The Story of My Life: The First Clue (Part Two)

So just to quickly recap what happened last time - I had been struggling physically and decided to see if the adoption agency could provide me with some medical info. Nothing.  I registered with the State of Indiana Vital Records to see if I could get some health information that way. Again nothing.  Then one night I am at my parent's house and my Dad tells me he knows my birth mother's name and he will tell me if I want to know.....

Now hold on here. I don't know if you remember or not, but a couple of blogs ago I listed a set of reasons why I was never really interested in searching for my birth mom.  One of them was because I never wanted to hurt my parents. I never wanted them to feel like they weren't good enough or that I wanted someone other than them in the role of parents in my life. The thought had never occurred to me that maybe my parents would want to know who my birth parents were, that they too would be interested in knowing the circumstances that surrounded how I came to be.  But that is exactly how it was. This one reason for not wanting to search was now null and void. Not only was my dad standing in front of me suggesting that I begin searching, he was reaching out his hand to give me the key that would open that very first door.

So I took it.

And he told me. Her name was Carol Close.  He said that even after all of these years he had never been able to forget.   He also told me that he thought he remembered her to be around 20 or 21 years old when I was born and that he was pretty sure she wasn't from the state of Indiana. He thought maybe Idaho.

I went home and I googled and I googled and I googled.  I found lots of people named Carol Close, but their age wouldn't be right or they lived in a different part of the country or Close was not their maiden name. Sometimes I would come across someone who would seem to fit the age range but then if I found their profile on Facebook they had the wrong color hair and eyes. The worst ones were when I was following someone's internet trail only to find out that they had died. I would find myself heartbroken at the thought.



My heart and emotions were up and down. I found myself feeling more deeply about the whole situation than I really was ready to admit.  I had never allowed myself to open wide the door to my inner feelings about being adopted and then once I did,  it was almost more than I could handle. So I just kept the door cracked instead, trying to hold some of the feeling inside.  I mean, what if I did finally decide to go looking for her to find out that she had really died. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to handle it.

I would search for several hours a few days in a row and then I would give up and not search again for a few weeks or months. This went on for more than a year or so. I don't remember the exact timeline.  I was almost at the point of giving up for good. Maybe the adoption agency was right that she had fallen off the face of the earth.  But then I found out some things that were very interesting and encouraging to me. It led me down a different path and on that path I discovered just a bit more about myself.....

More on that next time.