When What You're Searching For Finally Arrives

Hello?

Hi, this is Lisa Blinn, I believe you just called me?

There was a moment of silence, just the length of a heartbeat, then a deep breath, and then

Oh, hello! It's finally you! I'm XXXX XXXXXXXXX and I'm definitely your mother. Even if I hadn't been certain from the letter, the pictures leave no room for doubt...... The voice wavered and then there were sobs. As I murmured how wonderful it was to hear her voice and how ecstatic I was that she had called, she continued with what was to be a very important question for her and the first of many she would ask me.

The New York State Adoption Registry

Along the way, I registered with the New York State Adoption Registry, a passive reunion registry. Similar to other Mutual Consent Voluntary Registries (MCVRs) in other states, the registry collects information from adoptees, birth parents and birth siblings and houses them in a large database. These registries don't have a stellar success rate, between 1.5 and 10% in states that have them, as they only work if all parties register, and if the agency that monitors them has an adequate matching algorithm.

More Information to Obsess About

The file about me, hidden safely in the Catholic Charities filing cabinet, surely could yield more. Certainly I should be allowed to know what "spanish descent" meant--vague 70s terminology meant nothing to me. It seemed reasonable to ask about discrepancies in the report, such as the remark that there was no cancer in the "alleged" birth father's family, while his brother was listed as having died of leukemia.

The Thing About Information

Those first pieces of non-identifying information provoked a watershed moment for me: there were actually REAL people who had loved me and given me up, presumably for reasons that they believed to be in my best interest. Prior to seeing them described on the page, they had been no more real than characters in a well-known children's story or familiar heroes from Greek myths. They were shadowy, illusive, undefined, much imagined and even more--safe. Safe from being identified, safe from being a disappointment, safe from breaking my heart as the people who gave me up...who didn't want me...who opted for a life without me in it.

So I Wanted to Know Something

After I graduated from college in 1992, I decided it would be a good idea to visit the Catholic Charities office that I had been adopted through. After all, it was still in exactly the same place, people seemed friendly on the phone and the case worker was willing to meet with me. I called, explained that I would like some information about my birth family and first encountered the term "non-identifying information".

Non-identifying information is how the narrative surrounding an adoptee's birth and birth situation is characterized. It is designed to be informational about the birth parents and what was known by the agency at the time of birth. Some are very very short and some can be quite lengthy. What goes into the non-identifying information varies greatly from agency to agency and social worker to social worker. At Catholic Charities, all non-ID goes through a review process before it is released to the adoptee inquiring.

Naive me, in 1992, I thought it would be as easy as walking in and talking to someone. So I did. And the CC social worker at the time sat across the desk from me, WITH MY ORIGINAL FILE, and told me the above story about non-identifying information and why I would need to wait for the information to come in the mail. SHE HAD MY FILE IN FRONT OF HER...WITH MY NAME and everything else I wanted to know. I remember leaving CC and sitting in my car and crying, I was so frustrated. It seemed so unfair that someone could know everything about my background and being unable or unwilling to share it. I've since learned that many adoptees, meeting more sympathetic social workers, find themselves left in offices with their file on the desk while the social worker "goes to look for something". That was not my experience.

So I waited. And waited. And waited some more. I first asked for my non-ID in September of 1992. I moved to Houston and continued to wait. It would be Spring of 1993 before I would get the first version of my birth story.

Being an Adoptee: Some Background on My Experience

I've always known I was adopted. It wasn't revealed to me as a great family secret in later years or whispered about behind my back as a child until I guessed. I've always known. That fact has shaped the very positive adoption experience that has shaped me. My parents are not progressives, in fact, anyone who knows me has heard stories about just how conservative they are. They aren't trend setters or trail blazers, they just happened to be practical, common sense people who recognized, in their gut and their heart of hearts, that everyone has a right to a proper sense of self which doesn't start with keeping secrets. I don't remember them ever telling me I was adopted; it was just incorporated as a reality into my life.