This was originally written during the search of a person whose natural mother recently passed away due to complications of Alzheimer’s. This is being posted to the blog with the author’s permission.

I continue to believe that most people, when given the opportunity, will reconsider their automatically held, unexamined biases and opinions. If you have not considered the rights of adoptees before now, please take this opportunity to do so.

I am Mary's daughter. Mary has a granddaughter and three great granddaughters she has never met. Four generations of women in my family have been directly affected by the prevailing attitudes of our society.
As a parent and a grandparent, I realize we constantly reinforce a child's identity through family identity. My daughter looks so much like her father and her father's father. I see in my granddaughters' faces their known relatives' features, and wonder which of their features are inherited from their unknown relatives. I compare their behavior to that of my daughter at the same age. Two inherited their paternal grandfather's hair; one has my eyes (which I have recently learned are Mary's eyes). This constant reminder of the heritage of my descendants has taught me how little I know about myself. Adopted at age 5, I lived 40 years with no acknowledgment by anyone else of my existence before that age, and no knowledge of myself before that age. Therefore, as I learned only recently, a basic part of my being lived with the belief that I had no existence before I was adopted.

When I read my birth mother's story (in public records) of separation from her husband, and the loss of her toddler (me) and infant (my brother) children, I began to see the other side of adoption, the suffering of the birth mother. I was no longer an adoptee alone. I realized I am a member of a separated family.

I cannot imagine the loss felt by a mother forced by poverty to give up her children, but I can now empathize with Mary, and see her as a human being who did what she had to do at the time. Learning of her circumstances has only helped me. I no longer see adoption only from my sole viewpoint. I now have a frame of reference that is broader than my own experience.