finding her, part 2

when i was about 13, i started to search for my mother on my own.  i had a piece of paper that came with me, and one of the things it mentioned was that she was a competitive swimmer.  i started calling all the local high schools to see who had a pool.  i then went to each school's library and looked at old yearbooks, really searching for my face in one of school's swimmers faces.

i also tried calling every junior and senior in each yearbook, asking if they remember any of the girls getting pregnant in high school.

by the time i was 18, i was dating a cop, and i tried looking up police records on all those same people.  a big part of me wondered if she had broken any laws, because i assumed she must have been a derelict if she could just abandon her own baby.

by the time i was working at the radio station, i was sort of depleted of ideas, but i still never stopped hoping and daydreaming.

i felt the usual flicker of hope......the possibility of finding her was still there.....but at the same time, i had the safety of knowing i would never really find her.  right???  i mean, it had never happened before, even with eight years of searching frantically on my own.  i thought i had wished "hard enough" for it to happen, but it hadn't.  so deep down inside i had a "knowing" that it was never going to happen.

so, the more i stared at the information for this lady who searched for people missing through adoption, the more i thought, "why not?"  so i called the number listed.

i talked to a lady named sandy who told me that she was a first mother and had found her daughter.  i didn't end up booking her for the radio show, but i did book her for my own search.

my immediate thought was that i had to tell my mother.  she was in full support, as was my father.  they were also concerned and skeptical, being that my adoption was in the tightly sealed state of ny.

still, i sat at my desk for the next several weeks waiting for the phone to ring.  i also called sandy here and there, asking how my search was coming along.  "still working on it!"

i was convinced she'd never find my other mother either.  until one day when my phone rang.....

"jeni?  we've located your mother."

TBC............