The Young and the Restless, Real Life

I have always joked about my life being like a soap opera, but I never knew how true it would turn out to be. A lot of people are very careful about what they post on their blog because they are worreied about people at their job knowing about their personal lives or people in their personal lives finding out about things that they do in the dark. I have always been pretty open, and the one time that I decided to go private was because I was tired of getting these angry, petty, anonymous messages from God knows who. At any rate... I say all of that to say that some of you may disagree with my decision to publish this post, but oh well. My blog, my rules... damn the consequences. I told you last week that I, in my aimless wanderings through the world wide web, uncovered the identity of my birth mother. What I didn't give you was the details, so here you are.

We'll call her Maureen. In 2001 she set up a profile on adoption.com looking for the child that she had given up 30 years ago. The profile listed her whole name (maiden and current), her date of birth, the name of the hospital where she gave bith, the city where the adoption took place, the name that she gave me (Lauren Grace), and my birthdate. I knew from the minute I saw those details that I had found the right person because everything on the profile matched the information that I already knew. There was a link to contact Maureen by email, so before I realized what I was doing, I had drafted a quick email and pressed the "send" button. I was a little apprehensive because even though it was clear that she had been looking for me at one point, I didn't know the last time she had checked the site for an update and whether or not the email address was still valid. But I waited... for about 12 hours. The next morning I had an email from my birth mother... yeah, get with that.

There are so many details and so much to tell, so I will try my best to summarize the saga. After she gave me a few more details about herself (her height, the fact that she is white and her daughter's father was Black, her occupation, blah, blah blah), we pretty much confirmed that Maureen is my birth mother and I am the child that she gave up for adoption. Maureen was 20 years old and on active duty in the military in Virginia. Her family lived out of state and she didn't know anyone in the area where she was stationed. She met a man who was eight years older than her and fell very hard, very fast. John was also active duty military stationed at the same base, and they began to date. He was married with a young son and was also helping his wife to raise her son from a previous relationship. Apparently they had a very tumultuous relationship, frequently separating and getting back together. When he met Maureen, John and his wife had just decided to divorce, so he and my birth mother moved in together off base. This was in December, so since I was born in September, I guess you can figure out that she got pregnant very quickly. Three months later when she discovered that she was pregnant, John came home one day and said that his wife had called and said that she was pregnant. She hadn't known it at the time that they decided to separate and divorce, but she had been to the doctor and it was confirmed. John felt like this meant that he was supposed to move back home and try to salvage his marriage. So Maureen felt that in a competition between her and John's wife, she would never come out on top. She decided not to tell him that she was pregnant, and because she couldn't afford to live off the base by herself, she moved back into the barracks. Her family was in the midwest, and she knew that they would never have approved of her dating a married Black man and getting pregnant out of wedlock. Maureen decided to have her baby and give her up for adoption without telling anyone. Apparently at one point, John suspected that she was pregnant, but she denied it and nothing more ever came of it. Later that year John's wife gave birth to a second son, and they divorced three years later. Maureen, I guess through mutual friends and acquaintances, kept up with what was going on his life, but they never reconnected. She got married 11 years later and relocated to another state. She doesn't know where John is now or what kind of family he has (whether he has remarried, had more children, etc.).

So that, my friends, is the story of how I came to be. They say that there are three sides to every story: his side, her side, and what really happened, so I am very interested to hear what John has to say about the whole thing. Maureen has not told me his real name either or any other identifying information about him because like I said, he does not know that the two of them conceived a child together. She's supposed to be trying to find him so that she can tell him the complete story. Yeah... good luck with that.