A way to finally search...

A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click. ~Author Unknown

They say a journey starts with a single step...for me it was a single click! How do I go about finding the son that I relinquished to the adoption system? Did I have a "right" to do that? After all, I do believe that on most of the legal papers for adoption the words used are "gives up parental rights". Even though he had never left my heart, what was I really to him? I was the woman who gave birth to him...I did not raise him, I did not comfort him, I did not watch him grow. So what right did I have to search him out?

I use to wonder if I would somehow recognize him if we passed on the street. Would my heart call out his name to me. When he would of been college age I remember that young men use to come to the door selling encyclopedias. I would talk with them a little longer...give them a glass of water or lemonade...even though I knew I was not going to buy the encyclopedias. I would look at them and wonder if it might be him...as they walked away I hoped that they would turn around and tell me that they were my son, but that never happened.

I told myself that I only wanted to know if he was okay...that he had a good life...that I had made the right choice, and that he was fine with everything in his life. I told myself that I would be able to live with that...that to impose myself on him...to disrupt his family was something that I could not and would not do. I told myself that he already had a mother...that I was not the one who held his hand...took his temperature when he was sick and comforted him...I did not take him to school functions...or help him prepare for college. I was not there for him....someone else was. Maybe he wouldn't want to know me at all, but I would accept that I told myself as long as I knew he was healthy and happy. He was always with me, safe in my heart, where I continued to love him...I had 3 days with him...I always loved him....and so I started clicking.

I searched over and over in so many configurations his parents names...the ones that I thought I had seen on the final adoption papers so long ago, questioning myself if I had made those names up.  I was told that they were Doctors, I knew that they lived in the New York City area, how hard could this be? This was a time of the new technology...you could supposedly find every thing and anything on the Internet. I searched for the name that I had given him except I used their last name. I came up against one brick wall after another. I signed up as a member of ALMA  ( Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association.) I wrote an article about searching for USA Today, from which I received lots of people answering hoping that I was their mother. None of which were.  I would search during my depression every November...I would search every month of May (for Mother's Day)...I would search for hours...for days...for weeks at a time. I signed up at various adoption sites, I composed letters to the lawyer (which I never did send)...I wrote poems and journal entries and I kept the faith alive in my heart. I had whispered to him that we would be together again some day but, it was so disheartening.  With each disappointment of finding nothing I would suddenly shut down once again and stop the search. It hurt, it brought up so many of those raw emotions and I was not getting anywhere. I would wait and start again....it was a circle of searching that I did for many years.

Life shifted and changed for me in 2008....