

A while ago, while rummaging in my file drawer, I came across The Folder. This is an old dog-eared manila job stuffed full of papers, notes scribbled in and outside. It's the folder I started when I started to look for my birth mother and the son I gave up. You remember the story of my teenage heartbreak and pregnancy, you'll find it here.
Anyway, The Folder. Several years ago, I decided it was time to make the search, to see what information I could find about my birth family, and reconnect if that was in the stars. I put my name into all the Triad search websites, wrote the requisite letter to the agency in New Orleans, started poking and prodding around. I received non-essential information provided by my birth mother at the time of her confinement in St. Vincent's (I used to think that terminology for pregnant women was so sexist, but this time, it truly fit...) I found out her ethnic heritage, some sketchy family information, and that was about it.
And then I found Fran. Fran was a private investigator, who for a fee, attained my adoption papers and Christopher's, and read them to me over the phone. I got names, birth dates, cities of origin, more family details. I was set. Or not. I hemmed, hawed and generally procrastinated about it. You see, on one side of the equation, I was sure. I had a plan, a timetable, some good energy. I knew the circumstances and I knew more or less where my son came from, and where he'd be coming from now. On the other side, the antecedent was a blank. I never felt energy, didn't know what had happened to this woman who gave me life and then gave me up.
As a child, I fantasized about my origins -- I used to imagine a long limo pulling up in front of our modest New Orleans suburban house, and Elizabeth Taylor emerging to claim me as her own lost child. Or Julie Andrews. I alternated the two, mainly because with my dark blonde pixie cut and blue eyes, people would say I resembled Ms. Andrews. Liz Taylor was much more glamourous and dramatic. The Liz fantasies I usually used when I was pissed off over something my mother wanted me to do or not do (i.e. cleaning my room or hitting my brother) and I felt my style cramped by this OUTRAGEOUS maternal request. I'd show her, I'd be whisked off to Hollywood with my REAL mother (Liz or Julie) and NEVER have to clean my room or SEE that horrid evil little brother EVER again. Obviously, that worked out well. My mother never knew just how close she came to losing me FOREVER and continued the raising, nurturing and loving blissfully unaware.
I still have that faded Hollywood fantasy to draw from now, although I love my mom and wouldn't have had it any other way, limo notwithstanding. Perhaps I dwell on the negative aspect of the search now more than I did as a child. I mean, what if she's not up to my fantasies? What if she doesn't want to know me? What if she's terribly ill? What if she's crazy? What if she's dead? I think that if I'd had any indication that she searched for me (and I have left huge drifts of breadcrumbs wherever I could to facilitate that search) I would feel differently.
Now that I work at the library, I have more genealogy resources at my disposal. As a matter of fact, the genealogy room is at my back at the reference desk. Just behind me is a vast treasure trove of public record info, computers with search engines and databases and the like. I've made a few haphazard stabs at looking around, and the only results kinda scared me. I found a woman, approximately my birth mother's age, mentioned in an article because she had a mentally ill son in trouble in the prison system in California. I poked a bit more, but her background information didn't quite jive with the information I had already. Talk about mixed feelings there, disappointed that the search must go on, but relieved that I don't have a crazy half-brother in jail being abused.
I still hold on to The Folder. It has grown fatter slowly over the years, my mother contributing things she's come across - a wedding announcement from a bride she thought looked like me, some phone numbers of people with my birth mother's last name from her home town, notes I've written as I've looked around. Perhaps one day, my phone will ring, or I'll answer the door, and I'll be able to chunk it. For now, I'm just a little haunted by it all.