There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs to people who do not know where they came from.
It is not the loneliness of being alone in a room. It is the loneliness of being alone in your own history, of looking backward and finding nothing to stand on. No photographs on a mantle. No stories passed down at Thanksgiving. No one to tell you that you have your grandmother’s eyes or your grandfather’s stubbornness. Just a birth certificate with a name, an estimated date, and a blank where a father’s information should be.
My name is Cindy Peterson. I grew up in an orphanage after my mother, Sophie Sherman, died just days after my birth in DeLand, Florida. I was named “Cindy” by the nursing staff, after Cinderella, according to the records, which I find either sweetly optimistic or deeply ironic, depending on the day. “Peterson” was added because the hospital believed my father’s name was Randal Peterson. He was never found.
I have spent decades trying to find him anyway.
The story has shifted and changed with every person I’ve asked, every record I’ve pulled, every closed door I’ve stood outside of. My foster mothers each offered a different version of events, all well-meaning, several entirely invented. Sophie’s death records exist. Her fath, my grandfather, Walters Sherman, existed, though “existed” is perhaps the most generous word I can apply to him. He declined to collect her remains. He declined to take me in. He provided his attorney’s name and hung up the phone.
He was, by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant man.
The search has taken me through Army records, county archives, school yearbooks, newspaper clippings, Facebook posts directed at strangers in their seventies who might remember a girl named Sophie Sherman from the 300 block of West Minnesota Avenue. It has taken me to dead ends so consistent and so complete that I eventually stopped calling them dead ends and started calling them home.
What I knew of my mother before recently could fit on a notecard. She was 16 when she died. She was bright. She loved wildflowers. She had been awarded a four-year scholarship to Princeton University at the age of 15 — a letter I found among my grandfather’s belongings, framed and forgotten. She died alone, in a condemned building in Ocala, sixty miles from home, with a newborn and a rag doll and a small towel with embroidered initials.
That was all I had.
And then, in the way that life sometimes conspires to make you feel the universe has a sense of timing, if not mercy, things changed.
I was sailing the Bahamas with my friend Dr. Antonio Peterson when a message arrived that I was not expecting. It led me to a footlocker. The footlocker led me to a diary. Sophie’s diary, covering the last seven years of her sixteen years on earth, beginning on her ninth birthday and ending the night she left DeLand forever.
I will not pretend I was composed about this.
I had chased the ghost of my mother across decades of misfiled records and fabricated stories and carefully worded non-answers. And here she was, handwritten, in pencil and then pen, block print becoming cursive as the years progressed, a nine-year-old girl excited about her poodle skirt, a twelve-year-old philosopher asking her diary whether people were really just animals with money and pockets, a teenager planting wildflowers and quoting the wisdom of a woman named Miss Ellie and dreaming of Princeton and Prince Charming and a different kind of life than the one she had been given.
She was more than I had allowed myself to imagine.
The search for Sophie Sherman did not end the way I expected. What I found was not just a mother. It was a story, of secrets and survival, of a small Florida town during tumultuous times, of a girl who was braver than anyone knew and who built, within the confined walls of her life, something extraordinary.
I went looking for where I came from.
I found out, instead, who I am.
Cindy Peterson is a character from the award-winning novels Beyond the Garden – God’s Houseplants and Sophie’s Wildflowers by Sahara Sutter. Both books earned the Literary Titan Award. Sophie’s diary — and the secrets it holds — are at the heart of Sophie’s Wildflowers*, available on Amazon and in bookstores worldwide.*
