ShAKer LIFE | SUMMER 2015 31 As a child growing up in Shaker Heights, Norris was often asked where she got her bright red hair. “I would proudly say, I was adopted, so I didn’t know,” recalls Norris. Norris’ adoptive parents, Lois and Brad Norris, didn’t know either. “They were told how much formula I drank and that was it,” explains Norris, seated in her sunny office at Adoption Network Cleveland. Norris finally did get her answer. It was on the day she picked up the phone and called her birthmother for the first time. “I chose my words carefully. I was prepared for her to be shocked,” recalls Norris, who lives in Shaker’s Lomond neighborhood. “Once I got the words out, she said, ‘Oh my God I’ve been praying for this call for 26 years.’” “She asked me if I had red hair. She asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was a nurse. She told me about her mother, whose name was Betty and who had red hair and was a nurse.” Norris also learned that her birthmother and birthfather were married. She had three biological brothers. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents too. “I think I was the one who had to be scraped off the floor,” says Norris. “I can’t even describe how emotional it was.” It was also confusing. “As an adoptee, I’d looked at what I gained through adoption,” says Norris. That included a happy childhood in Shaker, with two brothers who were also adopted, and supportive, loving parents. Norris’s father was a lawyer, who was instrumental in the effort to protect the Shaker Lakes in the 1960s and also helped launch WCPN. “But I hadn’t looked so much at what I’d lost,” she says. Norris discovered some of the same confusion in her own patients. “I was working in pediatric mental health,” she explains. “This was right after my own search and reunion. Children who were adopted were overrepresented on our inpatient hospital unit.” Norris resolved to create a place where Clevelanders like her – anyone touched by adoption – could come together to find support. “I don’t know what came over me,” explains Norris. “But I decided it would be really powerful to have a place to talk about these things.” So, in 1988, Norris launched Adoption Network Cleveland, and she’s been working tirelessly on behalf of Ohioans on what she calls the “lifelong adoption journey” ever since. What What She’d She’d Lost Lost
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