I was adopted at three days old by a couple in rural Ohio who were kind and hardworking and who told me I was adopted from the beginning, at an age-appropriate volume that increased as I got older. I never felt like a secret. I never felt like a second choice. I felt, for the most part, like their daughter, because that is what I was.
I did not go looking for my biological family until I was sixty-two years old. My adoptive parents were both gone by then. My adoptive mother had passed five years earlier and my adoptive father the year after that, and somewhere in the processing of those losses I found myself thinking, for the first time with any real urgency, about where I had originally come from.
My daughter helped me sign up for an ancestry service. She was thirty-four and enthusiastic and treated the whole thing like an adventure, which I found helpful. I matched with a woman named Carol who shared enough DNA to suggest she was a first cousin. Carol was sixty-eight years old and lived in Michigan and responded to my carefully worded message within four hours.
Her message began: “I have been waiting for this for a very long time.”
Carol knew about me. Her mother – my biological mother’s sister – had told her the story years ago. A young woman. An unplanned pregnancy. A private adoption through a church organization in 1961. A family that had moved away and never spoken of it publicly again.
My biological mother’s name had been Ruth. She had passed away eleven years earlier at the age of seventy-eight. She had been a piano teacher for forty years and had never married and had kept a journal for most of her adult life.
Get Heartwarming Stories in Your Inbox
Join thousands of readers getting uplifting stories every week.