Search and find

Boy, it's been a long time since I last posted. I had forgotten my password to log on to blogspot, and had one of those moments of panic trying to remember it. I was lucky and got it on the second try. I have this great fear that one day I'll forget all of my passwords and not exist in cyberspace anymore.
Actually, that's a nice thought. Just think of the time I would save...
This has been a transformative year, a year of self-discovery as well as discovery of long-lost identities and secrets. As an adoptee, I set out this past summer to find my biological family, and from April until December of 2008, I obsessed and worked on finding out information about who I was before I became the person I've always known as Sara.
As adoptees in a closed adoption, we only know who we are in terms of our adoptive history. It is as if we didn't exist until some well-meaning couple took us into their homes. I actually was a living, breathing human being for 4-1/2 months before I had the legal identity I grew up with. My amended birth certificate is a fraud, a fake that was manufactured to foster the pretense that the people I called Mom and Dad were, in fact, my mother and father from birth forward. Of course they were my parents, no question, but I also had a prior set of parents whose identity was unknown to me until this past year.
At the ripe-old age of 41, I realized it was time to do some searching, and began in earnest. Oh, the hours I spent on ancestry.com and the Vietnam War Memorial website, the hours I spent in libraries and looking at microfilm (I think my vision is forever altered by those fun afternoons).
I am one of the lucky ones, because I learned all about my family of origin, both sides, and have met my biological mother and my biological father's brother and his family. My birthfather was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who lost his life before I turned a year old, so I'll never meet him, but meeting his mother (my first and only grandmother!) and his brother has been the most incredible experience, and I am truly blessed to know them. I am especially blessed to know my family health history, which is one aspect of closed adoptions that people don't consider when they're looking at that tiny healthy baby who has just been born to most likely young, healthy parents.
My biological mother is living, and I've met her once and spoken with her several times on the phone. She is great, and I look forward to getting to know her more in the future. There is a lot of pain and grief to work out when you are a birthmother, and she is still working through all sorts of emotions. It's easier for me. I have no memory of being relinquished, while she remembers all too clearly the wrenching heartache of surrendering her baby. She is a strong woman, and we continue to find things about each other that are so very similar.
Which leads me to my adoptive mother, my mom. I worried about how she would feel when I found my biological family, and didn't mention anything about my searching until I'd completed it and met both sides of my birthfamily. I didn't want her to worry about me, and this was a journey I needed to take by myself without having to consider anyone else's reactions but my own (my own were quite enough to deal with, thank you very much). When I told Mom about meeting my birthfamily, instead of reacting in a threatened way, she was joyous. She immediately phoned her sister, who christened my news "Our Christmas Miracle." I'm sure she has gone through many emotions of her own, but this discovery has reinforced how incredible and resilient my mom is and how much her influence has shaped the person I have become. Being a parent is a complex thing, and you can be a biological parent or a functioning parent, you can be both, you can be one or the other at different times and under different circumstances. The big thing I've learned over and over during this process is how much you can love many different people. It's perfectly acceptable to have several children and love them all, so it makes sense that I could have two mothers, one a biological one, one an adoptive, functional one, and love them both. I am grateful to my birthmother for carrying me and making the sacrifices she had to make to bear and then relinquish me, and I am grateful to my adoptive mother for the sacrifices and the leap of faith she made to take me in and love me as a mother should. I can't imagine being a mother to a child not of my flesh, but she did it and continues to do it. And I love her and always will. She is still the person I call when I need advice or a sympathetic ear, and I don't imagine that will ever change.
My own journey of discovery continues. Now that I know where I come from, where I was born, the circumstances of my birth, my health history, a lot of the mystery of me has melted away. And that is nice, but a little disconcerting. No longer can I fantasize about exotic origins. I come from hard-working, decent people with strong family connections, their share of eccentricities, and really dark eyes. Oh, yeah, name the disease, and I can find it in my family health history, which makes me especially thankful that I've taken reasonably good care of my health most of my life.
Now that I know where I came from, I have come to the conclusion that we are the product of biology, environment, and something else, a spark of identity that transcends any explanation. And that is a very good thing.