Anxiety rules, as I wait for a response to my letter. A week has gone by and surely it has been delivered. The lack of immediate response makes me think that either she is not at home or she is my mother — or otherwise related to me –and is processing the information in her own time.
I found an obituary for her mother from last year, and it listed all of the family. I have discovered why I could not find her family – it appears her mother remarried so the name changed. With her first husband she had four daughters, and with her second a son and a daughter. My potential match is the second of the four daughters, so I did some searching on the first daughter and found a yearbook photo of her. I felt like I was looking at a photo of myself at that age. The similarity to me is stunning. But I showed the pictures to my brother and my companion and both of them stated that they didn’t see any resemblance. It’s so frustrating!!
Still, I thought about the potential implications if my own instinct is correct. I suppose it’s perfectly likely that I might resemble my aunt, but I also wondered what if…. what if the older sister is actually my mother? What if she went away to college and found herself pregnant, and gave her sister’s name instead of her own to protect herself from her peers? And what if she never told anyone about it somehow? Now I have outed her secret to her sister. Or maybe her sister knew and has forwarded my letter to her?
I feel at turns mortified and indignant beneath the general anxiety. Mortified because I hate the idea that I have caused trouble for anyone, and indignant because it seems that everyone gets a valid stake in this situation but me. At this point in time, my adoptive parents (even post mortem) and family get to justify their harboring this secret and my bio-family gets to feel intruded upon by me. The state maintains its own rigid dismissal of my right to accurate and complete information. I am sympathetic to those things, but will I ever get any sympathy for my own perspective?