How I Finally Met My Mother

I refuse to scatter her ashes

An ocean beside us. An ocean between us.

My biological mother and I left footprints in the same sand but were lost to each other. The riptide of the closed adoption system forever pulled us apart, even on our shared shore.

Born in Chicago and relinquished at birth, I was adopted at five weeks. I’m careful to tell the story in that order now. Adoption stems from loss. This is the part society doesn’t like to talk about and prefers instead to start with the happy homecoming of adoption. I no longer discount that loss. Loss was with me from my first breath and was a constant, if often quiet, companion.

To be chosen, one must first be unchosen, surrendered.

Chosen is the wrong verb anyway. They were next in line, as was I. Random chance dropped me into a loving family, but it was just that, a stroke of luck. I was fortunate to have a “good adoption.” I’m told I screamed bloody murder on that first day but quickly acclimated. I loved my new family and clung for dear life to them. My paper parents and siblings felt real to me, though I never quite felt real to myself. Had I even been born, or did I just materialize? Where was that woman that brought me into the world?

I grew up knowing next to nothing about her. My adoptive parents were given only scribbled statistics from the adoption agency: sixteen, black hair, brown eyes. No name, ethnicity, or medical history. She was but a concept to me, and I couldn’t risk thinking otherwise. I assumed she didn’t want me. I was sure she’d forgotten all about me. I tried to do the same, but the thought of her haunted me.

After college, I couldn’t seem to settle. I spent the next decade floating around New York City, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and a string of elsewheres. Finally, in 2002, I settled in Venice Beach. I moved two blocks away from her, though, of course, I didn’t know it. Nor did she. We never met.

When you have no backstory, the stories you tell yourself take over. I didn’t know I was an unreliable narrator. I believed everything I told myself.

In truth, she had never forgotten me. She looked for me, even hired a private detective, but that search proved fruitless. This was before affordable consumer DNA tests, before social media, and Illinois, like most states, sealed everything. She gave me one name, my parents gave me another, and never the twain should meet. I didn’t comprehend the depth of the secrecy, didn’t even know I’d had another name.

I assumed if she wanted to find me, she would. I shrugged off suggestions that I search for someone who’d tossed me aside. But if I’m being honest, I was terrified — afraid of further rejection by both her and my adoptive family. My adoptive parents often encouraged me to petition the court, if only for more medical records, but some part of me didn’t trust them, didn’t trust anyone. That was a lesson learned before I uttered my first word. Distrust was burned into my soul.

Still, something took me to that golden coast and convinced me to sign a lease on the very street where she lived. We roamed the same neighborhood unknowingly for years. I wonder now if we brushed shoulders at the market or passed each other on the boardwalk. Did I fill in her footprints with mine in our shared sand? How could I have missed this mirror image, this generational doppelganger? It’s as if we moved in stereo but never in synch. So close. Bad timing must be genetic.

She looked too soon. I looked too late. Illinois changed its law allowing adoptees access to their Original Birth Certificates in 2010. She died six months before the law went into effect. Had I been first in line (and I found out later there really was a line of adoptees waiting for this information), I’d still have been too late. I didn’t look for another nine years.

I was unaware the law had changed, only stumbled upon the information when researching something for my adoptive mother on the Illinois government website. I still hesitated. Printed out the form and set it aside. For almost three years. I finally sent in the form a year after my adoptive mother died, after I returned to writing and met an author who’d also surrendered a child to adoption. I now believe it was grief over losing my adoptive mother that brought a long-buried grief for my first mother to the surface. It forced my hand. I ordered my original birth certificate and began a search in 2019.

I found a grave. I say this figuratively, for there was no headstone to visit, no obituary to clip. She’d not been buried but cremated. What I found was a social security death notice, definitive proof of her death. Fortunately, I also found proof of her life in my much younger half-brother and her longtime best friend.

Time and tide washed that mother from me forever, but my story finally had a prologue. My life didn’t begin “the day we brought you home.” I didn’t just drop out of the sky. I had a mother, ancestors, and a family tree that existed long before I was grafted onto another. I could see the faint chalk outline on my supposed blank slate of a beginning. I met someone I shared blood with and met people my first mother knew and loved. I learned she’d not thrown me away but had no choice, no other option in 1969.

She’d been shamed and sent away to a “home for unwed mothers,” all but forced into signing relinquishment papers.

The state and society would likely say it was for my own good. All of it for the good of “the baby.” I may have agreed as recently as just a few years ago. Now though, I see things differently. I think the shame my mother carried seeped into me. I believe being denied my own origin story poisoned my relationship with my new family. My adoptive mother and I were close, but there was always something, an impediment. Scar tissue.

That first cut was deep. I think having my own birth records could’ve healed me. Now I’ve lost both mothers, the one I never knew and the one I never let know me. Though I am so thankful for the information I’ve uncovered, I ache for both of them.

Last summer, my first mother’s longtime best friend, an ageless, ethereal, beachy blonde, met me for lunch.

“I brought your mom,” Bestie said and handed me a small mahogany cremation keepsake box. A spiral-haired, prettier, more delicate version of me beamed from its built-in frame. She was twenty-something in the photo, not the age she’d died, but the age Bestie said she’d want to be remembered. I laughed, then stared in awe. My first mother and I had the same broad, toothy smile, the same mole just to the side of our nose, hers to the left, mine to the right. Bestie called it a beauty mark. I could finally see that, indeed, it was. She fanned her face, waving off tears.

“You look so much like her. Like a mirror.”

I’d always hated looking in the mirror, had always felt myself a reflection of no one. I had always craved context.

Bestie said, “I live next to the ocean but never scattered her ashes. I think I was waiting for you.” She and my half-brother had each taken a portion of the ashes. She wanted me to have hers. She was reuniting us the only way she knew. I crumbled into her arms, sobbing for a mother I’d never and always known. I thanked her and swore I’d scatter the ashes myself. It was a promise I thought I meant, though it never felt real to me. Part of me always knew that promise was a lie. I put her on the mantel, next to the ashes of my parents, though part of me thought their spirits had already met. Part of me thinks they all guided me from beyond.

I live in another city now, but along that same ocean, that ocean we once shared.

I took that pretty little box filled with my pretty little mother to the beach one day. I sat with my toes in the sand, skin goose-fleshing as water pooled and receded around me. I watched the waves break and felt a warmth beyond the sun. No, I thought, I’ve only just found you. I can’t let you go. I thought of the years I’d felt thrown away, scattered into the world. I worried her spirit might misinterpret my actions as not a tribute but a relinquishment. I couldn’t take that chance.

Ashes unscattered, I carried my first mother home.

I whispered a solemn vow to the ghost of she, now forever the ghost of me.

“I will never let another ocean come between us.”

A version of this story appeared in the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates Summer 2023 Newsletter.