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It has been said that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. This photograph is one of the first photos ever taken of my son and I – and I treasure it and others that have followed!
Our First Contact
“Jan? It’s Chris” – those were the first words my son ever spoke to me. I missed the “mama” stage with my son; I was never around for him to call me that as a toddler. Nor, was I there for his teen years when having his mother around was probably the last person he cared to have around. Instead, he was nearly 32 years old before we spoke for the first time – and he did not call me “Mom”. That name was reserved for the mother who raised him, so, he called me by my first name. However, the first time I heard him call me, “Jan”, I melted like butter in the sun on a hot summer day. When I heard that warm, deep voice speak to me for the very first time, a flush of excitement surged through me. I thought to myself, “My son, that was my son who just said my name.” I was overjoyed.
Our first words were spoken to each other on the telephone after the agency that had handled my son’s adoption found me through a search. Within weeks after the agency had received all the necessary waivers, we spoke for the first time in our whole lives! How monumental is that?
Want to know what that first call was like – the most anticipated and longed for phone call of my entire life? It was without reservation truly amazing! Warm, joyful, enthusiastic – it was the best phone call I had ever had. Though I did not have a great deal of time to anticipate it – less than two weeks, I instinctively had a good feeling that our call would go well. I hoped that my son would have a warm and generous heart like his birth father. He did, and for that, I was incredibly thankful.
We chatted for a bit and then in one fell swoop, I launched into the circumstances of his birth and why I felt compelled to relinquish him to adoption and give him to strangers to raise. It was of utmost importance to me that he not wonder an instant longer whether I had loved and wanted him. He said not a word while I hurriedly explained and spoke to him from my heart. I barely gave him a chance to say a word as I gushed out the “story”.
When finally I stopped he said, “Well, now what would you like to know about me?” I blurted out “Everything”. He laughed, a hearty wonderful chuckle that I would grow to love and look forward to hearing. Next, he told me about his life for awhile. We talked about ordinary things – his schooling, the family he grew up with, the states we had both lived in. As I turned out, we both had lived in several different states over the past decades. Except for the brief time I remained in the state where he was born and had grown up though, never had we lived in the same state. Chris had lived in the South for several years, where I had spent a great deal of my life. However, he had not lived in any of the same states that I had. Just in the past few years before he found me, he had moved back to the area where he had been born and grown up. He had decided to settle down there for good.
One of the most important facts that he shared with me during our first telephone call was that he had a happy childhood. I was relieved and terribly grateful to know that he had. I had so hoped that would be the case. The time flew by quickly as we chatted; we spoke for two hours. After we hung up, I was beaming as I kept recalling the details of our first conversation.
