If you’re adopted and you have ever told someone that you wanted to find out about your birth parents and genetic family, did they tell you that you should just be happy about your adoptive family?  I know some have been told that.  In fact, as a young child, that was my opinion for which I boldly expressed to others when the subject came up.

I was very blessed to be adopted by my lifelong parents, Bill and Betty, who had only been married a few years.  When they adopted me, they were older than most parents (44 & 43), especially in the era of the 1960’s (it’s now not such a weird thing as I have since followed in their path, adopting our daughter at the age of 43).  After trying to conceive and eventually going through a hysterectomy, adoption was their only chance for a child.  I am more than blessed by having them because they gave me a wonderful childhood, a sister (Carla – also adopted), took us to church and brought me to Christ.  If I died today, I could be satisfied knowing that God blessed me with both a wonderful earthly family and adopted and an eternal forever family in Christ.  But, that hasn’t left me without questions or the feeling that maybe I should and could know more than I do.

As I mentioned in my Introduction, I was adopted from the Gladney in Fort Worth in 1968, having just turned 1-year old when placed.  I’ve yet to know for sure why it took me so long to get adopted given that I had no health or other factors that would keep a new-born from being immediately placed.  However, as I got older, we did discover that I was hard of hearing in my right ear (only 20% capacity to hear) for which there was no cure.  So, over the course of time, I have let it work to my favor.  If it’s noisy when I’m trying to sleep, I just turn on my good ear and most of the noise is drowned out.  If I’m singing in a choir next to a “tone-deaf” person, I just make sure he’s on my right side as I can completely drown him out and sing the right notes.  On the other hand, it’s not so good when I’m in a crowd, like the dinner table, when I can’t understand half of the conversation and eventually retreat to my own thoughts rather than constantly asking “What?” or turning my head around to try to hear someone on my right side.  However, if I could get it corrected at this point in my life, I don’t think I would.  After all, I might hear sounds that I don’t like or are distracting to me that most of you are used to.  Besides, I’ve always been able to live this way since I can remember.  It didn’t stop me from finding a beautiful wife and being a father.  But, as I think about this condition that I’ve lived with my whole life, it’s helped me answer why, after 35 years, I changed my mind and decided to find out more about my genetic family.

Though I did have questions for years, I never really cared about finding my birth parents until 2002.  By then, both of my parents had died.  My dad died when I was 11 after a lifelong battle with a WW2 injury.  My mom died when I was 29 after a year-long battle with cancer.  By age 35, I finally felt free to explore those questions without worrying that I would be dishonoring them.  So, I contacted the Gladney Center to see if I could get any information about my birth parents since this was a closed adoption.  My mom and dad did leave me with some information about both my birth mother and birth father.  I knew that my birth mother’s family was Russian Ukrainian and had been a part of the Greek Orthodox church.  My birth father was a self-taught pianist and competitive swimmer.  As it turns out, once Gladney sent me the “non-identifying” information (that means, they blot out anything on the documents that identifies anyone), everything checked out.  Not that I ever thought my mom and dad would lie to me, but it was just confirmation that I had been told the complete truth as far as they knew it.  For some reason, just knowing and actually seeing the truth gave me a sense of empowerment.

So, I decided to send a letter to my birth mother through Gladney.  They contacted her and sent the letter.  It was about 4 months before I got a reply from both her and a birth half-sister who was told about me when she was 18.  Again, it was empowering for me.  I was taking hold of some information about me that other people (the Gladney Center and the State of Texas) had about me and claiming it for myself.  This may sound like no big deal to the average person, but those who have never experienced any form of connection or communication with someone they are genetically connected to can sometimes feel like something is missing.  So, I wrote back to both of them, but didn’t hear back from either after that.

Fast forward to 10 years later: I resumed my research.  Having never heard back again from my birth mother and birth half-sister, I just let it go for a while.  During that time, I met Tracy, my wife.  I married her after a short engagement.  Since neither of us had ever been married or had kids, we didn’t mess around.  It was 6 months between the time we met and got married.  But, given that I was about to turn 40, who cared.  I knew what I wanted and hoped we would have our own family.  However, I married her knowing that our chances were slim for having our own children naturally due to some conditions she let me know about when we were dating.  But, she also had told me that she once had desired to adopt when she was younger.  Did that bother me?  No.  In fact, I was more excited about that than I was trying in vitro and going through the struggle that many couples in their late 30’s and early 40’s go through.  As it turns out, that was God’s plan for us.  So, here was my second brush with adoption.  Now, I’m an adopting parent.

After vetting some of the adoption agencies, we settled on an agency in Houston called Alternatives in Motion.  What was so unique about them was their concentrated ministry to birth mothers.  They ministered to them whether the mother gave up the baby or kept it as their agency was funded by both fees and donations.  As part of their orientation, we actually met former birth mothers who came back to the agency and testified about their decision in the past to give up their babies to a loving couple they picked.  When they found out about my adoption, they feared I might resent them since that was my birth experience.  But, I assured them that I did not.  However, it gave me great insight into how birth mothers thought and cared about the babies they placed for adoption and gave me some insight into what my birth mother went through.  So, after waiting for about 12-13 months, we finally had a birth mother select us. When we were notified, she was due in about 3 weeks.  So, we met her with the agency workers in Houston and formally agreed to the open adoption.  This was so much different from mine, but it re-ignited my desire to eventually find out more about me.  After all, my daughter’s experience would be one of openness in that she would see pictures of her birth mother and father.  Besides, in an age of social media and the web, you can find out about almost anything with very little information to start with.  Even though agencies in Texas still have to keep the identities of the birth parents confidential, it was easy enough to find out what we wanted to know with what we already knew about them.  But, in my case as an adoptee, that would be virtually impossible given that I came from Gladney, the mother of closed adoptions.

Given that I never heard back from my birth mother even though Gladney claimed they had sent my second letter, I had concluded that maybe that was the end of the road for my search.  But, I became dissatisfied because now that I had my own adopted child through an open adoption experience. I should at least experience a little of what she would, which was knowing the identity of her birth parents.  I needed to be ready to help her in the future when she would start processing what being adopted meant to her.  This gave me new resolve to reopen the door to the unknown in my own genetic family experience.  I wasn’t just doing this for myself now, but for my daughter.  But I have to admit that researching further still left me a bit anxious and apprehensive.  Luckily, Tracy boldly stepped in and started this for me.

It was early in 2013 when Tracy put some of my birth information on an adoption registry website.  Within a day, someone wrote back on the site claiming that they may have found the name of my birth mother.  Sure enough, they confirmed my birth certificate number with the birth index they had from the official State of Texas library in Austin.  It turns out that this “adoption angel” searched through the index for my birth date in the county I was born in.  The way she figured it out was that I was listed as “the infant of…”.  Given that it was the only “infant of…” boy for that day with no father listed (that’s what they did back in the 60’s), she thought it might be mine.  (As an interesting but significant side note, I later went to a local public library and found on microfiche that same original listing of my birth in the Texas birth index, so it’s not as big of a secret as I thought).  So, now I have my birth mother’s name and could request an original certificate from the State (that’s a new law that came in effect a few years ago).

At this point it took no time for us to find out information about me.  My birth mother’s information (like number of brothers and sisters) from Gladney quickly matched everything we found on the web, especially on Ancestry dot-com.  The most exciting thing we found out was that I was a first generation American.  My birth mother had immigrated from the Ukraine as a very young child with her family.  Tracy found the boat manifest with all of their names on it.  Everything we found out matched with what Gladney had in their non-identifying files.  What a discovery!  But finding them on social media was a different story.

For over a year, we searched and searched for my birth mother and birth half-sister, but to no avail.  It wasn’t until Tracy was searching on a high school reunion website in September 2014 for the upcoming class reunion for my birth half-sister that she struck gold.  My birth half-sister’s husband was on that site and saw that she was asking about her.  Tracy called me at work to tell me she had found her.  That night, we were actually talking to each other on the phone.  What a surreal experience!  After talking for an hour, I think we were both on some kind of “high”.  Neither one of us probably slept much that night.  It turns out that she never got my second letter from over 10 years ago.  But, it really was no surprise to me.  Gladney claimed they had sent it and reaffirmed that a few more times when I called them, but it wasn’t true.  It wasn’t but a few weeks later that I called my birth half-sister again to talk about the family history.  Even though my birth mother had yet to feel comfortable communicating with me (and still hasn’t to this point) we still wanted to communicate with each other.  However, my birth mother had no problem passing along to her the birth father’s name.  So, early into the second phone call with my half-sister, she dropped the name.  Unlike my birth mother, he was easy to find on the web.  We even found his two children (a son and a daughter) on his Facebook page.  Both of them strongly resembled me as children.  The son looked almost exactly like me.  However, I have yet to this day felt come in contact with them.  I’ll have to keep everyone posted on this one as there are still chapters to be written.

So, why would I would I want to find my birth parents?  Is there really any need aside from medical history or just personal curiosity?  Maybe there is more to it after all. Not knowing anything about my genetic history is a lot like being hard of hearing.  I could function my whole life without addressing it and survive just fine as I am.  But, like being hard of hearing, it’s a handicap.  There’s information out there that is being kept from me, but known by others.  Maybe that’s fine for a child, but that shouldn’t be the case for a 47 year old man.  None of us ever know completely everything about ourselves or our genetic history (every family probably has some untold story) but there’s something wrong when I can get more genetic information about a dog than I can about myself.  So, forget Gladney and the Texas laws that don’t believe the adopted person as an adult is near as important as they should be.  My ears may never hear everything most of you hear, but why should I live with the handicap of not knowing my genetic history when the information is out there and available to me?  Yes, I may “hear” some disturbing things during my quest for information, but why live with this handicap when I don’t have to?