Growing Up

When I was growing up, I knew that I would meet my natural mother one day. It was just something that I wanted to do. All I thought about was meeting her and asking her questions that I had about my adoption. That was it. Nothing else. I never once thought that I would ever have a relationship with her. I didn’t feel like I was a part of her or her family.

When I was around 18, I knew it was time for me to get my questions answered and I contacted the adoption agency to find out if they knew where she was located. To my surprise, I found out that in my state I couldn’t ask the agency to locate her without my parent’s permission, unless I wanted to wait until I was 21 years old.

So I got the form for my parent’s to sign, asked them to sign it, and they said they would. But I never gave them the form so they never signed it. They had given me permission to search, but I wanted to do this on my own terms. The state, the agency, and my parents was not allowing me to search on my own terms, therefore, I stopped the search. I needed to search for her when I wanted and with no one else’s permission, especially the state.

I remember a couple of days before I turned 21, I thought the day I turned 21, I was going to walk into the adoption agency and ask them to locate her. That didn’t happen. All of a sudden it was on my terms and I was going to be the one who made the decision, but I didn’t want to search right then. Twenty-one years I had been waiting to meet her, but all of a sudden all the feelings of “what if she doesn’t like me”, “what if I can’t find her”, “what if she has passed away”. All the negative feelings came rushing in for the first time in my life and took over.

Instead of facing the negative feelings, I allowed them to postpone my search.