Teresa Matheny

She whispered to me and said, you know you still have a balance due to me.

When you get up here, you are going to have to sit down with Tara. You're going to have to pretend that you know nothing.

So Tara, you know, when we got into Detroit, I text her and was like, we're here. And she's like, yay, you know. And so her plan was for the following day for us to meet Tara and our birth parents in Port Huron at a restaurant.

She said, oh, I can't get a hold of her. She won't answer.

Yeah.

So then we go back into panic mode. I'm a mess, you know, crying, don't know what to do. We had not slept. We were running on fumes.

Julie Falkenberry. And so that name stuck in my head. That night when we were at our Airbnb, I sent her a message. I was like, hey, just kind of fishing, you know, hey, you know, we're with Tara Lee, you know, we're here in Michigan or whatever. And she immediately, you know, sent me a message back and was like, can I call you? But I don't want to call you alone.

I want to have my friend Courtney on the phone.

I had to. I had to. I didn't know what was going on. I had to know. They call me. I am in the dining room pacing around the kitchen table. I'm on the phone with these two women.

And they got to meet us for the first time. And it was amazing. I know that it was scary, I think, for all of us because of this connection that we had had. And I call him Baby Boy because, like, obviously we had our name picked.

It's snowing. It's freezing. We walked in with all of the victims through the front door of the courthouse. in a line, we were all together. And we all sat in the jurors box.

Yeah. She's blowing Tanya's phone up.

I think we still had a week left on our Airbnb, and we just said, keep it. Just, we're leaving.

We're so excited. We get in the car. We get on the road. I mean, we were hit the road, dude. We were like out of there.

And it's... He stayed in the slow lane like a grandpa.

Yeah, he hated the car seat.

Yep. It's all our friends. I think we're waiting at our house when we got there, right? We had all of our friends there. My dad, yeah, he came down. My sister was there. It was great. Yeah, so that's kind of how it happened.

We had never heard anything about this guy named Jay. He was introduced to us as someone that would be witnessing our birth father signing away his rights because that's what we were doing that night.

You could tell that the birth parents loved each other very much.

So then Tara jumps in. She goes, that's not true. That is not true. That is not what the doctors said. You are 40 weeks old. You know, and our birth mom just kind of cowers down.

You've got vulnerable birth parents. You've got vulnerable adoptive parents.

It's a perfect scam.

Heart attack, stroke, cancer.

No, no, not at all. And we knew it was bullshit. We knew.

Our birth mom is hooked up to the monitors. She is frantically trying to get a hold of her partner who doesn't have the phone. She's terrified. She's alone. She doesn't know us. She has no support there.

And that's when I started recording.

She whispered to me and said, you know you still have a balance due to me.

She was like, just go to the NICU or whatever. And I'm sitting here looking at this human being, a woman who has carried this baby for nine months, has given this baby up for adoption and has no one there with her. It was heartbreaking. The most important thing to me at that moment was consoling her. And I asked her permission. I said, is this okay? Is it okay for me to go to the NICU?

And she said, yes. And so that's when I went to the NICU.

And I saw his little face and he was just so sweet.

His hand was as big as his body. He was just precious. He was five pounds, four ounces. He was a tiny little thing. And yeah, he was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. He was so sweet. He had like the cutest little nose. He was just perfect to my eyes. I mean, he was just, you know, he also seemed like he was very alert, you know, he was just, Beautiful. I don't know.

It felt like he was mine, if that makes sense.

I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh my gosh, like, this is real. Like, we have a son. Like, this is crazy.

So no one knew about the FBI. So the hospital, they thought we were crazy.

Please know that your birth parents are being taken care of. I have staff. I'll be back in communication later.

I mean, just some like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? But she wouldn't answer.

And I was like, oh my gosh, we have to leave, you know, in a week and a half. And she goes, you don't need to leave in a week. The baby's not due till the end of the month.

that they basically don't do as they're supposed to do, like, you know, go to their doctor's appointments. They don't take her phone calls. They don't basically do what she tells them to do is kind of what I thought she meant by that.

So we had a little white Jenny Lind crib, and the walls were kind of like a mint green, gender neutral, and had a little, you know, chair with an ottoman and stuffed animals.

I would go in that nursery and sit and wait, you know, just waiting. The waiting was really, really hard. It was really hard. It was the hardest part.

Yeah. My husband forgot that we were bringing another human home with us.

So first of all, he brought his golf clubs, put them in the floorboard in the back. We have stroller, car seat. So in addition to this, it was very important to me that I wanted him to be on breast milk. And so my cousin at the time had a baby, and so she was pumping for me. And so we had an entire cooler full of breast milk iced down.

She said, Teresa, you cannot tell anyone this. You cannot tell anyone Tara is under investigation with the FBI. And I screamed. I screamed like I could hear it in my ears. Oh my God. I fell to the floor. I started like having a panic attack.

Then my thought is like, who was that woman that we talked to on the phone that claimed to be our birth mom? Who was she? You know, what is going on? I'm like, is there a baby? It was almost like finding out that my mom died. That was my reaction. You know, it felt like a death.

Mike, for the first time in our relationship and marriage, I don't think he quite knew what to do, except he just took control of the conversation and started talking to Tanya. And, you know, I just remember Mike saying, where is our money? I remember him saying, like, you know, at the end of the conversation, what should we do? What should we do?

And Tanya saying, get in your car and drive up here. just get in her car.

God, I'm choking up. Like, I don't know why I'm so emotional about this.

Sorry, give me a minute. This just brings up a lot. I'm sorry.

We started trying right after we got married to have a baby and it didn't happen. And so I went to the fertility doctor and we went through two rounds and I emotionally could not do it. The second one was brutal.

So we started the adoption journey.

The way that this process works with the adoption. So we created a book on Shutterfly with just very basic information about us, you know, pictures of the house that we live in and our dogs and Teresa works for a university.

But we were with them for 18 months and we never got, you know, a match or even our profile presented. Why is it taking so long? Why will nobody choose us? Like, what's wrong with us?

Listen, like, she's rough around the edges. She cusses like a sailor. She's covered in tattoos. She's very passionate. She's scatterbrained. She's amazing. Does a lot for the birth moms. And so we're like, oh, wow, this woman is incredible.

You know, we're so excited.

She was like, the birth parents chose you. I'm like, oh my gosh, I've got to call Mike. You've got to get back to the room. You're not going to believe this, that like we're matched. And he's like, what?

We'll call him Baby S. So we were told that she was due on October 11th.

Tara said, I need $8,000 for birth mom expenses and a separate $5,000 payment for doula and counseling services.

Yes, because that never happens.

So Friday, we had dinner with my mother at Ippolito's.

And it said, has anyone here worked with Tara Lee in Always Hope? And it was very simple like that. I just kind of went, huh. I did respond to the email and said, actually, we are working with Tara Lee through our agency and we have a match. We're leaving tomorrow for Michigan. Our baby is gonna be born next week.

Do not call Tara Lee. Do not speak with anyone. Someone will be in contact with you soon. I tried to call her again. She refused to answer. I blew her phone up. At this point, I'm like starting to get my anxiety. I'm going, what is going on? Something is wrong. And so it occurred to me, you know, we were signed with Talia and Tanya because they would be representing us and our birth mom.

This is the part that really haunts me the most about it all. And so I called Tanya and I said, I just got this email. What is going on? She goes, oh my God. And I'm sobbing. She said, Teresa, you cannot tell anyone this. You cannot tell anyone. Tara is under investigation with the FBI. And I screamed. I screamed like I could hear it in my ears.

So we were told that she was due on October 11th.

She was like, can I patch her at?

Tara asked, Do you choose them to parent your child? And she said yes.

After we got off that phone call, she was like, okay, so I'm going to put you and myself and your birth mom into like a group chat. And she was like, the reason why I do that is so in case things get awkward, I can kind of step in and kind of smooth things out.

We were told that we would be there probably two weeks. He would most likely go into the NICU for a little bit.