Letters, email, and a phone call

When I left off I had sent off my first letter to the agency and shortly thereafter the letter from my birth mom arrived.  She mailed hers to the agency, using the actual postal service, so there was a delay of a couple of days from the time she finished it to the time it arrived there.  The woman we were working through at the agency didn’t actually see my email with the letter attached until Monday, December 14^th due to her work schedule (I sent it on December 11^th).  My birth mom’s letter arrived there on December 15^th.  Luckily I didn’t have to wait for the postal service again, as the woman at the agency scanned it and emailed it to me before putting the original into another envelope and mailing it to me. 

Obviously I have no other experience with first contact with my birth mother, but if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say the letter I got was at the top end of the scale.  I still read it on a fairly regular basis now, and I still have an emotional reaction every time.  It filled in a lot of gaps and details about the beginning of my life and it confirmed some things I always believed about her despite having no evidence upon which to base those beliefs.  If I hadn’t spent the previous ten days or so researching adoption and birth mothers rather than working, and developing a lot of empathy for my birth mom and birth moms in general in the process, her letter would have done it for me also. 

So, after reading her letter a couple of times, and emailing a copy to my wife, I had to start writing a response.  My letter apparently sparked a similar desire in her to respond quickly because I got another email with a second letter on the 17^th of December.  I’d sent my second letter off on the 16^th of December, which was the date on the letter I received.  The second letter contained a lot more information and was equally good at producing that same emotional reaction (aka tears).

The process we had to follow if we wanted direct contact involved filling out affidavits, which had to be notarized, allowing for the release of our contact information to the other party.  You see, dear readers, despite all evidence to the contrary in states that have open adoption records or have changed laws to allow open adoption records and give those affected an opportunity to “opt out”, what birth parents and adoptees really want is their privacy protected.  Lawmakers opposed to opening records will tell you that birth parents were promised their privacy when they gave their children up, and that privacy must be protected by keeping records sealed.  That sounds great to the uninformed, but it ignores a glaring fact of the law that anyone with any experience in such matters can easily pick out.  An adoption cannot be completed until the rights of the natural parents are severed.  When the rights of the natural parents are severed it is impossible to know for sure if an adoption will ever take place for the child in question.  Sure, in the case of healthy infants it is almost a foregone conclusion, but it is possible, no matter how unlikely, that a specific child might never be adopted.  In that case the child’s original birth certificate will never be amended because there will be no new parents to name on an amended certificate.  So, the names of the natural parents of the child will be available to the child on his or her birth certificate.  That is hardly “protecting the privacy” of the birth parents.  It is simply impossible to guarantee, at the time a child is given up, the privacy of the natural parents.  Many birth parents, if you ask them, will say they were never assured of their privacy.  It’s a fiction created by the adoption industry and legislators who support it.

Well, after I read the second letter on the 17^th I was ready to sign the affidavit.  Luckily there is a notary in my office, so I didn’t actually have to go anywhere.  The woman from the agency emailed me a copy of the affidavit, I signed it in front of the notary, I scanned it, and I emailed it back.  There was a slight hiccup in the process that almost resulted in another delay.  I didn’t know she already had a signed affidavit from my birth mom, and I had some actual work to do, so I didn’t jump on getting it filled out and sent back as soon as the email arrived.  She sent a second email around 2:30 pm asking if I was going to send the affidavit back that day (which would be 3:30 pm her time), but I didn’t notice it until around 3:30 pm my time because it had the same title as the previous email from her.  Well, she got off work at 5 pm, and this was a Thursday (and she didn’t work on Friday).  So, I rushed to fill out the affidavit and get our notary to sign it.  However, this had all come about very quickly, and a lot of people in my office didn’t know the story, or even know I was adopted.  So, I had to tell our notary the story (as briefly as possible, without being rude, she was doing me a favor after all).  By the time I got the affidavit scanned and emailed it was 3:50 pm, or 4:50 pm on the receiving end.  I called the woman at the agency to let her know I sent it, hoping she was still in the office, but I got her voicemail.  I left a message saying I had sent the affidavit back.  Real work called again and when I stepped back into my office I had a missed call from the agency.  I called back and got her voicemail again.  I figured she had left for the day and I was bummed out I was going to have to go all weekend without getting the contact information.  It turned out she was actually on the phone with my birth mom, which is why I got her voicemail, but I didn’t know that at the time.  Then an email popped up in my inbox with my birth mom’s contact information and a note that I should expect an email from her that night on my personal email.  I really have to hand it to the woman from the agency; she was so helpful throughout this whole process and stayed late that day to make sure we got each other’s information.  Any negative feelings I may express about adoption agencies or workers throughout this blog absolutely do not apply to her or her agency.

So, we did exchange emails the night of the 17^th, and then on the 18^th.  On the 19^th, Saturday, I called her.  I’m not big on talking on the phone under the best of circumstances.  Actually you could say I hate it.  However, I wanted to talk with her and I believe the feeling was mutual.  We lived 1000 miles apart (and still do at this writing), so it isn’t like we could meet at Starbucks.  So, I sucked it up and made an actual phone call.  I won’t try and drag this out, it was the best phone conversation I’ve had in years, perhaps ever.  It lasted nearly three hours and it was not uncomfortable for me at all, well except that my arms got tired from holding the phone and I had to keep switching off.  It was like I had known her forever, my whole life.  In a sense I suppose that is true, depending on how you define it, the first person we all meet is our mother.  As well as the letter writing had gone, I was not expecting to feel like I had known her forever, but I did.  I had no plans to do it when I picked up the phone, but I invited her to visit for my birthday, which was about eight weeks away the day of the phone call.  I really would have liked her to come sooner, that is how much of an impact this all had on me.  However, I felt like my birthday would be a special day for her as well as me, and a great time for us to meet for the first (or second, depending on how you look at it) time.  I suggested that she should bring her husband as well.  I did that for two reasons.  Primarily because I really wanted to meet him, everything she had told me about him made him sound like a great guy, plus he was the father of my four siblings.  Second, I thought of this because of all the years I have spent in the criminal justice system, and therefore dealing with the darker side of people, I wanted her to feel comfortable.  I may be her son, but 42 years later, she doesn’t really know me.  Asking her to travel 1000 miles, visit me alone, and just trust that I am as sane and normal as I claim seemed to be asking too much.

So, tentative plans were made for a visit the weekend of my birthday and hashed out over the next week.  The email communication continued on a daily and often more than daily basis.  We found out a lot about each other, including that we had lived in the same town in a state neither of us were from, and had lived about 90 miles apart for almost a decade, also not in the state we were from.  There were other little things like that; I went to a barber shop for several years on a regular basis.  The barber who cut my hair there was married to a woman who worked for her at a daycare she ran out of her home about 15 years earlier.  There was an area where I went to hike on a regular basis.  While she didn’t live in the area anymore when I was hiking there, she brought her family there from where they lived semi-regularly to hike there also.  I sometimes wonder if we were there at the same time. 

At some point during all this I stopped thinking of her as my “birth mom” or my “biological mom” and starting thinking of her as my “mom”.  I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, I don’t think there was a specific point, but it started with the phone call.  The changeover was complete before I actually met her face to face.  Should the readership of this blog ever increase past people who I specifically point it out to this will probably be a controversial paragraph.  To that, all I can say is it’s impossible to understand unless it has been experienced.  I never expected to think of her as my mom, and I even told to woman from the agency that, in those exact words, when I first talked to her on November 30^th.  However, some things just are whether one expects them to be, wants them to be, or not.  This is just one of those things that is.  Even if I wanted to do something about it (which I do not), I couldn’t.  She is my mom, and she always will be.

December 21^st marked another first for me, the first time I heard from a sibling.  In this case it was my 31 year old sister.  I think perhaps she deserves her own entry, but I’ll just say here that after 42 years as an only child I still feel strange when I use the words “my sister” or “my brother” in conversation or writing.  Those are words I have often wished I could say and never thought I would be able to.  As fantastic as mom made me feel about this whole event, my sister did the most to make me comfortable with the idea of being a brother.  When the time came to meet my siblings she had done so much to make me feel welcome that I wasn’t even particularly nervous, or at least not nearly as nervous as I would have been otherwise.

I planned to include the first meeting with my mom in this entry, but it’s gotten quite long already, and that meeting probably deserves its own anyway, so I’ll end it here for now.  There will be more to come as time allows me to work on it.  Mom is visiting this weekend, so perhaps not for the next couple of days.