Dear Diary...

I stumbled onto a journal of mine recently and while thumbing through it I read an entry dated just prior to finding out who my biological mother is. See below.

December 5, 2018

I’m close to finding out information about my biological family (I hope). My DNA is being extracted right now and I’ve sent information to a search angel who seems knowledgeable.

I don’t know why this is so important to me now, 35 years later, but somehow it is. I hope knowing who I’m biologically related to will give me a sense of myself at birth. Maybe if you’re not adopted that’s hard to understand. There is something unsettling about not belonging to someone at the beginning of your life, when you’re the most vulnerable. The moment when perhaps you’re the most loved. I assume for most people giving a child up for adoption is the ultimate act of love. Maybe I’ll understand that better if I can communicate with my biological mother. I yearn to hear her story and our story of how I came to be and why I had to go.

I can’t help but wonder if being given up for adoption has added to my sense of being untethered. I’ve heard that experiences and feelings babies have before they have memory or the ability to communicate can stay in their psyche and the cells body. An overwhelming idea for sure.

But today I feel excited about the prospect of finding out about my beginnings. I also need to remember what I’ve told myself from the start of this search, keep perspective. There could be great disappointments, they could be deceased or not want anything to do with me. I could be illegitimate or a big secret. Finding out my story could be an amazing gift or another loss.

Reminder, there’s just as much chance that it could be wonderful.

The Results Are In

It’s the end of 2018 and I’m waiting. Waiting for DNA results from Ancestry and for non-identifying birth background information from Sacramento County. I’m waiting for something I never thought I would, details that will lead me to my biological beginnings.

Like a Christmas present the DNA results come on December 23rd. I contact my new search angel, not expecting to hear from her right away due to the holiday. But she responds right requesting access to my results. A note on search angels: the one I met serendipitously on LinkedIn leads me to another who leads me to two more. True angels they do research and lead me to the answers I seek without payment.

The search angel wastes no time and gets back to me the same night I receive my DNA results. I have two matches that are 97 and 99% related to me, only my daughter is closer at 100%. One has only initials but the search angel messages me that the person’s father has the same surname that was on my original birth certificate. She also forwards an obituary that shows he died in 2004 but was born in 1959 in the town I’ve been living in for over 50 years. This is stunning because although I was adopted a short distance away, people could be anywhere in the world after such a long time. He will turn out to be a half brother.

The search angel cites the lateness of the hour and asks if we can pick up the research of my other DNA match the next day. She encourages me by saying I’m fortunate to have “riches of information.” She’s had to work much harder with much less. She signs off by saying her partner search angel will join in the research and they’ll get back to me as soon as possible.

It’s now the second week in January 2019. I arrive home from work to find a manila envelope in my mailbox. My heart flutters. This is it, the non-identifying information from the agency I was adopted through that I’ve been waiting three months for. I’m surprised and grateful that the document is very descriptive and is seven pages long. I sit on the couch and start to read.

The details begin with a description of my birth mother. She was 21 years old when I was born. Her height, weight, hair color, complexion, eye color, and nationality were listed. These simple things are fascinating to someone who’s wondered what the woman she came from looked like.

A description of my birth father followed, he was 23 years old when I was born. It went on to say that when my birth parents married my birth father worked with his father in business but when that ended my birth father fell into drugs and had been in and out of jail. He did meet with an agency social worker to sign the relinquishment papers that would allow for my adoption and stated he did not want any further contact. The social worker stated that my birth mother had been depressed but was planning to get more education so as to obtain a job. Although she loved my birth father, she would remain separated from him unless “he took definite steps to bring about change in himself.”

The document went on to describe the two biological brothers I’d always known about. I’m stunned to see their ages were two and three when I was born, meaning my biological mother would’ve had three kids under the age of three. Left by herself in that situation it’s easy to see why I was put up for adoption. The report states however that it was not an easy decision, “your birth mother cried when she talked about you and said it would be hard to give her baby up; she wanted to see you while you were still in the hospital and wanted to be notified when you were placed.” She went on to tell the social worker that she didn’t ever want her sons to know she’d given up a full sibling.

Further is description of the almost three months I was in foster care, which I found very comforting. I’d always wondered about it and felt the sense of peace that comes from curiosity relieved.

After eight more days the search ladies message me with names, dates, places that are somehow related to me but they aren’t exactly sure how yet. I begin to research the other 97% match from Ancestry using Facebook. I find the person quite easily and unbelievably, she lives in MY TOWN. I send her a direct message. She kindly answers me and we exchange messages until she drops in the missing piece, her uncle is my biological father. And he died 35 years ago. It will take more messages and a couple of months before she answers the question of how he died, young at the age of 40. He wasn’t able to recover from addiction and was found dead downtown, an assumed drug deal gone bad.

A lot to process is an understatement. Thought and feeling overload. And I haven’t found my biological mother yet.

Next time: “You’re From Where?”

The Four o' clock Martini Chronicles: A Search Starts

In September 2018 I reached out to an Adoption Reunion Search Angel I’d come across on LinkedIn (of all places). In my direct message to her I asked what the first step would be to start a search for one’s birth family. Three hours later she responded and asked if I knew the birth parents names, birth dates or places, ages, or any background information. I tell her what little bit I know which has come from my mother over 40 years ago. It doesn’t include any concrete information about who the birth parents are. No problem she says, she’ll conduct research to find out a definite birth name and will get back to me. I’m not believing this is really going to work yet 24 hours later I receive an email saying her research has turned up something. A last name that looks like the birth mother’s and initials of the birth father’s but no last name. She encourages me to request non-identifying information from the agency I was adopted through, gives me contact information and suggests I do a DNA test through Ancestry.

As I start to think about the biologicals, I get out a box of family pictures and start going through it over a few evenings time. I’ve moved this box of pictures around with me since I was 18 and have looked through it many, many times. Midway through the box I pull out a manila envelope with my mother’s handwriting called “forever papers.” This isn’t a new discovery, I’ve seen this envelope before and I’ve pulled the papers out and looked through them. It contains my parents divorce papers, early drafts of my mother’s will and some of my adoption papers. I start to set it aside and then decide to look through it again. I leaf through until I come across a legal size document typed on thin, translucent paper titled “In the Matter of the Petition to adopt a minor female child.” It’s much like the other paperwork I’ve read until I reach the bottom of the first page and a section called “Natural Parents.”

There in plain sight for 35 years was information about my biological mother including her birth date (she was 21 years old when I was born), the date of her marriage to the biological father (she was 18) and a description of him being born a year before her, completing high school through the 11th grade and serving in the military. Stunning beginning pieces of the puzzle and amazing that it had gone unnoticed for all these years.

I forward the newly discovered details to the Search Angel and she puts my directly in touch with her researcher. She says she will continue to search for more information that can lead to the identity of the biologicals and says what we know already is huge. What I’ve learned in only two months is dizzying and in November of 2018 I send my DNA sample to Ancestry and a request to the adoption agency for any information they can give me. Now I wait.

The Four o' clock Martini Chronicles: Curiouser and Curiouser

I was put into the arms of my adoptive parents Calvin and Jean Michener on December 1, 1965. My parents had been trying to have baby for a while. My mother suffered multiple miscarriages before it was discovered that my dad was sterile. She always wondered if it was because he worked for a chemical company for a time. They’d been married for 12 years before adopting me. Their marriage lasted only another five years after that. I’ve wondered if I was supposed to be the glue. Perhaps they thought, if we just had a baby…

My birth announcement read, “I wasn’t expected, I was selected.” This was true not only about being adopted but also because I wasn’t the first baby my parents were offered. A call from the adoption agency brought them to meet an available baby. But when my mother held the child in her arms, she said something didn’t feel right. They declined to adopt that baby. Thus my conveyor belt adoption theory was born.

As life unfolded I never thought about any other parents but my own. There wasn’t talk about finding bio people, probably in large part because sealed adoption records made it nearly impossible. And maybe it was all I could do to keep things together with the life I was living. My parents divorced when I was five. My mother and I moved to another house and my father moved 45 minutes away. My stay-at-home mother entered the workforce full time and I became a latchkey kid in the first grade. Ironically similar to the biological situation. There were no 50-50 custody arrangements at that time but I saw my father regularly on weekends, holidays and school breaks. Life bumped along until I was 16 and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two metastasis and two years later she was gone.

Surprisingly as my remaining family relationships faltered with my father and maternal aunt, my original position on looking for the biologicals didn’t change. I couldn’t see myself hunting people down, who fate had separated me from, to say hello. No anger, no angst just acceptance of it was what it was.

Until 2018. For reasons still unclear to me, I became curious about the biologicals. Soon after I came across someone called an adoption reunion search angel on LinkedIn, of all places. I messaged her asking how one might start a search and she answered me immediately with questions about what facts I knew about the biologicals.

There’s a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It was the serendipitous beginning of my search for DNA sharers.

The Four o' clock Martini Chronicles: Expected vs Selected

I’ve always known I was adopted. I remember my mother telling me when I was about 7 years old. She had great delivery and it came off like the many stories she’d read to me. Sensing it could be a confusing concept for a child, my mother pulled out my baby book and pointed to my birth announcement that read, “I wasn’t expected I was selected.” I don’t remember feeling much about the news but the announcement led me to to picture the way children were adopted. In my child’s mind prospective parents looked through a window as babies went by on a conveyor belt until they saw the child they wanted and said, “That one!” Rather an efficient process I thought.

A few years later, I’m probably about 10 years old, my mother announces that December 1st is Family Day. “Huh?” I ask, “What’s that?” She adds to the adoption story by explaining that it’s the date she and my father picked me up from the adoption agency and brought me home. Though not great at math I notice the difference between my September birthday and December 1st, “Where was I before Family Day?” I asked. “In a foster home,” my mother explains. My 10 year old brain thinks it sounds like a way station on the path to becoming my parents’ daughter. I’m still not thinking much about being adopted except I notice when I share the fact, people raise their eyebrows and it seems like a nifty tidbit of information.

The older I got, the more information my mother shared. My biological parents we’re getting a divorce and already had two boys under the age of five. Their mother was going to have to get a job to support them and three mouths to feed was one too many.

In my teens, twenties and beyond people would ask me if I ever wanted to find my biological parents. I did not. It just seemed too weird to show up decades later and knock on the door of people who had given me away. I didn’t feel angry about them putting me up for adoption and I had no need to mess with the cosmos that had already decided everyone’s life path. If anything I was mildly curious about the two biological brothers since I was an only child. But not enough to do anything about it.

And so my adoption was all neat and tidy and tucked away. Until it wasn’t. More to come.