![]() ![]() She eventually spoke by phone with her birth mother-who asked that I use only her first name, Joann-and learned that Joann had been walking to a grocery store near her home in Livonia, Michigan, one night in October, 1968, when a stranger attacked her at knifepoint. ![]() I thought, Something’s wrong.” She reached out to the caseworker, who reluctantly confirmed what Kiessling already suspected: she was the product of a rape. Soon she received a two-page letter from an adoption caseworker, which listed details about her birth mother down to her “reddish highlights” and “average” high-school grades but stated, “No information is available concerning your biological father, other than he was caucasian and of large build.” Kiessling recalled, “It sounded like a police description. On her eighteenth birthday, in 1987, she contacted a local probate court. In a spiral-bound notebook, Kiessling counted down “the years, months, and days” until she would be old enough to legally access information about her biological parents. “Betcha they’re good / Why shouldn’t they be?” Annie sings. When Kiessling and I first met, last spring, she recited some of the lyrics for me. She likes to recount a story about seeing the musical “Annie” and being transfixed by the song “Maybe,” in which the orphan protagonist dreams of her mother and father. Gail sewed matching mother-daughter outfits, but that did little to quell Kiessling’s feeling that she didn’t belong. In Kiessling’s memory, Larry would joke that “socially deviant behavior is genetic,” a reference to the 1956 thriller “The Bad Seed,” in which a psychopathic child turns out to be the descendant of a serial killer. Larry and Gail Wasser were Jews who took the family to temple on the High Holidays, and Kiessling, a fair-haired, blue-eyed child, recalls people asking, “Who’s the little shiksa?” Her only sibling, an adopted older brother, acted out in grade school and later got into trouble with the law. As a young girl in suburban Michigan, in the nineteen-seventies, Rebecca Kiessling was teased for looking nothing like her adoptive parents. ![]()
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