Growing up Adopted

It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest evening in late summer when they finally got the call. "Mr. and Mrs. Lee, you are about to be the parents of a beautiful baby girl!" My mother was in the kitchen knitting a yellow jumper and my dad yelled to her from the hallway, "Lynn! Get in the car. It's time! Our daughter is on the way." They were over the moon. After nine years of trying for a baby, they finally decided to adopt. The moment they had been waiting for was finally happening.

Upon arrival, my mom burst through the doors demanding to see her baby. The paperwork hadn't even been drawn up yet. I wouldn't legally be theirs for another 3 days. That didn't matter to her. The nurse said she could take them back to see me, but warned my parents to be that I was a fussy little thing. She never said they could hold me. My mother didn't care. As soon as she was in the room where I lay, she scooped me up in her arms.

"You can't do that! She isn't yours yet!", the nurse nervously yelled

It was as if Lynn didn't hear her, or care....I was her daughter. As the story goes, she told the nurse what she could do with the rules, and proceeded to hold me close to her heart. The staff in the room said it was the first time I had stopped crying since being born only hours ago. My biological mother refused to see or hold me before they took me out of the delivery room. They said I cried and screamed as if I was aware I was coming into this world unwanted. Even now, forty years later, I wonder if they might have been right about that.

Fast forward to my fourth birthday. We lived in Edmonds Washington, a quaint coastal town, on Cherry Lane. Our next door neighbor Kathy had two children around my age and they were invited to my party. She had a very sweet daughter and an older boy who was troubled.

Her son Arin was a hellion and was always picking on me. On this particular day he decided to destroy our plumbing system by flushing several rolls of toilette paper down our toilette, flooding the entire first floor of our house. The destruction he caused didn't satisfy him, so he decided to come after me next. He chased me with a cap gun that looked quite real and I ended slicing my leg on a broken sprinkler head.

As I crumpled to the floor clutching my bleeding shin, he laughed at me and said I deserved it for being adopted. Little did he know, despite being 3 years older, that I knew all about being adopted. To me, it was almost like my super power. This was the first time anyone had ever made adoption seem like a bad thing.

Being only four, I plainly explained to him what it meant to be adopted. I told him that my mommy had gotten a phone call from the place where all the extra special babies were born. She was given an invitation to come and pick out any baby that she wanted, and she had picked me. I told him he wasn't special at all because his mommy wasn't given a choice and was stuck with him whether she loved him or not. Proof that my mommy must love me more than his mommy loved him. Arin burst into tears and ran home as fast as his fat little legs could carry him.

Seconds later the phone rings. It was Kathy. I was inside getting my leg cleaned up and bandaged and I could hear her muffled shrieks coming out of the phone. She was laughing hysterically. "You wont believe what your daughter just told me son...."

I don't remember getting in trouble or even corrected for saying this to him. Maybe that kind of solidified my idea of what adoption was for a while. I truly thought I was chosen out of a room full of special babies, who were born for extra special moms, who got to choose whatever baby they wanted. I had never even pondered that I was born to a woman who didn't want me in the first place.

Another year passes by and my parents marriage fails. At first they separate and live a few towns apart. Its weird being shuttled back and forth between two houses, and I become a very confused child. My belief in being a special baby for special parents is destroyed and I begin to feel like their failing marriage is partly my fault....possibly even entirely my fault.

At age five I am spending night after night awake wondering why my family is falling apart. I start school that fall, and for the first time, I get to observe the other kids in my class react with their families. I realize that my mom never comes to help in our classroom like the other moms (because she had to work to support us.) She's never happy when she comes to pick me up from school. I don't have brothers or sisters like most of the other kids do. My dad never seems happy to play with me on the weekends. I start to feel sad most of the time.

Another year passes and my parents officially divorce. My mother takes a job in California, and we move miles away from home to start a new life. As I grow up and learn where babies really come from, I am faced with a horrifying reality. My real mom never wanted me. I wasn't chosen. I wasn't special. I'm not even related to my own family. At age six I feel entirely alone in this world.

Signs of distress start to surface shortly after I make this observation, but at that time nobody was talking about children and their mental health. Before starting school, I could already read, write and do simple math. I was expected to be in the top tier of my class. Instead, my performance begins to plummet and my social skills aren't developing as they should. I am consumed with feeling unwanted, unloved, and I can't make sense of it.

By the third grade I know a little more about adoption and I start to ask my parents questions about my biological mother. Who was she? What was her name? Where was she from? Did they ever get to meet her, and so on. They assure me they have no idea who she was, never met her or knew her name. They told me it was a private adoption and all the records were sealed. They couldn't tell me anymore information even if they wanted to.

I must have accepted those answers for a while, because I stopped asking questions. But something in me told me there was more to the story. I was consumed with curiosity and determined to find the truth about my adoption story. There had to be more information. They had to sign papers. Those papers must be somewhere. What did they say?

It wasn't until 1992, when I was age 12, that I would find the first clue and embark on what would be a 25 year journey that would eventually lead me to finding my family. I will never forget this day as long as my brain still functions.

It was a humid, sticky summer day in Dallas Texas. My dad had moved there for a job two years prior, and I spent my summers and school holidays there to fulfill the joint custody arrangements. At this point I felt unloved and unwanted by the world, but most of all by my parents. I was sad and angry for ever being born.

My dad had left for work early and the lady who watched me during the day hadn't arrived yet. I decided to take it upon myself and break into his home office and ransack the place. He had huge file cabinets lining the walls, one of which was always locked. Well, not for long. Don't underestimate the tween-age angst of a girl on a mission.

I had that cabinet open in no time. I carefully went through each labeled file, but I couldn't find anything obvious. Crap. On closer inspection I realized that there were a few folders that seemed very thin or possibly even empty, but I decided to look through them anyway. BINGO.

In an unmarked folder there was a receipt and a half torn airline ticket with a hardly legible post-it note attached. The only words I could make out on the note were my name, and bio-mom. The half torn ticket had a name on it too. Cooper, Crystal. Her destination wasn't listed. But she had flown out of Seattle to go back to wherever she came from. My father had purchased her ticket. The ticket had her name on it. I had been lied to.

The emotion I felt in that moment is indescribable. I think I felt every emotion on the human spectrum of emotions simultaneously. That still doesn't come close to describing what it actually felt like, but I knew my life was forever changed in that instant. That would be a lot for anyone to process, but for a twelve year old girl? It was like a donkey kick to the essence of my being. My whole life felt like a lie. I was an outsider to my own existence.

My dad had just gotten dial-up internet for the house. This was back in the day when less than half of the people I knew had internet in their own houses. I wasted zero time. I got on the computer and looked up every Crystal Cooper in the country. that I could find. I had printed a stack of pages of phone numbers and addresses. I spent the summer calling each one and checking them off list.

I knew I would be in deep trouble when my dad got home, but I didn't care. I wanted to know why he lied to me. Why had he said he had never known her name? Telling the truth was a BIG thing in my family, and finding out my dad (and mom) had been lying to me my entire life was a hard pill to swallow. I felt betrayed.

After a very intense discussion I was able to extract a bit more information from him. Where was she from? He couldn't remember for sure, but he thought Kentucky or Tennessee. That's also when I was told that it was her wish to keep the adoption private and that she never wanted to be found. He also told me that if I pursued the issue I would only end up being more hurt than I already was and advised me to drop it and move on.

I simply couldn't accept that. So, I continued my search. Years of internet searches tuned up fruitless. A few times I had decided it just wasn't worth it. I'd put my search on hold, but I never truly gave up on my desire to find her.

Another surge of interest came when I turned 18 knowing (thinking) I could gain access to my "records". I called the doctor who delivered me, the hospital where I was born, the county records department. All were dead ends. My birth certificate listed my current parents as my patents because both of my biological parents had forfeited all parental rights. I fell into another pit of depression and despair.

Over a decade went by without me actively searching. At this point I felt like it was hopeless. I was highly discouraged from hiring a private investigator in the scenario that she would reject any contact with me if I succeeded in finding her. It was a really dark time in my life for several reasons, but this feeling of being unwanted and unloved from my first breath of life was nearly unbearable.

It's 2015, and I am 35 years old. The buzz over DNA testing kits is everywhere. I had been considering it for a while, but my self esteem was so low that I wasn't sure I even wanted to find her anymore. What if my dad was right and she would reject me if I happened to find her. I didn't think I could handle it. But I had never been a quitter. Somewhere in my soul there was a little crack of light that encouraged me to press on.

In the winter of 2015 before I finally gave in and did a test. It seemed to take FOREVER to get the results back. I resolved not to get my hopes up and decided that it would be interesting to know my genetic origins at the very least. If nothing else, I could finally tell people what nationality was or what my origins were.

The results came back and there were no significant matches. This was one of the first tests on the market. It was for The Human Genome Project. The technology was still in its infancy. It was interesting to see that instead of being Scandinavian like everyone had always guessed, I was actually mostly Scottish, English, Irish and French. I guess that was better than knowing absolutely nothing about myself.

It would be 2 more years before DNA testing became more main stream. I had been researching two different companies offering DNA testing, and I decided to give it another try. I picked the one I thought to be more in line with the information I was after and sent in a sample. The wait seemed like eternity, but to my complete shock and surprise, this time I had a close relative match. The test suggested this person could be an uncle or first cousin.

I was out of my mind with excitement. This person was open to receiving messages, and I did not delay! I sent one, and then another....and another. No response. I had prepared myself for this possibility. I knew that my sudden appearance may not be a welcome one. After several months and nearly 100 messages, I stopped trying to contact this person, whoever he may be..... but I DID get to find out some information about my distant family tree. Honestly, I was excited just to know that someone directly related to me was out there somewhere. But.... I wanted to know more.

Finally, around my 38th birthday in 2018, I decided to submit my DNA to the other company I had researched. I figured it was a shot in the dark, but what the hell. Six months went by without any significant matches. There were a slew of 3rd-6th cousins, but that was about it. I figured my search had finally come to an end, and I was happy that I had given it my best efforts.

I kept the app on my phone so I could check back periodically, but I had honestly put the thought of finding any close relatives at the back of my mind. I had actually exchanged messages with some distant relatives, and I assumed that was the closest I would ever get to finding family.

It was around Thanks Giving on my lunch break when I realized I had a new notification from the app. I really didn't think much of it, but I opened it up to my profile page out of idle curiosity. When I saw what it was, I nearly peed my pants. YOU HAVE A CLOSE RELATIVE MATCH. It was a young woman and we had 24.7% DNA in common. The message said she was likely a half sibling.

HOLY !@#$! I could not believe my eyes. I couldn't even process what I was reading. I had a sister! Seriously? Me? I had a sister??? Her profile was private, but I sent her a request to share information and contact her. I assumed it would be similar to last time and didn't expect her to accept.

To my utter astonishment, I got a ping not more than 5 minutes after hitting send. She was interested in sharing information and she wanted to exchange messages! To say that I had no words would be an understatement. It was like my body had been a glacier for almost 4o years that instantly began to melt. I absolutely could not believe it.

By the end of the day I found out that she was my biological father's child. The entire time growing up I hadn't even imagined finding my father's side of the family. She told me I had one older and one younger half brother, they had 6 kids between them, and my older brother's kids were both adopted. I was blown away. Plus, she was incredibly nice, hilariously funny, and we had the same favorite foods! This was the day that changed everything, the day I had been waiting for that I thought would never come.

Fast forward to 2021, and I have been back to Kentucky to meet everyone twice. I have formed a bond with my older brother that has changed my outlook on life, and I am a God Mother to his oldest son. Life is definitely a journey, and now I know I won't ever have to travel the road alone. I no longer feel like an outsider but an active participant in my own life. Finding my family has transformed my outlook on life. I know how lucky I am to have found a happy ending to my decades long search.

In my darkest hour I could still feel the little light in my soul guiding me and whispering to never give up looking. If you've enjoyed my story or know someone who might be inspired by it, please consider leaving a small donation so I can continue on my journey to eventually find my mother. Thank you for taking the time to read about my experience.