The Phone Call

So, when I left off I had reached November of 2015 more or less.  Once I stopped being a cop I found a job still in criminal justice, though I don’t carry a gun or make arrests anymore.  I work normal hours almost all the time, 8-5 Monday to Friday.  Occasionally it runs over a little bit, but in the two years I’ve been doing it, I’ve yet to work a weekend or a holiday.  It’s been a nice change.

The first week of November 2015 I got a letter in the mail from an adoption agency.  I almost didn’t open it at all, figuring it was some sort of solicitation for money.  However, the envelope was a little too nice for that and something about it just told me it needed to go in the keep stack rather than the trash stack when I was sorting out the mail.  The letter happened to arrive in what was, at least so far, the busiest two weeks I have ever had at work.  I didn’t even open it until the weekend came around.  When I did, I discovered not a plea for money, but a letter telling me that a member of my “birth family” (it was not specific as to who) had medical information to provide to me through the agency and asked that I contact them in reference to it.  I was somewhat stunned by this because, at 42 years old, I had never heard anything from any member of my biological family and I had reached the point where I never expected to.  It was the weekend, so I couldn’t call anyone at the agency and no email address was provided.

The following week was the second week of my busiest two weeks to date at my job, and it was literally impossible for me to make a phone call to the agency during business hours as I was in court all day for the entire week.  I hadn’t even decided if I was going to call for sure.  At 42 I had made it through a lot of doctors’ visits saying I was adopted and therefore didn’t have any medical history to offer.  One has to understand that even at this point I didn’t believe that being adopted had any effect on me at all and I didn’t see any benefit to obtaining medical information at this point in my life.  I did eventually decide I would call simply because I had children of my own and knowing some medical history could turn out to be helpful for anything that might crop up with them.

So, I put the letter in my car and figured that when the trial I was involved in was over and I was back in the office I’d call.  The next Monday I carried the letter in with a stack of paperwork, dropped it on my desk, and it was promptly covered up with other things.  I completely forgot about it for a week.  I unearthed it the following Monday, November 23^rd.  I called the woman who wrote the letter the afternoon of the 23^rd and got her voicemail.  The voicemail said she only worked in the morning on Monday, but worked all day on Tuesday.  I didn’t leave a message, but instead decided to call back on Tuesday.  When I called back on Tuesday the message had been changed to say she was out of town for Thanksgiving and would be out of the office the rest of the week.  I figured if I didn’t leave a message I would never remember to call back after Thanksgiving, so I left one.  I promptly forgot about it after that, working the rest of that short week, then spending Thanksgiving with my family.

I feel it is important at this point to explain my attitude toward this whole thing, which probably seems to be pretty flippant.  First, the letter I received only said that medical information was available; it didn’t say any information about my birth family was available or even hint that it might be.  Second, I had bought into the commonly accepted narrative about adoption hook, line, and sinker.  I firmly believed that my birth mom would have been encouraged to forget about me and would have the best chance of living a happy life if she was not reminded of my existence.  I never made any effort at all to search for her or any member of my birth family, not because I wasn’t interested in finding out information, but because I didn’t want to disrupt anyone’s life simply because I was curious.  I firmly believed at the time that I had suffered no consequences as a result of being adopted, therefore I didn’t “need” answers.  I didn’t see my curiosity as a sufficient reason to risk the wellbeing of who knew how many people.  It’s funny, given my job I had access to all sorts of resources that most people don’t, and as it turned out for much of the time I was living in the same state as my birth mom, not two hours away (not the state I was born and grew up in, not the state she gave me up in).  I never so much as typed “how to find your birth parents” into Google.

So, after Thanksgiving of 2015 I returned to work on Monday, the 30^th of November.  About an hour later my phone rang with a number from the adoption agency showing on the caller ID.  I picked it up not knowing that my life was about to be changed forever.

After an exchange of pleasantries the woman from the agency told me about the medical information, which was from my birth mom.  She gave me a brief rundown, but I could tell there was more to this call than this health information as she appeared to be feeling me out for my attitude about my birth mom and being adopted in general.  Luckily she cut to the chase pretty quickly and told me that if I was interested my birth mom would like to make contact with me.  The agency would act as an intermediary for any communication unless and until we both decided we were comfortable releasing our contact information to each other.   Well, I never searched for anyone from my birth family but I decided long ago that if anyone ever came looking for me, I wouldn’t turn them away.  I never had any anger about being adopted and I was curious to know the “whole story”, so it didn’t take any convincing, I agreed to contact through the agency right away.

All of that was enough of a shock, but in its self it wasn’t life changing.  I was interested, but then the woman from the agency started telling me information about my mom’s life, starting with her first name (which I had never known) and going on from there.  I had the outline of a story surrounding the events that lead to my being given up, but it filled in a lot that day.  Then came the bombshell, my mom went on to have four other children.  Not with the same man who was my father, but they all had the same father, and she was still married to him 35 years later.  Those brothers and sisters I wondered if I had all those years ago sitting on the rock in my parents front yard actually existed.  The oldest at the time of this conversation, a sister, was 34, the youngest, a brother born the year I graduated from high school, was 24.  In between another sister, 31 and another brother, 27.  I had gone from 42 years of being an only child to being the oldest of five in the space of a single phone call.  I had no idea if I would ever meet them, or how it would go if I did, but somehow just knowing they existed was enough in that moment.  I started to cry sitting at my desk.

There was more to the conversation, but compared to the news about my siblings it doesn’t stand out in my mind.  As excited as I was to find out more about my mom, and in time I did, the news that really changed my life was the news of my brothers and sisters.  I always knew logically that I had a mom out there somewhere.  I didn’t know who or where she was, but I knew she had to exist.  I had no idea if I had siblings, and if I did, how many.  As soon as I got off the phone I had to call my wife and tell her not only about my mom, but about my brothers and sisters.  Even now, six months after I first heard the news, it still has a powerful effect on me.  I had to stop writing the above paragraph for a while because I started tearing up and I had to get through that before I could keep writing.

I’ll stop here for now.  There is much more to tell, but the phone call that started it all is over.  There will be more to come.