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My twin sister Jackie and I were placed for adoption in 1970 through Lutheran Child and Family Services in Illinois. As was typical at the time, ours was a closed adoption. It remained closed until 2008 when I needed a family medical history. I had never planned to find my birth family. While, at various points in our childhood, my sister and I wondered aloud about the woman who gave birth to us, our wonderings stayed as that. Perhaps because I grew up with a biological other, I never felt the compulsion to find my birth family that many adoptees do. I never felt as if part of myself was missing.

At the end of the summer of 2008, I contacted the Confidential Intermediary Service of Illinois. By early 2009, I knew the part of myself that I never thought I would know. Our birth parents were alive and well, and married, living now in Colorado.  Less than a year after my sister and I were adopted, our birth mother had a son, our full biological brother, who lives in the same town in Colorado as his parents do.

In July 2009, my sister and I met our biological brother for the first time, and in September of that year, I also met my birth parents for the first time.  In August 2011, my sister and I introduced our mother to our birthparents in the lobby of a hotel in Valparaiso, Indiana, steps from the university my birth mother had attended, along with two friends who later became my parents’ caseworkers at Lutheran Child and Family Services.  I traveled to my birth parent’s home in Colorado in February 2012 and saw them again in April of that year while I was in Denver for an adoption conference.  In August 2012, my sister and I journeyed to North Dakota, to the family farm where my birth mother grew up.  That was the last time we saw one another.

But the journey continues.

–Jenny