You can read the earlier posts in this series here:
Happy Mother’s Day! I thought this day would be an appropriate time to revisit the topic of my adoption and my two mothers: the one who carried me and gave birth to me, and the one who raised me. After my first two posts on being adopted, I received some feedback that they painted adoption in an overly negative light. To the contrary, adoption is very often the best solution to incredibly difficult problems. The fact that it is an imperfect solution does not mean we should avoid it or that we shouldn’t relish the many joys it brings. I am grateful to both of my mothers for the choices they made and the role they played in my life. I would not have lived the life I have lived, and I would not be the person I am, had it not been for both of these women.
I had always been curious about my biological family. In my early adult years, I took some half-hearted steps toward finding them, like adding my name and birthdate to online registries. It wasn’t until I was 22 or 23, though, that I started really seeking information about them.
My parents gave me some letters they had exchanged with the lawyer who had represented them in the adoption, which was about the only information they had. I contacted the lawyer, who was still practicing law, but he was unable to locate my file after all those years. A few years later, just after graduating from law school, I decided to use the legal process to access whatever information might be available to me. I didn’t have a specific outcome in mind, but I hoped I might at least learn some medical history.
One day, I received a court order in the mail informing me that my petition for non-identifying information had been granted. The judge wrote that my birth mother had not provided the court with any family medical history to be shared with me. The order conveyed a paragraph of information that the court had deemed suitable to share with me without disclosing my mother’s identity. It stated that my mother had been Caucasian, Protestant, and had one other child.
The last part was a surprise to me. I understood the statement to mean that my mother had one other child at the time of my birth, meaning that I had an older sibling. My origin story was not one of a teen pregnancy as we so often imagine. My birth mother was already a mother when she conceived me. She was already raising another child. What would have prompted her to keep and raise my sibling but give me away? The question didn’t make me sad or resentful — I was well aware that there was still so much I did not know. It made me more curious about the circumstances of my conception, though. More than anything, it made me want to find my sibling.
I sought permission from the court to make contact with my birth mother through a court-appointed intermediary, who would attempt to locate her. The court allowed me to do so, and the appointed social worker located my mother, but she initially was not interested in communicating with me. She agreed to complete a health history form, which was largely unremarkable. The social worker encouraged me to write a letter to her, signed with just my initial, and I did so. My birth mother responded, also anonymously, and we exchanged a few letters.
Through these letters, I learned that I had not just one sibling, but three, as well as a niece and nephew. My sister was eight years older than me and had two children, who at that time were 12 and 14. My brothers were three and four years younger than me. They shared the same father, to whom my birth mother was still married.
I learned that my birth mother’s name started with C, that she was a creative child, and that she had once thought of becoming a paralegal. Though I had not actually met her, I could see that we had some things in common. Reading her letters, written in her own hand, was a bit surreal. Suddenly this person who had existed only in my imagination was taking shape before me.
Then, out of the blue, my sister called my workplace. She had found the letters I had written to our mother and had pieced together enough information about me to find my website bio. She remembered our mother being pregnant with me and had always wondered about me. She was thrilled to have finally found me, and she wanted to meet.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series, where I’ll tell you what it was like to sit across from a biological relative for the first time ever.
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