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.