Photo: Leslie’s story was featured in a documentary film by Ann Fessler about unwed mothers called “A Girl Like Her.” The movie poster hangs on a wall in her home.

The way back

Lost children and missing parents were themes that ran through Leslie’s family as surely as the genes for blond hair and blue eyes. She was born in Kansas City, Mo., to parents who had married young and were not a good match. Her father, Wendell, was a chemist for Standard Oil by day and a jazz sax player by night, and her mother, Jean, was a bookkeeper. They divorced when Leslie was 5, sharing custody at first, but not peacefully. Seven years later, Jean remarried, and Leslie and her sister went to live with her in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.

In 1960, life settled down and Leslie threw herself into making friends, going to the beach and attending Choctawhatchee High. In her senior year, Leslie fell hard for a dark-haired football player who took her to the prom and loved her in return. He drove her around town in his red Bonneville, going as far as Atlanta that August to see the Beatles play Atlanta Stadium.

After the concert, they parked on a dark street before driving to Decatur to spend the night with her aunt and uncle.

Pouring herself a glass of water at the kitchen sink later that night, Leslie felt something flip in her belly. It felt like the Fourth of July in there, as if actual fireworks were exploding under her skin.

What if I got pregnant? she said.

We’d get married, her boyfriend replied.

Six weeks later, Leslie was getting ready for class at Pensacola Junior College when she was overcome with nausea. When she told her boyfriend the news, he drove to Fort Walton Beach the next weekend and told his parents they were getting married. They were having none of it and hustled him right back to the University of Florida.

Leslie’s parents sent her to a maternity home for unwed mothers in Mobile, Ala., telling anyone who asked that she was spending the semester in France with family. Leslie was instructed to write letters to her friends and then mail them home so Jean could ship them over France to be postmarked and mailed back. No one was to know she wasn’t off having the time of her life.

And in a strange way, she was. The girls at Allen Memorial maternity home felt a little like family. When they could forget what lay ahead, they acted like any other group of teenage girls thrown together at camp or college. It was also where Leslie got her first glimpse of a job she thought she might one day do: Talking to people about their lives, the way the nun they called Sam did. It was her job to sit with each girl for a half-hour every other week to “go over the plan.” It wasn’t counseling, but the idea of talking to people to help them through a difficult time made an impression.

When she reported feeling the first signs of labor, Leslie was dropped off alone at the hospital and made to labor in a hallway because unwed women were not allowed in the labor ward with married women. The nuns had promised the girls they would not feel a thing when their babies were born; that much, at least, had been true. As labor progressed, they were put under; when they woke, their babies were gone. Instructed to never tell a soul — even a future husband, who “would not want damaged goods” — the girls were told to resume their lives as if nothing had happened.

As if that were possible. Leslie tried, hiding her grief and obediently going off to the new school her mother had selected, a Catholic girls college in Cullman, Ala. Then an old high school boyfriend stopped by after Christmas, on his way to Vietnam, for a bon voyage weekend.

Six weeks later, the familiar sensation of nausea left Leslie terrified and ashamed. She felt paralyzed, lost and more alone than ever. There was no way to tell anyone it had happened again. So she came home for the summer as planned, started eating everything in sight and made sure she was busy all day, every day. She worked at the family appliance store as well as a department store and a church nursery. She let out the seams of her muumuus and stitched up newer and looser shifts on the sewing machine in her green-and-blue bedroom, where albums by the Beatles and Smokey Robinson littered the carpet.

The day Leslie’s mother found her daughter on the bathroom floor with her newborn son, she sat down beside her weeping child and stroked her hair, telling her, Everything’s gonna be OK.

It would take Leslie years to see any gifts in that afternoon. In time, she was able to recognize and reclaim the strength that got her through the birth and adoption of her second son and recognize it as the seat of her empathy for all women, including herself. In time, she discovered that reframing her perspective on all she had lost would uncover the depths of all she had to give.

Making the connection

After losing her second son to adoption, Leslie felt herself split in two. The shame-filled girl who couldn’t look anyone in the eye stayed hidden inside, frozen in time. The girl on the outside transferred to the University of Georgia in 1967 to study social work. There, she learned the only way to keep the pain at bay was to work longer hours and aim higher than anyone else.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in social work in 1969, Leslie moved to Atlanta and was hired by Families First, one of the biggest social service agencies in town, which gave her a scholarship to get her masters. She got her degree at Tulane and returned to Atlanta to work as a licensed clinical social worker.

In the late ‘70s, Leslie started to notice that many of the teen patients who showed up in crisis at West Paces Ferry Hospital and Ridgeview Institute were adopted. Nearly a fifth of them.

“I had to shut it down,” she says, looking back. She wasn’t ready to think about how adoption might impact a child’s emotional well-being.

When she was 41, Leslie married Bill Mackinnon, a fellow therapist, and became pregnant with twins. Leslie was ecstatic. But as soon as she delivered the babies, things took a turn. She immediately broke out in hives. Doctors chalked it up to a reaction to the Betadine solution used on her C-section incision. But Leslie wondered if it wasn’t some bone-deep fear of having her newborn twins, Elliot and Annelise, taken away, too.

The fear of losing them cropped up at home whenever the nightly news ran a story about a child abduction, and she’d have to switch the TV off. Once her babies were big enough to crawl around, a sense of all she had lost started to build.

“I was sitting on the floor playing with them,” Leslie remembers. “And I started wondering about what my sons had been doing at this age. Here were these two people who looked like me, and I remembered [the boys] looking like me. I had a 100 percent awareness that they were full-grown men who had gone on to have lives and I didn’t know one thing about them.”

She became depressed and struggled to feel connected to the twins. Something had risen up in her and was standing in her way. She had written to the agencies that had handled her sons’ adoptions years ago, making sure they knew she was open to contact and updating her information any time she moved. In the closed adoption universe, that’s all you can do — send a letter and hope it gets filed. But now, she realized, she had to do more.

“I got my buns back in therapy,” Leslie says, “and started dealing with their loss.”

One night, she had a dream she was driving down a road. Not just any road — that familiar hairpin turn back in Fort Walton Beach where, as a pregnant 19-year-old, she had considered crashing her car. Two baby boys sat on the side of the road. Scared someone would run them over, she stopped the car, picked them up and put them safely in the back seat.

Oh Leslie, when are you going to find those boys? said a colleague with whom Leslie had shared her dream.

Bill supported her search for the boys as long as she waited until the twins were in kindergarten.

So in the mid-‘90s, Leslie started educating herself on adoption and search and reunion. One book led to dozens, which led to internet research and phone calls to strangers. She reached out to the regional representative for Concerned United Birth-parents (CUB), a support and education organization based in California, and met Margy McMorrow, a fellow birth-mother who would become a dear friend. Margy assured Leslie she was not the only woman in the world to have surrendered more than one child for adoption and invited her to a CUB retreat in Carlsbad, California. There, Leslie tried to overcome the shock of being able to say aloud what she had spent 30 years hiding.

“It was so scary,” she remembers. “Every time I opened my mouth, I was terrified. But I realized I had never said it in public, so I was going to say it until I got used to it: ‘Hi, I’m Leslie Mackinnon, and I gave up two sons.’ ”

When Margy learned Leslie was a therapist, she rightly predicted Leslie would end up doing work in the field and gave her a list of other professionals in the adoption reform community whom she needed to meet.

“I was devastated to learn how damaged adoptees could be,” Leslie says. “And I felt responsible. That’s when I started trolling back through my cases (with former clients) and feeling, Oh God — that’s what that was! I started becoming so fascinated with the whole topic. Every conference I went to, I bought every single book I didn’t already have. I’d always been fascinated by the whole world of psychology — and here was a whole new branch.”

The wider world

Not content to just counsel those whose lives were changed by adoption, Leslie is out to change the adoption process. She is an advocate for helping women with unplanned pregnancies find ways to parent, and if they decide that adoption is the only choice, to arrange an open adoption. She reconnects families separated by adoption and advocates for open records, traveling the country to speak to academics, attorneys and agencies. She joined the staff of TLC’s Sunday night series “Long Lost Family,” after suggesting to producers they needed to offer families counseling if they were going to reunite them. The show resumes airing new episodes next spring.

In September, she spoke at a conference examining the outcomes for children created by third-party reproduction who, once they reach adulthood, often experience the same emotional issues as adult adoptees. She urged attendees not to repeat the fallacy that adults won’t want to know about their origins. By bridging the worlds of adoption and third-party reproduction, as both a mother and a therapist, Leslie sees her life coming full circle. Because her twins were born through in vitro fertilization, she likes to say she has a foot in each world. When the company that stored her remaining embryos asked if she would consider donating them to a childless couple, no strings attached, Leslie replied with an unequivocal: No thanks. Once down the road of secrets and lies is more than enough.

“A true change-maker” is how April Dinwoodie, chief executive of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, characterizes Leslie, who serves on the organization’s board.

“Her skills, spirit and passion for reforming adoption have had a transformational impact on organizations, systems and individuals,” Dinwoodie wrote in an email. “She is fierce, bringing her leadership, knowledge and insight to our work.”

Around her wrist, Leslie wears a delicate bracelet that bears the words, “Let your life speak.” It has become her motto, and she lives it every day.

Who would have thought that the girl who had been so filled with shame would one day tell her story on network TV? Who would have thought that the girl who came to UGA in 1967 “doing everything (she) could to keep bricks on (her) mouth” would one day return as a sought-after lecturer? She tells students what she learned the hard way by letting her life speak.