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.
