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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My mother wears army boots
She kicked butt for me and I want to thank her.
By Lisa Zeidner
[05/08/00]

An introduction
We devote a week to Mother's Day and the messages that don't fit on the cards.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[05/08/00]

Remembering Cardinal O'Connor
He stopped taking my calls after I slammed him in the press, but he still had time to be kind to my mother, an Orthodox Jew.
By Ari L. Goldman
[05/05/00]

Sexism and the death chamber
Chivalry lives when a woman must die.
By Cathy Young
[05/04/00]

My spawn arrives!
In the third installment of his lesbian sperm donor saga, Hank Pellissier describes the arrivals of his two babies -- born 21 days apart.
By Hank Pellissier
[05/03/00]

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They pulled me into a tight family hug and assured me that I was even more a part of them, because of all the babies in the world, they chose me. They said we were meant to be together as a family.

Also Today An introduction to this week's series By Jennifer Foote Sweeney My mother wears army boots She kicked butt for me and I want to thank her. By Lisa Zeidner The series Beyond Hearts and Flowers We devote a week to Mother's Day and the messages that don't fit on the cards.

I never felt like anything was missing, and I had only idle curiosity about my birth parents. My grandpa thought I looked like every famous blond on television, from Chris Evert Lloyd to Jane Pauley to Princess Diana, so sometimes I wondered if I was biologically related to someone famous. It was a fun fantasy, and a pretty common one among the adoptees I knew. But even as a teenager, when I believed my parents were the most embarrassing, uptight, rigid authority figures on the planet, I never wished for different parents, even birth parents.

As we read the letter that day, days before my 18th birthday, it seemed too personal, painfully so. It was filled with details of the woman's life and her desire to know me. She wanted me to call, to write, to share the details of my life with her.

My mom and I agonized over what to do. My parents knew only a few details about my birth family, and there wasn't enough in the letter to know for sure whether this woman was really my birth mother. My head was spinning with curiosity and fear, and from trying to fit this bizarre new piece of my life into the puzzle of my everyday existence -- calculus finals, term papers due, my senior trip and planning for the prom. My mom suggested I skip school the next day, and that we go to the adoption agency to find out if what the letter said was true.

I called the number on the last page of the letter, and told an answering machine that I had received the letter and that I would appreciate it if this woman (I'll call her Mary) didn't contact me again. I told the machine that I needed to find out if Mary really was my birth mother, and until then, I didn't want to be in touch with her.

She phoned five minutes later.

Mary was a deluge of questions -- first, she wanted to verify that all the details fit, which, for the most part, they did. Then she wanted to know what I'd been up to for the past, oh, 18 years. The one question that kept drumming through my mind was, Is she or isn't she? Even though the details matched, I kept thinking that there must have been more than one baby girl born on my birthday who was given up for adoption. At the same time, I was curious to hear Mary's story and to find out who she was and why she gave up her baby.

Mary said she and her boyfriend were 16 when she got pregnant and they both wanted what was best for their baby. As I listened to her talk lovingly about the baby she gave up, I was thinking in the abstract of a hypothetical baby, not that the baby could possibly be me.

It was too surreal, this stranger believing that she was part of my life, conveying the most painful parts of herself to me during our first conversation. I was embarrassed, because she was too interested in me, and because she was showing me all of the carefully sewn seams in her life, which now seemed to be unraveling as she revealed all of her secrets.

Apparently she took a long and complicated path to find me. She had first started attending meetings of Concerned United Birthparents, an advocacy group for birth parents. CUB led her to a Michigan detective who specializes in finding adopted children. He came up with my name and an incredible amount of information about me, including my SAT scores and my yearbook pictures.

As she recited all of my vital statistics to me, I began to feel uncomfortably exposed, like in those dreams where you show up at school wearing nothing but a too-small washcloth. As we hung up the phone that night, Mary told me that she loved me. I felt queasy, the way you do when a lover says those words too early and you don't feel the same way. I muttered quickly, "OK, bye."

The next day, I skipped school, and my mom and I drove to the adoption agency that had placed me to see what we could find out. Amazingly, the same caseworker was still there; even more incredible, she remembered my family. But the law at that time prohibited us from finding out the names of my birth parents without a court order, so we were stuck.

Back at home, I called Mary and told her that I couldn't find out for sure if she was my birth mother. I asked her not to contact me again because it seemed strange to start such an intimate relationship with a total stranger. She asked if she could call, just every once in a while, to see how things were going with me. I said OK, thinking that if she was my actual birth mother, I didn't want to push her away entirely. I imagined that I would treat the calls like rare communications with distant relatives: "Hi, how are you?" "I'm fine. I'm getting ready to go to camp again this summer." "Really? Great. Good luck with that." "Thanks, bye."

Next page | I found myself feeling more and more invaded