Adoptee Reunion Story: Marci and Me

This year, out of the blue, we got to skip the nagging and the crying. My mother had gotten three new grandchildren all at once a few months before, when a long-lost older sister of mine—the subject of her annual tears—materialized in our lives like a plot contrivance. I know it’s a cliché to say that life feels like fiction, but what else do you call it when a mysterious stranger appears from your past?

Four years before I was born, when my mother and biological father were just 15 years old, they had their first child together. This being the early 1970s, the baby was whisked away before she even realized what was going on, during a high school winter recess. Not that she wouldn’t have placed the baby for adoption, but she never had the chance to discuss it, nor had she ever resolved the matter with her own mother, who died in 2009—almost two years to the day before my lost sister returned.It wasn’t the first time we’d heard of this story; in an argument about 15 years ago, my birth father had wielded the secret against one of my younger sisters, Amber, like a hammer. When Amber got a little older, she made an attempt to track down the sibling, but was stymied by a Kafkaesque paper trail. I figured it was a cold case that would never be solved, and filed it away in the “family secrets” folder.

We rarely talked about it, my two sisters and I, and somehow I never connected the dots between my mother’s loss and each year’s fresh new sadness. I was too young, or too self-involved in the way college kids can be, to recognize that my parents were actual human beings with their own personal lives and long histories.”

Read the rest of the story at Marci and Me [Slate 1/5/12 by Luke O’Neil].

This story mentions a few good links that adoptive parents should know about:

The adoptee rights organization, Bastard Nation

Adoptee Reunion site, Adoption Registry Connect that has US state and foreign country categories.

REFORM Puzzle Piece

It is important to have resources for original family connections and to understand the current struggle that many adult adoptees have in their searches.

The right of adoptees to have the option to know their history and their original family is an important aspect of adoption reform.