For my entire life, my birth mom was an idea. I knew the outline of her story since I was 13: a young woman, alone, far from home, who made an impossibly hard decision so that I could exist. I didn’t know her face. I didn’t know her voice. I didn’t know if she was still alive to ask.
Last October, recovering from a health scare and finally forced to slow down, I sat down with my laptop and went looking for my biological family again. My wife found an old obituary — one of my birth mom’s sisters — which led to more names, and eventually a phone number for her last surviving sister, Carol. I waited nearly a week before I found the nerve to call.
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