31, 2012 • SouthFloridaGayNews.com