“And anyway, I was wondering…if there was any way I could find my birth mother? If I wanted to? I mean, do we even know her name?”
I could tell right away that asking the question was a mistake. The air felt thick with tension and my mother began to blink back tears. Tears! Over a stupid question. Meanwhile, Charlotte looked down at her plate with this guilty look on her face while my dad strapped on his most somber, preachy one, the same one he wore when he gave my sister and me the big “don’t do drugs” speech. Rather than just answering the question, he said, “Well. This is a pretty serious subject.”
“It’s not that serious,” I said.
“Well, sure it is,” he said. “And it’s important. Very, very important. I mean, if it’s important to you, it’s important to us. Right, Lynn?”
“I don’t want to find her or anything,” I backpedaled. “I just wanted to know if I could. Geez.”
“Don’t take His name in vain,” my mother said.
I told her I was spelling it with a g, not a j, fighting back the urge to ask if she thought I’d go to heck for it.
Charlotte laughed at this, and I flashed her a smile. No matter how much she got on my nerves, I loved making my sister laugh.
Then I looked back at my mother and mumbled, “I mean, I don’t care a single thing about her. I’d probably hate her.”
My mother looked relieved, while my father said, “Don’t say that. She did a brave thing. She did what was best for you.”
“Whatever,” I said, at my peril. It was one of my parents’ least favorite words. “It’s no biggie.”
My father pressed on. “Do you want to find her, Kirbs?”
“I already said I didn’t!”
He nodded, clearly not believing me, as he went on to carefully explain that Heartstrings, the agency that had arranged my adoption, had a provision in the documents which granted me access to my birth mother when I turned eighteen, should I want to meet her.
“Access?” I said, as casually as I could.
“If you want her contact information, the agency will provide it to you,” my father said. “Assuming she has kept her records current. She agreed to this term, but understood that it was your decision, not hers. Currently, she has no information about you or us, nor will she ever be given it. And,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if about to make an important point, “she was okay with this.”
In other words, she didn’t want to find me so why should I want to find her? I shrugged, as if the details of the legal arrangement bored me. To myself, I silently vowed never to bring the subject up again, at least not with my parents.
But from that day forward, I became intrigued by adoption in a way I hadn’t been before, acutely aware of stories about adopted children finding their birth mothers and vice versa. I lived for talk shows that orchestrated reunions, riveted by the emotional tales. Sometimes there was guilt and regret, sometimes anger, usually a complex mix of emotions. Occasionally there was a dramatic health issue at stake—or in a few rare cases, a murder, mystery, or kidnapping. I gathered the anecdotes in my mind as I wondered about my own birth mother, her story. I never thought of her as a second mother, more like a distant relative, a long-lost aunt or cousin who was doing something far more interesting (I hoped) than anyone in my life. Perhaps she was a musician, or a CEO, or a surgeon, or a missionary in a third-world country. I had no feelings of bitterness or resentment or abandonment, just a growing curiosity and an occasional, fleeting, romanticized notion of who she might be—and what that might make me by association. Deep down, I had the feeling that she was the missing piece of me—and I wondered if the same was true for her. I still insisted to myself that I didn’t want to find her, but I was starting to also believe that I could never really know myself until I did.