My question when I started off was who am I? One of the more interesting answers was I was a person who didn’t like change. This was true. But in writing this column, this answer changed.
I am a person who believed that consistency bred security. Even though things changed in my life (i.e moving from my hometown to attend EMU), I never let it change me. I was still, for many years, the same person I had always been.
I am a person who was adopted, and always felt bad about being adopted. Growing up (and even now), being adopted always had negative ties to it. Unanswered questions, emotional baggage, the fear of the unknown and public response to this seemed to confirm what was already in my mind. I felt this way until I had a meeting with my editor and a thought changed it all for me.
It started with a thought, turned into a conversation and developed into a journey. I have to thank my Life Editor Jerome Nichols, for not only giving me the opportunity, but gently encouraging me to go through with it. There were many times that the old me fought with the new me. I am a “what if” person, and the answers to those unsettling questions made me want to back down and give up, but I chose to stick it out. And what I found proved to be valuable.
I learned the process my birth parents had to go through, and without even knowing them, I developed a connection to them. I always assumed that all anyone had to do in this situation was sign a piece of paper and hand over their child. Boy, was I wrong! Even when you make a seemingly personal decision like that, there are other people who are involved in the process from A-Z and I came across some of the same people who were involved in that process.
Another thing I learned was that the process never stops. True, it may be at a standstill, but the moment that I chose to make the decision to find my birth parents, it was like a switch: it turned back on.
When I was adopted, I didn’t have a voice; the decision was already made for me that would forever change my life. The people who created me and brought me into the world were giving up their rights as my parents, and I had no say so. I couldn’t walk, talk or even understand how something so important was happening around me that would affect me. But selfishness took over; I had only looked at how it affected me. What about them? What about my parents who actually took me in? What about my family? These are questions that didn’t come up until this journey started.
Now that I’m an adult, things have truly changed. I have a voice, and I’m fighting to be heard. Not just by my family or those who choose to read this, but by the two people who spoke for me when I couldn’t speak up for myself. Now I have the chance to allow them to hear me out, and to speak on how this affected and changed me. And now, I walk down the path it will take to find them.
Don’t think that this process is easy. In truth, I truly underestimated it. The time it took, the emotions I would feel and the change it would provoke in me. From this experience, I grew and who I was is not who I am. I developed strength, courage, patience, perseverance, discipline and dedication, and the truly remarkable thing is the fact that somewhere along this path, I came across forgiveness and gratitude. The gratitude was not towards the wonderful people who chose to raise me, (which I already had), but towards the ones who decided not to. Without them, I wouldn’t have had a chance to tell this story.
And I’m not done yet. This journey has taken me along another road. The process of finding my birth parents is coming to a close, but the experience in actually meeting them has yet to begin. Once I meet them, who knows what the future will hold? I most certainly don’t. It can go in two directions: I may meet them and develop a relationship with them, or I might have to accept the information I get without meeting them and move on with newfound knowledge and the characteristics I acquired along the way. Either way, this proves to be a win-win outcome for me.
So what happens now? I wait. I wait on the information I filed to be handed over to the division in the court my adoption was finalized in, to be processed. After that, they will assign a caseworker to me, who will then meet with me and give me every document on file pertaining to my adoption. And because I was born in 1989, I will be able to get all kinds of information along with the last known names and addresses of my birth parents. I will find out my medical history, my nationalities (thank goodness I can stop guessing!), if they have any other children that were born before me and every step they went through and my adoptive parents went through. My history is in those files; the beginning into who I was and who I became will be at my fingertips. And that would change anyone.
So, I said I was a person who didn’t like change, and I said that answer changed along the way. The answer is now that I love change. I realized that change is inevitable. Everything we are will change with time. It’s all about how you respond to it, and changing how I responded to it would prove to be more than just a change in thought. It became a change in who I am.
