August 19, 2000, was a Saturday, 3 days after my 22nd birthday. I was prone to think about my adoption story and the family I never knew around this time of year but I wasn’t thinking about it at all that night. No, that night I had other things on my mind. I was a mobile DJ in those days and that night I was doing a gig for a bunch of doctors and nurses who were celebrating their friend’s med school graduation.

I brought Bonnie along with me that night. While we were setting up, the nurses who were throwing the party came up to talk to me. I continued working while we talked and as I was setting up my lights my lighting stand fell forward and smacked one of the ladies in the face. It busted her nose and covered her face in blood.

To say that it was a stressful night from that point would be an understatement. The image of the woman’s face I had broken monopolized my thoughts. But that triviality would soon be forgotten as I was about to receive monumentally life-changing news.

A Mysterious Phone Call

Towards the end of the party, Bonnie got a call from her mother. It was a rather cryptic message that didn’t make a great deal of sense at first. She called her back to get more details. It seemed a woman had called Bonnie’s mom looking for me. She wanted to know if I had been adopted in 1978 and claimed that she might be my aunt. Back in January Bonnie had asked me if I wanted to find my biological family and I said I would someday. So for the next 8 months, she took to the internet to try to find them.

Finding Your Birth Family Back Then Was A Lot More Work Than Throwing a Pic Up on Facebook

These days if you were adopted and you want to find your birth mom you just put your information on a sign, take a picture with it, put it on Facebook, and let the internet do all the work. But even that’s outdated now since you can just take a DNA test and find everyone in the country who’s related to you whether you knew it or not. But back then you had to enter the information you had onto these adoption websites. If you entered your info and your family entered their info then eventually you might find each other. It only worked, though, if you were both looking for each other. For 8 months Bonnie entered the very limited information we had on these sites.

What We Knew About My Adoption

What we knew about my birth parents came from the adoption paperwork my adoptive parents had. We had my hospital paperwork that didn’t offer a lot of clues but it did have a little information about my birth parents; a brief medical history for each of them and some family medical history. There were also some very unhelpful clues that led nowhere.

I wasn’t adopted right away. For the first three months of my life, I was in foster care and my foster family named me. It wasn’t my legal name just something to call me. This name was on all of the medical paperwork from my first three months of life. It didn’t contain any clues but it was the bulk of the information we had. They call it a closed adoption for a reason.

Fortunately, there were also some clues in a pair of letters my birth parents wrote to me. They put them in a bible with instructions that I should receive it when I turned 18. In my birth mom’s letter, she mentioned her and my birth father’s ages which confirmed the ages in the paperwork from the hospital (although they had my birth mom’s birth-month wrong.) My birth father signed his letter with his first name which was the only real personal clue we had about who these people were.

The Other Side of This Adoption Story

So for 8 months she searched for adoption websites and entered this information on each one. There were a few times we thought we might have a match but then there was always a glaring discrepancy that kept us moving on.

Then, unbeknownst to us, on Wednesday, August 16, 2000, my 22nd birthday and just three days before the mysterious phone call, my aunt called my birth mom for my birthday. My aunt had been offering to look for me for some time. Until this point, my birth mom was reluctant. She thought, quite accurately, that when I grew up and got married my wife would press me to start looking.

But this year, she acquiesced and my aunt, using some sort of background check software that she had purchased, began to look using the limited information that my birth parents had. And so because Bonnie had spent 8 months logging my information into dozens of adoption websites it made it very easy for my aunt to find it all in just 3 days! (And of course, she likes to take the credit for finding me so fast 🙄.)

So Many Questions

Through some less than ethical means my aunt found Bonnie’s mom’s home phone number. Bonnie’s brother also named Richard, led to my aunts confusion about my relationship to my future mother in-law. Really, it was just dumb luck that she found the number at all.

She called the number and left a message. When Bonnie’s mom heard the message she called Bonnie. Bonnie told her mom to call this mysterious woman back and get some more information which she did and relayed to Bonnie.

After we had packed up the truck and were driving home I was asking Bonnie for details. She had already told me everything that her mom had told her but I kept asking the same questions over and over again hoping for some new information. She told told me my birth parents married 3 years after I was born. A year later they had a daughter.

“I have a little sister?!” I exclaimed. We had just started up the Conejo grade from Camarillo and I remember telling Bonnie that I had always wanted a little sister. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe that my birth family was still a family. It had never occurred to me that they were still together. I just assumed that any other siblings I had would be half-siblings.

My aunt gave left the number for my birth parents and said to call anytime. Being that it was midnight before I got home I didn’t call. I kind of wanted to but I also didn’t both out of nerves and exhaustion. I had a very stressful and emotional day and my adoption story had taken 22 years to get this far so what was a few more hours? So I waited until the morning.

Sunday Morning

I have never been one to pick up the phone and call someone. Since I was a teenager I have always felt like the person on the other end couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me. I didn’t like calling friends because I didn’t want to be a bother. Calling girls was traumatic. Calling a complete stranger 2 states away who may or may not have given me up for adoption was almost too much to bear. But Bonnie was there supporting and encouraging me to make the call so I did.

We talked for an hour or 2 I think and I don’t remember much of what was said. Later that evening we met my aunt and her family at The Olive Garden. They lived 40 mins away my whole life! About a month later my birth mom flew down and my sister and 2 friends drove down as soon as our parents told her the news.

Not a Normal Adoption Story

That was all 20 years ago as I write this. These past 20 years have been full of birthdays, Thanksgivings, weddings, births, and all of the other things that go along with being a family. It feels good to be welcomed back into the fold – it’s been effortless; the way things work when they’re right. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows though. There has been plenty of pain as well. Hearing stories of things that I missed out on; feeling like an interloper at times in not just 1 but now 2 families. But still, the goodness of it all far outweighs the bad. Questions have been answered and the mystery of the past has been solved allowing focus to be shifted to the future. There was a hole that is finally closing up albeit slowly.

I am happy with the way my adoption story unfolded but I have recently learned that mine is an unusual one. Most adoptions don’t end up like this. The adoptee holds great resentment and bitterness towards their birth parents. Or, when the adoptee finally finds their birth parents they reject him a second time. There are so many stories without happy endings that I feel blessed to be a rare but fortunate exception.

So Is This the End of My Adoption Story?

Realizing that this week would mark the 20th anniversary of our reunion as well as my birth parents 40th wedding anniversary and also my 42 birthday we had made plans to do a big, epic family trip someplace but then the world fell into a global pandemic and put the kibosh on our plans. I haven’t seen any of them since January.

My sister and her family had been coming to visit once-a-month for the previous 6 months and my birth parents every other month up until that point. It’s been hard these past 8 months not being able to get together. I hope that this pandemic will calm down soon we’ll all be able to get together but I rather fear it’s only going to get worse before next year. But whatever happens in the short term I look forward to another 20 years with my new old family and I’m grateful to have had almost as much time with them, thus far, as we were apart. So, no, this is not the end of my adoption story, not by a long shot.