Can someone please tell me their adoption reunion story ?

Philippa

I was coerced into surrendering my son in 1981 and always knew there might be a chance that he would. My son started searching for me in 1999 and found my family quite quickly who, unfortunatley, lied to him for almost five years. They basically told him they didn't know where I was and eventually he believed I didn't want to know and my family were covering for me. However not only did they lie to him but they never told me they had contact with him.

I was told I would never be allowed to search, my family didn't want me talking about my son and for various reasons I was too frightened tos earch for him.

In 2004, five days after my son's 23rd birthday I went on a genealogy site and joined it. After I put all the info I could I had a match with another member's tree. It was my son and he had joined using the names I gave him so I emailed him and that was the start of our reunion.

For the first 4 months we lived 260 miles apart but managed to meet up 3 times. He then moved to Canada to study but in Dec 2006 he had to come to England for various reasons and moved i with me and my husband. Until recently he wasn't on good terms with his aparents but they are on better terms now.

Lori A

I chose adoption for my daughter in 1972. Her father knew about her and was in the military at the time so he could not be around. she found me 28 years later and we have been in a great reunion ever since. She met her father in 2007, they are working on a reunion.

amyhpete

I was 18 and a senior in high school. For advanced composition, our teacher assigned an I-Search project -- research and write about something you really want to know. I'm sure if it was the 21st century we could have set up blogs, websites, done things over Facebook, etc., but at this point I was still writing on a "fancy" electronic typewriter, not even a computer. We had computers at school, but they were only used for business and math.

Ahem. Anyway...

I decided I wanted to find my birth/bio/first mom. I went to the teacher for approval and she said, "Number one, remember that she is a person, not a project, that she might not want to be found, or you might be upset by what you do find. And number two, I have faith that you will write something extraordinary whether or not you succeed."

Every week at least we had to turn in a writing to the sharing table -- a paragraph or two about our progress in our project for our classmates to comment on. This was the final quarter of our senior year and a lot of clique and class differences had gone out the window and we were seriously having fun together and encouraging each other. I had tons of comments on mine and this whole class following my progress especially.

I wrote to the hospital where I was born asking for records. I also wrote to the office of the doctor on my birth certificate. It did start bothering me that my birth certificate is a lie: saying that Chuck and Sue, my adoptive parents, were there at my birth on my birthdate at that hospital when they didn't see me until a month later.

I already knew there had been a mixup with the paper work and that instead of the usual 4-5 days in the hospital even back then, I spent 20 days there in care of the nuns who were nurses while all the paperwork was sorted out. I think that was a God thing because my parents only finished their application to become adoptive parents sometime around my birthday and if I'd gone in 4-5 days surely I would have gone to someone else.

I also knew that my bio-mom had been just 16 and starting 11th grade when she had me, that she was tall with strawberry blonde hair and played the clarinet in band.

The hospital was of no help, really. They informed me that they had no access to the name of my bio-mom, that their records, as with all closed adoptions by Catholic Charities, reflected the medical care of "Mother J" and "Baby Girl J." I was "Baby Girl J." to the courts until I was one year old. I did start getting the idea that my mom's last name must have started with a J.

The place where I was born was a small town in the midst of many tiny farm towns. I had always thought my bio-mom was from C, the town where the hospital was, so I traveled to C to the library and checked out yearbooks wondering if I would find anyone. I found a few possibilities from CHS class of 19-- but nothing that leaped out at me. Plus, all of those girls seemed to be in school for various events throughout the year and came back for senior year. They also seemed to be at some end of the year events for their 10th grade year and in May of 10th grade, Mother J would have been six months pregnant.

And none of them had the first or last name of J, though I didn't eliminate them based solely on that. I already kind of felt that "Mother J" never came back to school for 11th and 12th grade, but couldn't explain why I felt that way.

I went through a few more subversive avenues to try to find "Mother J." Finally, in mid-April, I wrote to the Catholic Charities in C and gave them my information and said I would appreciate any information they could provide. I had known that Catholic Charities was almost notorious for making closed adoptions extremely closed and was pessimistic about the possibilities there.

April 30, 1990, would have been my adoptive mom's 49th birthday. She'd died in 1988 of a heart condition. I was excitedly getting ready to go to a college scholarship dinner at the university I would attend that fall -- it was about a 50 mile drive from our house. As my dad called down the stairs, "Come on, let's go!" The phone rang. My phone downstairs was a cordless. I grabbed it and started heading up the stairs.

"Hello?"

The person speaking was from Catholic Charities in S, my town, and said, "I'm looking at a letter here written in August of 1989 by a woman named Elizabeth. She's been searching for you but didn't want to disturb your life so she's said that if you ever come looking for her, she'd very much like to meet you."

Oh. Wow. I have goosebumps just typing that.

We set up a time for me to drive out to Catholic Charities to meet her. They insisted on facilitating the first meeting. Then I had to rush off to make it to my dinner. My dad was happy for me. He knew about the project and hoped I'd be successful.

The night came for me to meet Elizabeth J. I pulled into the parking lot and saw an old car with plates for a county next to C county -- it was afte

Cambria

Last year in May or so my adoption agency contacted me to let me know my bio-father had contacted them about wanting to find me. Normally, according to their own rules, they wouldn't have let me know, but because all the information included with my adoption had nothing at all listed about my bio-dad (he didn't even know my bio-mom had been pregnant until after I was adopted) they wanted to let me know it was an option.

In January, I finally decided to get in contact with him. It has been interesting. It is still pretty new right now. It was nice to be able to have some questions answered and it was nice to finally see pictures of people who look like me. And he has been really great about being supportive and not pushing any expectations on me. So far it has just been phone and email contact (he lives on the other side of the country) and I am also in contact with one of his sisters who is about my age, but this summer, I am going to be meeting him and a whole bunch of his family. I am nervous about it but excited.

The hard part for me has been his daughter. She really wants to have a close relationship and stuff like that, and what has made it hard is that this is the first time I have really felt like there is someone who has some serious expectations about what I should be like and what the reunion should be like. It is hard for me because that kind of pressure really makes me want to pull away, but I also know that it isn't really her fault. She is just an excited teenager who has sort of developed this "long lost older sister" fantasy thing now. So...yeah.

I do plan on eventually trying to contact my bio-mom, but for right now, there is a lot happening in my life. I want to get more centered personally, more centered on how things are going with my bio-dad and I still have a lot more issues attached to her than I ever did to him, so I am still trying to get some of those things worked out.

So, yeah! That's it!

Rachel

Me, my brother & sister were all adopted. When I was 6, me & my mom, dad, brother went to "pick up" my sister from her birth mother/agency...so I met my birth mother then at the agency (we had the same for all 3 of us). My parents also sent Christmas cards, etc to all our birth mothers and kept in touch for the most part. When I was 18 my half sister actually found me on myspace. My birth mother joined, and we started to communicate and build a friendship that way. Then when I turned 20, my birth mother found my birthfather on facebook! So I have been reunited with him as well, and plan on meeting them both face to face someday! My birthfather only lives about 2 hours away! Pretty crazy! My brother has been in Hawaii for the past year for school, and his birthmother found him on facebook, and was actually vacationing in Hawaii at the time so they met up then! It's pretty fun and interesting to meet your biological parents, but it doesn't change how I feel about my adoptive parents...they are my parents no matter what! :)

Mamacita

probably not to a stranger on the internet

Maria

Yeah, my cousin found out she had a sister and it was a disaster.

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