An Introduction

Hi. I'm Rachel. Among many other things, I'm adopted. I've known this all my life; I remember reading a childrens' book called "Why Was I Adopted" with my mom and dad when I was still in the under-three-feet-tall stage. All my life there has been this mysterious woman that lurked in the back of my brain. She gave birth to me, and gave me up--not because she didn't love me, but because she loved me more than I could know but couldn't give me the life she wanted to provide. Nineteen years later, I decided to meet her.

I'd been asking to meet my birthmother since I can remember. My parents told me that I could meet her when I turned eighteen, but toward my later teenage years, the curiosity lessened. Yet the summer of my nineteenth year, something in me wanted to know where I'd come from. Something in me wanted to know the person who loved me enough to give me to people she knew could take better care of me.

Fast forward to the present.

My parents always told my birthmother, Kathy, that they'd contact her first to make sure she was okay with meeting me. Earlier this week, I drove home from my late-night pit orchestra gig to find my parents waiting for me in the driveway. "We got a phone call tonight," they said.

It was Kathy. She wanted to meet me.

All of the sudden I was flooded with this sense that something entirely new was opening itself up. If I could put it in picture form, it'd look like this: My brain has always been a very large and very cluttered room, with paint splattered across the walls and plastic architecture for toy racecars and music fluttering visually through the air and lots and lots and lots of books. But all of the sudden, I'd discovered that the eastern wall was really just a giant door. All I had to do was push it open, peek my head in, see what's inside. I didn't know how big the room I was looking into was, nor what was inside it or how long I'd want to stay there...or if I wanted to knock down the wall and make my room-of-a-head even bigger.

Today, I talked to Kathy on the phone. Suddenly, I'm becoming an experiment of Nature vs. Nurture. We have very similar likes and dislikes...dogs, reading to escape, talking to strangers...I get this feeling that there's a part of me that I'm going to explore in her.

I don't expect Kathy to be a mother to me. My mother is the one who changed my diapers at all hours of the night and came to all of those concerts and ballet recitals and Tae Kwon Do testings. My mother's the one who, as I write this, I can hear snoring loudly from all the way across the second floor of this house.

Welcome to the journey--of mother, daughter, and birthmom.