Given to her at 18 by the woman she always called her mother, it was a reminder of her adoption and possibly of the birth mother who had given her up.
Dodie Jacobi, now 44, always knew she was adopted. She’d sit with her mom and say, “Tell me about the lady who had me.”
Her mother didn’t know much. The young lady was 15, she said. There were nuns in blue. There was a fairy-tale quality to the story and the way it was told, as if it had happened so long ago and so far away.
Like so many adoptees, Dodie grew up in a loving family. There were four children in the Jacobi family, two boys, two girls, each adopted a year and a half apart. Each from a different birth family. Her parents, June and Bob Jacobi Sr., were politically active, well-known in social circles.
“You were chosen,” her mother would often say. She said it whenever she needed to, whenever Dodie or her siblings felt the brunt of an insult from other kids. You just remind them that you were chosen and you don’t know whether they were or not…
This summer, with help from a licensed third-party intermediary, she contacted and then met her biological mother, who lives in the area. Her biological father had died.
Out of respect, she says, for their emerging relationship, Jacobi declined to talk much about her.
