Inside was a picture of an infant. When Donnelly asked who it was, Krakat told her, "Hope Ann. That's the baby my mother gave up for adoption." Stunned, Donnelly stood up and, hyperventilating, exclaimed, "That's me! I was Hope Ann!"
"I thought she was pulling my leg," says Krakat. But it was true: Twenty-seven years after being put up for adoption, Donnelly was reunited with her birth family by a freakish coincidence. Now her greatest joy is to spend time with her biological mother, Theresa O'Konski, 54.
"I feel like I can't let go of her," says Donnelly, snuggling up with her birth mother in her Rensselaer living room. "I want to eat, drink and sleep with her." O'Konski feels the same way. "My life has come full circle," she says. For many years, O'Konski had believed her daughter was irretrievably lost. In 1971, O'Konski, then living in Troy and working as a waitress and bartender, became pregnant by an auto mechanic she had dated briefly. She fretted about what to do. She already had two children from a previous marriage, but because of her meager financial resources, only Doreen, then 5, was living with her. A social worker urged her to put the baby up for adoption. "I was very reluctant to give her up," recalls O'Konski. "So after the birth I took her home and kept her for three months. But I was having such a tough time." Ultimately she concluded that she had no choice, and the social workers came to take Hope Ann. "It was like my world had just ended," says O'Konski. Says Doreen: "I remember them taking Hope out of her arms and her just crying and crying."
After several months in foster homes, Hope was adopted by Paul Phelps, a contractor in neighboring Nassau, and his wife, Sharren, an accountant. The little girl, renamed Beth, grew up knowing that she was adopted. She was told her birth name and was given a photograph of herself—the same one in the O'Konski family album—taken when she was about a week old. Donnelly says the Phelpses were good parents, but she felt deep anguish about having been given up and thought often of her birth mother. "On my birthdays I would just cry," she says. "I would think, 'Is she even thinking about me? Does she care? Is she alive?' "
After graduating from high school, she trained as a nurse and married Randy Donnelly, a heating and air-conditioning technician. The couple live in Rensselaer, 18 miles from her birth home, and have a son, Justin, 2. In recent years, Beth had signed up with several registries that try to reunite adopted children with their biological parents and had even hired a private detective, all without success. Meanwhile, O'Konski, who was remarried to steel fabricator Raymond O'Konski, fantasized often about her daughter, though she was reluctant to seek her out. "I always wondered where she was," she says. "But I didn't think that she'd want me."
O'Konski's first meeting with Donnelly, set up by Doreen at her home, was fraught with emotion. "I kept looking out the window waiting for her to pull up," says O'Konski. "All of a sudden the door opened, and it was like looking back at myself. We ran into each other's arms, and I didn't want to ever let her go. There was no denying her." For two weeks after that the pair were inseparable. Beth's adoptive mother, Sharren, admits she had mixed feelings. "We were thrilled for Beth," she says. "But I would be a liar if I said there wasn't a sharp pain in my heart."
Beth's grandmother died on Nov. 6. But somehow the miracle of the reunion helped ease the pain. "My mother always wanted our family together," says O'Konski. "The last thing she did was give me Hope Ann. It was like her final gift to me."
Bill Hewitt
Tom Duffy in Rensselaer
- Contributors:
- Tom Duffy.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
