My mother suddenly and unexpectedly passed away in 2002 at the young age of 46. Needless to say, my five siblings and I were devastated and shocked. However, the shock didn’t end there. In the same twenty minutes that she took her last breath, we were informed that 25 years ago, she’d placed a baby boy up for adoption. I cannot begin to describe the emotional roller coaster we went through. Pain, grief, sadness, shock, disappointment, and mourning– but in the same moment, a sense of hope. Although we’ll never know why she chose not to share this with us earlier, we did find out she’d started searching for this child a year before she died. There was hope for us to find him– for her, for him, and also for us.
It was like there was a little piece of her that we could get back if we could only find him. I made several postings on the Internet, contacted the adoption agency through which he’d been placed, and petitioned the judge to open the adoption. But each time I was denied, hitting a wall I never thought I’d get through. Between 2002 and 2009, I’d periodically surf through websites, hoping to find any kind of clue. I posted on every site I could find, still hoping.
The day I came home and my husband told me “my brother” called, I thought he meant the brother that I had grown up with. I couldn’t quite grasp that it was him. For reasons only known to them, his adoptive parents decided to search the internet, and found one of my postings. There’s no way in this world I could possible explain the array of feelings…and the tears, they continue to fall as I’m writing this! We (all seven of us siblings) couldn’t possibly be any more excited and happy about this reunion. It’s amazing how you can instantly love someone you’ve never known.
In the hundreds of postings, hours of searching, and painful despair that I had felt so often in the journey of searching for my brother, we found success. The chances were so small– I think I knew that from the beginning. But there is magic in the adoption community; there are miracles. And now I get to spend the rest of my life being a sister to the brother I never knew I had.
