Member-only story
The Mother I’d Never Met
Finding my birth mother was easier than I thought. The real work happened next.
It is a rainy November day in Hannibal, Missouri. Storm clouds hover darkly over the small river city, threatening to spit snow. I sit hunched inside a tiny, soundproofed room at the Hannibal Public Library, oblivious to the inclement weather brewing outside. In front of me, on a large round table, a stack of eight musty high school yearbooks — 1968 to 1976 — wait to cough out their dry bits of history.
I pore through the pages of each, slowly at first, and then with increasing anxiety.
Suddenly, in the last yearbook in the stack, they appear: my eyes. Smack in the middle of the graduating class of ’74, there are my eyes, my mouth, my nose. Except the face belongs to someone I’ve never met; a girl named Cathy Higgins.
I re-examine the small, blotchy, black-and-white face with disbelief. No, this woman doesn’t look like me. She’s too thin, her face is too long, her hair isn’t right. Still, there’s something. I stare at the tiny features until they melt along with the page, and my disbelief slowly turns into breathlessness, then to something more like love. I can’t help but love her, because she’s mine. I don’t doubt it for a second.
Immediately, almost against my will, I am drawn head-over-heels into the search. How can I not find this woman who gave birth to me 23 years ago? More importantly, how can I find her? This picture, this concrete piece of evidence, is my first clue, but I am nowhere near the end of the trail.
As I examine the tiny face again I wonder, “Where is she now? How will I find her?”
My search began two years ago at the Audrain County Division of Family Services, the agency through which I was adopted. At age 18, all adoptees are legally allowed to view their “open” adoption files containing information about their parents that the state considers non-identifying. I didn’t muster the courage to look until I was 21.
The laws governing non-identifying information vary widely from state to state. In some states, adoptees are given everything except the name, Social Security number, and birth date of their birth parents. I hoped this would be the case.
