Family

For those of you who don\'t know me, I was adopted at birth. I\'ve known this since I was a small child as my parents did not keep this a secret from me. For the most part, over the years, I\'ve not had a great urge to find my birth mother. Part of this was due to the difficulty in doing so. Records were sealed when I was adopted as a matter of government policy, so finding one\'s birth parent(s) was next to impossible. Things changed on the first of November of 2004. On that date, in the province of Alberta, all adoption records were unsealed. Now all an adult adoptee (or birth parent of an adotpee) has to do to get what is called “identifying” information is fill out the appropriate form and send it in.

Near the end of December I filled out the form and faxed it to the government. The reply came yesterday. I now know things about me that most people take for granted. Things like what hospital I was born in, how much I weighed at birth are things I now know that for the first 36 years of my life were a mystery.

I also, as part of the mass of paper the government sent me, now know my birth mother\'s name. Now for the ease of the reading public, if I use the term mother, father or parent I am referring to the people who raised me (my parents). If I use the term birth or bio in front of mother, father or parent I\'m referring to the people who\'s genetics I have.

So now I have a name. Here\'s the scary part. A half-hearted search with Google, netted the whereabouts of my bio-mother in about 20 minutes. With the internet, there\'s just no way to hide anymore. My bio-mother\'s husband appears to have genealogy as a hobby, having his and my bio-mother\'s family trees on line on his web page. Checking the information I have against the information in the family tree, it is clear that I\'ve found the right person, complete with address and phone number. For the record, she lives within 2-3 km of my house.

How do my parents feel about all this? My mom has been urging me to find my bio-mother for years now, so she was happy that I\'d received the records. She\'s all gung-ho for me to contact my bio-mother. Both my mom and I don\'t think my dad would take it well, so it may be a while before I tell him, Both my parents are low-tech people, BTW, so I think it\'s unlikely that my dad will see this post since he doesn\'t own a computer, let alone know how to use the internet.

How am I feeling? It\'s all a little strange. It\'s exciting in that a piece of my history has been filled-in (and thanks to the genealogy hobby of bio-mom\'s partner, it\'s been filled-in in spades). There\'s some nervousness and uncertainty as well. Questions need to be answered. Most importantly, do I contact her? If so, how? Would she reply?

I\'m going to have to digest a lot of this over the next few days and weeks to see what I come up with. Regardless, my life has gotten a lot larger in the past 24 hours, even if it\'s just in terms of information.