Connecting. Part 2

There was a lot of information in the detective’s report. My birth mother had no children subsequent to me, and never married. She had a career, though. She’d even lived and worked in Europe for a time. What struck me when I looked at her prior addresses is how closely she had lived to me while I was in New England. When I was working at State Street Bank in Quincy, MA, she too was living in Quincy and the surrounding south shore towns. She’d lived on Cape Cod, too, just like me. She had two sisters and a brother. Only one of her siblings had children, three sons, all born within a few years of me. 

The detective told me it’s not rare that my birth mother was single; a lot of birth mothers are. She also said my phone call would make her relive the whole experience. No birth mother is ever prepared for what relinquishment of a child will do to her life.

Her coaching continued: If the machine picks up, don’t leave a message. If she answers and then hangs up it means she’s panicked, and needs time. I can write her a letter after two or three weeks. Bottom line, no matter what happens, I will have to carry this call.

I took a day off from work to do it. I first spent some time preparing, reviewing the script. Best case: acceptance and a conversation; worst case: rejection. I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. A woman answered. My stomach flipped, but I began the script. At every pause, she gave me a green light. She told me she’d been hoping for this call for a long long time, and that she was overjoyed. She was warm, funny, extremely bright. It was kind of a jackpot. We talked for five hours, taking a bathroom break midway. So much ground to cover - the circumstances around my birth, my birth father, her own childhood and what led to an unplanned pregnancy, and her life in the decades since. She was curious about me and surprised, as I was, by our earlier geographic parallels.

We hung up, finally, after agreeing to exchange photos. At age forty, a major piece of the adoption puzzle had fallen into place. I was relieved, elated, and about to embark on the journey of knowing her.