An Accident of Birth: A Story of Adoption and Identity<\/a>\u201d (UnCollected Press, out now).<\/p>\nAfter about five years on the now-defunct genealogy platform, he heard from a stranger named Brook. They shared 20% of their DNA, meaning she was likely a niece or grandchild. She would turn out to be the daughter of his youngest brother, Pete.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the moment that changed my life,\u201d writes Blum, a happily married father-of-three who lives in San Diego and works as a filmmaker and consultant. \u201cThe next thing I knew I was the oldest of four full brothers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alex Blum was raised in an Upper East Side townhouse (pictured) after being given up for adoption. Olga Ginzburg for the N.Y. Post<\/p>\n
In 1955, Lee Hart was just 20 years old when she had an affair with a married man named John Stanton and got pregnant. She had little choice but to give the baby up for adoption.<\/p>\n
A wealthy, older Upper East Side couple, John and Nancy Blum, adopted the tot and named him Alex. His upbringing was privileged but lonely, despite having an older brother who was also adopted.<\/p>\n
John worked in marketing at Macy\u2019s and Unilever. Nancy busied herself with historic preservation organizations and conservation causes. They were cold, distant and WASP-y, always jetting off to boozy black tie events, leaving Blum and his brother with a live-in nanny. .<\/p>\n
It was like \u201cliving with strangers disguised as parents,\u201dhe writes. He always had a \u201ckind of empty feeling,\u201d a yearning for a sense of belonging that never came.<\/p>\n
Blum\u2019s biological parents, Lee Hart and John Stanton, weren\u2019t married when he was born. Lee was just 20 and John was married to another woman. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, John Stanton divorced his first wife not long after Blum was born. Within two years, he and Lee were married and expecting another child of their own. Hank was born in 1957, followed by Pete two years later and Bill two years after that.<\/p>\n
Stanton was a global executive for a soft drink company, and the family were jets-setters in the kids\u2019 youth, zigzagging the world with stops in Africa and the Alps before settling in Germany.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, in 1967, he caught a severe infection and died suddenly in an Italian hospital at just 52-years-old.<\/p>\n
Lee went on to raise the boys as a single mom in hardscrabble Darien, Conn. She sold real estate and sent her sons to public school while battling her own demons. She was erratic and unpredictable and struggled with alcoholism. She told the boys that they had an older brother who\u2019d died in childbirth, but the story never quite rang true.<\/p>\n
Blum\u2019s adoptive parents, Nancy and John, were wealthy and distant. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
\u201cIntuitively, something never gelled with that, even as a seven-year-old,\u201d Pete Stanton, 67, writes in the book, which features first person vignettes from all of the brothers. \u201cI kept thinking \u2014 even in my youth \u2014 that there was something more to the story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Indeed there was. His oldest brother was alive and well, swirling about East Coast society. Blum summered at a country home in Connecticut and attended the prestigious Choate boarding school, his adoptive father\u2019s alma mater. As a senior, John Blum had taunted a freshman named John F. Kennedy there, making the future president run laps around the track in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n
When Pete\u2019s daughter initially found Blum in 2019, something clicked for him.<\/p>\n
Growing up, Blum enjoyed privilege but often felt lonely. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
\u201cI immediately knew it was our brother \u2014 and that it was the child mom was tortured by giving up \u2014 that she had been calling her \u2018first son\/still born child,\u2019\u201d Pete writes.\u201cIt was like the tumblers all fell in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the coffee and the laughs kept flowing at breakfast, Alex brandished an envelope he protected as if it contained the nuclear codes.<\/p>\n
Carefully unfolding the protective layers, he read aloud the two-sided note, handwritten in pencil script on a faded scrap of yellow lined paper. One of his nieces had found it in an old lockbox of relics years ago and given it to Alex, believing that his mother had written it for the son she\u2019d given away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is only one sin beyond forgiveness and that is fear of a code. To fail someone who needs you, to starve someone of love because you fear to offend against a code, that\u2019s a mortal sin,\u201d read one side. \u201cYou never come to terms with yourself again \u2014 never. And that is the origin story of my life,\u201d read the other.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Blum believes his birth mother meant this note for him. \u201cThere is only one sin beyond forgiveness and that is fear of a code. To fail someone who needs you, to starve someone of love because you fear to offend against a code, that\u2019s a mortal sin,\u201d reads one side. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
\u201cYou never come to terms with yourself again \u2014\u00a0never,\u201d the other side reads. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
Blum treasures the note, the only thing he has from his biological mother. \u201c[It\u2019s] essential to my understanding of the story, my story, and my brothers\u2019 story as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Brother Hank, 69, was at first incredulous at the thought of another one of them out there \u2014 until he first saw Blum\u2019s photo.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy wife took one look and said, \u2018That\u2019s your brother.\u2019 It was right away,\u201d recalled Hank, who works in publishing in Baltimore and produced the book.<\/p>\n
Pete recalled that when he first talked to Alex on the phone years ago, he immediately felt like family.<\/p>\n
John Stanton divorced his wife not long after Alex was born. He and Lee (pictured) married and had three more sons. T. Alex Blum<\/p>\n
\u201cit was like we had known each other forever \u2014 even though we just met,\u201d said the Florida-based father of two and entrepreneur in the financial industry. \u201cIt was like an old friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe amazing thing to me was how easy it was,\u201d added baby brother Bill, 63, a father-of-four girls who retired from commercial lending and splits his time between New Jersey and Europe. \u201c[We] just created a new normal \u2013 with someone we haven\u2019t seen in a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, it\u2019s not just about making up for lost time, but maximizing the present. They have regular Zoom calls, where they laugh and debate the quality of the \u201cGodfather,\u201d \u201cFrench Connection,\u201d \u201cIndiana Jones\u201d sequels. They hope to get together in person again in the next year.<\/p>\n
The brothers hope to get together again in the next year. Until then, there\u2019s Zoom. Olga Ginzburg for the N.Y. Post<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a little bit of Alex in each of them,\u201d Blum\u2019s wife, Andrea, told The Post.<\/p>\n
At their bistro meeting, the oldest brother marveled at his good fortune.<\/p>\n
He said, \u201cI got three best friends overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex Blum, 71, and his three biological brothers all gather together for the first time in midtown. Blum,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2878,28138,4683,15855,232,9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-235901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-books","tag-dna","tag-family","tag-genetics","tag-lifestyle","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}