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.