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.

Early Morning Caller

After three weeks of waiting, wondering, and worrying, the call finally came.

It was 8:00AM on a Saturday morning, the second weekend in September 2007. I was sound asleep, the dogs miraculously having refrained from awakening me at six as they do every other morning of my life. The rings were incorporated into my dream and I only fully realized it was the phone as the noise stopped. I checked the number. It was a 518 number, the area code I expected my birth mother would call from, and it was not a number I was familiar with.

There was no message.

Waiting

As the days turned into weeks, I waited for a response from my birth mother or an update from my "emissary." My greatest fear was that she would never call, followed closely by an intense belief that she might call and say "thanks, but no thanks." It was entirely possible that I would only have one chance to ask the questions I longed to hear answered. I had promised that I would honor whatever decision she made. To do that, it was imperative that I be ready if that call came in order to maximize the opportunity in the event that it was the only chance I ever had.

What to Do Next When You're Not in Control

I had found out that one of the people I had been searching for most of my adult life was not actually biologically related to me. I had also found out that he knew who my birth mother was and where she currently resided. I suspected that she would not be happy to be contacted by him, simply based on his characterizations of their relationship which did not sound as if it had been a happy one. He would not reveal her name to me so that I could contact her directly.

This was a control freak's nightmare.

Science Does What It Does Best

Once in Cancun, the test results were never far from my mind. Truth be told, they overshadowed the entire vacation. The first couple of days, I was able to push the impending phone call to the back of my mind because I knew it was too early to expect a call. I focused on catching up with Amy & John and Ellen & Bobby, having a wonderful time in the sun with Eric, and relaxing.

Science Enters In

I had spoken with the mystery man and he was no longer a shadowy figure--he was an animated, gregarious, concerned, relevant figure in my story and he just might be my actual biological father. I was convinced he was the man identified as my "alleged" biological father but only science could determine if my genes truly were related to his bloodline.

No Matter What, I'm Part of the Story

Lisa Blinn? Hello! This is XXXX XXXXXXX, I received your letter and would like to first ask you a couple of questions so that we can be sure we are both talking about the same event, ok?

Waiting for Contact

From the moment I handed off my letter to the Fedex man, the clock was ticking. I tracked the envelope obsessively, waiting for the moment that it was signed for at the mystery man's door. As soon as the signature appeared on my screen, I expected a call. Every hour that went by, I became more and more convinced that he would not call. Nevermind that it was delivered at 11AM on a Tuesday and it was possible he was at work, or shopping, or visiting friends, or doing any of the myriad of things that a person does in the course of a normal day when they are not expecting a life-changing package to arrive at their home.

Letter to the Great Unknown

After the shock of a credible response from my shot-in-the-dark classified ad, I spent the weekend crafting a letter to the man that could be my alleged birth father. What were the odds that this Cuban golf pro Lothario had been right near Bard all along? If he wasn't "the guy", would he cooperate and name names?

Below is the letter that I Fedex'd off on Monday morning with huge, flapping, crazed butterflies in my stomach:

Turns Out Someone Actually Reads Those Things

In the end, it turns out that all the research in the world can't take the place of pure dumb luck. In the end, what eventually enabled me to find my birth family was a fluke, a joke, a serendipitous chain of events that yielded me results I might have otherwise never reached.

In the end, it didn't matter how I found them but that I did find them, those mysterious shadow people, those biological parents, MY birth parents.

How Times Change

Probably the single greatest source of information for me when searching over the years came from the wonderful people on the NY Adoptees Yahoo group. They share their stories, answer questions, support each other and generally provide insight based on best practices and their own personal experiences. It was because of that group that I decided to write Catholic Charities again in summer of 2007 and ask for an updated non-identifying information report.

Where I Become Obsessed with Googling

Searching became a part of my life; it had ebb & flows, when my life was busy, hectic or focused on other things, I was passive, but when life was slow, relaxed or otherwise quiet, I turned back to my "mystery" as I had come to describe it. I discovered that my undergraduate history training was good for something besides eye rolling on the part of my more practically-minded friends--it had conditioned me to think critically about the details and see connections where others might not.

I had great luck reuniting inanimate objects with people who needed them, loved them and didn't even know they missed them. The first was a "ready made ancestor" that I had purchased at an antique store in Skagit Valley, Washington back in the mid-90s. The portrait had travelled with me back to Houston and I was became quite fond of the old gentleman, wondering who he was, what his story was and why he was wearing what looked to be a massive gold nugget ring. I discovered accidentally that there was some faded handwriting on the back of the large portrait when I was remounting it in it's original frame. It looked like it might say Clarke, but Clarke who? The photographer's studio address was listed as San Francisco, perhaps a gold rush forty-niner, I thought, although this gentleman's dress was late 1800s, not mid-century. After days of Googling, I identified the man as William Andrews Clark, Sr. the Copper King of Montana who became a US Senator in one of the defining scandals of the turn-of-the-century.

Searching can be Addictive

Once I had my known search parameters, I seached the internet incessantly. As search engines grew more powerful, so did my ability to see connections, leads, possible avenues to explore. Left with a spare half hour, I could be found on Ancestry.com, reading through lists of ship's rolls for possible Cuban names, or sending shot-in-the-dark emails to Cuban ex-pat golf leagues in Miami. I became very good at summarizing my story & along the way, I met many wonderful people who wanted to help, just because they couldn't imagine not knowing their own families.

I remember one particular email that I received back.

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 Why Search?

In my experience, adoptees who search fall into two categories, although I'm sure there are lots of other reasons I haven't considered. Either you are consumed with a need to know, a burning desire to find out "why" and have questions about your biological family answered or you approach it as a Sherlock Holmes mystery to be solved. I came to searching as the latter of the two.

I was perfectly satisfied with my life; my family was far from perfect but I recognized early on that this is true of most people's families. I hadn't been confronted with any serious health problems that drove me to find biological relatives, and no tragic or awful events had occurred in my young life that made me need to know. I was simply curious. It started out in college when a stranger on the 4 train told me that I looked just like their cousin from County Sligo. Interesting, I thought. The curiosity intensified when I took a job post-college traveling the US and spent a lot of time by myself, just thinking about life and family and the importance of connections. I realized that there were people out there who knew who it was that I actually resembled, who had insight into what my biological predestination might have been.

As I got even older, every time I went to the doctor, I was hit with the family history question, which if you're not adopted, you've probably never realized is no-win question for adoptees of my age. You get to say every single time "no, I have no family history", "no, I don't know if there's a genetic history of breast cancer," "no, I have no idea if anyone else has heart disease", "no, I don't know anything about my family history of x, y, z". It gets old. It gets frustrating. It makes your life more dangerous than it needs to be in this age of genetic markers and familial predisposition. It made me mad.

It was, at this point, that I actually became a searcher of the first type...I was motivated by the belief that it is wrong to penalize adult adoptees for decisions that they had no choice in making. While I always believed (and still do) that birth parents have a right to privacy, I believe that that right does not extend to secrecy around medical records. They have a right not to be contacted by their offspring without their consent, but there should be a mechanism to reunite adult adoptees with information which is useful, informative and potentially life-saving, and it should not require a court order to do so. My experience with the "non-identifying" information that agencies in NYS provide, while it did provide one of the kernels that ultimately unlocked my mystery, was useless to me medically as it only captured the family medical situation as it was in 1970.