Not many people know I was adopted at the age of four. My family and close friends know and eventually it will come up in conversation, especially when people see me with my mother who is about a foot shorter than me. They’ll say something like, Wow, your dad must be tall, and I’ll laugh and say no, that he’s actually about my height. Really I’m just so used to it now that I just affirm their guess and move on.

When I was a kid it was important for me to let people know I had some other family out there. I was a lost kid in search of greener pastures and I needed people to know there was a very good reason I was nothing like my family. There was a reason I was so self-centered, melodramatic, and manipulative. I just wasn’t supposed to be there.

I still remember telling my mom in a huff one night that I was “going to go find my birth mother and live with her!” Of course, most kids hate their parents at one time or another and I’ll bet a lot of kids even wish they were adopted, but not many struggle as much as those kids who really have been “abandoned” by their birth parents only to be adopted by parents who might have chosen to have their own children instead of some crazy woman’s spawn.

The search began

So when I turned 18 I did all I could think of to track her down. For most of my life, I can remember my mom receiving social security checks on my behalf - something to do with my mother’s illness and it being hereditary, they compensated the adoptive parents as if to say We’re sorry you got stuck with a defective kid, so here’s something to cover the expenses she’ll incur. These checks were always addressed to me c/o my mother but my last name was different. In fact over about 10 years there were a couple different last names. Being the detective I always thought I wanted to be, I set out with my first clue.

I did some digging on the internet (what internet there was in 1995) but found little to go on until I went off to college. My roommate wanted to help me find my mother too so we decided to take a drive one weekend and see the town I was born in, to see if we could get anywhere with that. That little town, the pit-stop off I-5 in northern California was one of those places you’d hardly know was there. You’d just get gas and get back on the road. It was hard to find anything really, but we happened to pass a hospital and I remembered the name of it from my birth certificate.

Something I forgot to mention which you need to understand is that I didn’t have ANY information about my mother to go on. Adoptions in the seventies were sealed so I didn’t even have a hair color much less a name. I did see a birth certificate once but it had been altered and the names of the parents were my adoptive parents. Big help. But, I could be pretty sure they didn’t fudge the name of the hospital too, so I decided it was worth a look around.

So my roommate and I were tiptoeing through the hospital like two little Nancy Drew wannabes when a nurse popped up and asked if she could help us with anything. I blurted out my whole story, including my rotten childhood and my desperate search for my “good mom” while she batted her eyes in feigned sympathy (she probably had a teenager herself).

She was so nice I now wish I had written down her name. She told me she couldn’t tell me anything about my mother even if she had been around to remember something (duh), but she grabbed the phone book and made a copy of the pages which had those last names I had seen printed on those envelopes from Social Security. I had no idea if any of the names would actually be attached to my mother, but it was the best lead I had.

Sitting on my hands

I wish I could tell you I rang up every name, found my mother and we both lived happily ever after, but this isn’t that kind of fairy tale. This one is more of the reality-based kind where things go up and down and my head spins while I figure out what the hell I’m doing looking for my mother in the first place. Basically I had triumphed in getting those pages of the phone book and felt secure in that for the moment. I wasn’t ready to start making phone calls. My cop out when people asked was “When I’m meant to find her, I’ll just know.”

I don’t know how much of that I believed but it made me feel better to put it aside like that. It eased my mind to feel like I was doing something in my own time, in my own way and no one cared either way. My parents sure weren’t egging me on. In fact, I think they were pretty relieved when I still hadn’t found anything by 19. But then something unexpected happened, like God just kind of sat up there with all of His knowledge and decided there were a few things I could handle knowing too.

Attorney quits his practice

For awhile after I dropped out of college I lived with my dad back in San Diego. One day he handed me a big envelope with papers in it and told me the attorney who had handled my adopted had quit his practice and sent my dad the files. I’m not sure if that was true or if he was sitting on them all those years and just didn’t want to admit it, but it made sense at the time and now it wouldn’t really matter either way. The point is I now had ample information to track down my mother.

In those papers I found more last names because my mother had been married a few times in 20 years, but more importantly I had her first name for the first time: Gloria. I now had a first name to go with all those last names from the phone book. Obviously I was thrilled, but it was also a little overwhelming, I mean, for the first time I had no excuse not to make that phone call. It was now just one phone call I had to make because there was only one Gloria in my pages of the phone book. So I called…