Letter writing and research

So, after the phone call ended and I called and told my wife I spent quite a while just sitting at my desk and thinking about the conversation and what it meant to me.  Much of the conversation focused on my birth mom and how giving me up had affected her.  It pains me to admit this now, but that is something I had not really considered over the years.  I understand why I hadn’t really considered it, but the reason isn’t a good one.  It goes back to my wholesale purchase of the adoption narrative as sold by the adoption industry.  I failed to do the thing that I have been preaching for years on other topics: Know your source, do your own research, don’t accept “common knowledge”, “conventional wisdom”, or what “they” say at face value, verify your information, and then form an opinion based on facts and education on whatever issue it is.

So, far too late I decided to follow the advice I would have given myself if I had bothered to think about the issue in any sort of critical way and I started doing research.  I knew how I felt about my adoption, or at least I thought I did.  I wouldn’t actually know for sure until April 22, 2016 when my world changed completely again.  So, I decided to research the issue from the prospective of birth mothers.  What I found disrupted a lot of ideas I had about adoption in general and how I imagined my birth mom felt in particular. 

As I did this research, which lasted most of the rest of the week, sorry about that employer, my mind was not on my work at all that week; I also started writing a letter to my birth mom.  This was how things were to be done, we exchanged letters through the agency and they were inspected by someone at the agency to make sure that no identifying information got through before we both consented to its release.  I finished my first letter two days after the phone call.  It was friendly, expressed my willingness to communicate, and totally naïve.  When I look at it now it is clearly a letter written by someone who hadn’t given this issue much thought in many years, then suddenly had it sprung on him and wanted to get something on paper as soon as possible.  That is exactly what happened, so it makes sense the letter reads that way.

The original plan was for my birth mom to send the first letter, but days passed and I got more and more impatient to hear from her.  At the same time I continued my research and learned more and more about what she might have been up against back in 1973.  I started to feel like my first letter, which I hadn’t sent yet, was insufficient.  I still meant what it said, but there was a lot more to say.  My feelings had started to change based on what I had learned and I felt I needed to say more.  I didn’t want to change the original letter, so I added on to the end instead, explaining why I had done it that way.  I also changed the signature from simply my name to “Your Son” and then my name.   After everything I had learned I felt like she deserved to be acknowledged in that way, what she did for me required the love of a mother, it was the least I could do.  I did feel like her son, and I hadn’t even heard from her yet, just based on the information I had from the agency and the research I had done, my prospective have changed.  I sent the letter off to the agency, via email of course.  Thankfully the days of waiting for the post office to deliver such things are mostly over.  Not long after I had a letter from my birth mom, she had my letter, and the exchange began in earnest.   

That will do for now I think; next I’ll talk about the whirlwind letter writing and eventual first meeting.