Reactions

Speaking with my birth mother for the first time had a tremendous effect on me, but what sort of ripple effect did it cause for my family?

She Does Have a Bit of a Temper

Including my parents in my search yielded some unexpectedly enlightening results. The first was a letter that they had received from their Catholic Charities social worker, an apparently delightful older woman named Kathryn Doll. Written in a beautiful longhand script that revealed a solid Catholic school education, the letter was from the woman who had taken care of me in the eight weeks between my birth and my parents receiving me.

Thinking about Others

One of the biggest hurdles for adoptees that are thinking about searching is the major question of impact on their families. No one wants to hurt the feelings of their parents...the people who raised them, loved them, kissed their booboos, tucked them in at night...you know, their parents! Most adoptees, me included, fear the reaction of their parents if they tell them that they are searching for their birth family. Does that mean the parents weren't good enough? Does it mean the adoptee doesn't love them? Is the adoptive family insufficient? Will the adoptee abandon their family should they find their birth family? The answer to all of these questions is overwhelmingly no in the majority of cases, it certainly was in mine. But that doesn't stop the fear of losing their child from rising in the mind of the parent.

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.