Abortion attempt survivor. Voice for the voiceless.

Ever since I can remember, I knew that I was adopted. Like a badge of honor, I have carried that distinction with me throughout my life, proud to share with others that my parents found me so special that they invited me into their lives, their family. That pride of being an adopted child has not waned over the course of time. On the contrary, time and maturity have given me the opportunity to admire and respect my adoptive parents in ways that I never imagined were possible.

Being adopted, in and of itself, caused me little strife other than the normal teenage urge to question who I was, where I came from, and where it was that I might be going. Fantasies of who my birth parents might be, of meeting them, of having them involved in my life, often filled my daydreams, as I progressed through adolescence. Being the supportive parents that they were, my adoptive parents never once ridiculed or shamed me for my adolescent search for self and meaning, and the role that my birth family played in it.

Although I have always been aware that I am adopted, and I seemed to experience few, if any, issues, both in our family and in the world around me, as a result of this intimate knowledge, the tides of change blew in with adolescence.

It was during these formative years of my adolescent life that my world, as I knew it, crumbled at its’ very foundation, and a new concept of self emerged. On a cool, crisp, autumn evening, a Friday to be exact, during my 8th grade year, my sister, Tammy picked a fight with me, which was far from anything new at our house. What was new, however, was that Tammy was a ballooning, hormonal, pregnant high school student at this time, and I was fast growing into a more confident, sarcastic teenager, myself. Not only was I now able to physically protect myself from my sister (not just because she was pregnant, but because I was continuing to physically mature and had grown taller and more muscular than her), but I was also able to better handle her emotionally. Prior to our fight that night, I felt incredibly confident that there was nothing that Tammy could say or do that could penetrate the thick skin that I had developed over the years to cope with her.

That fateful fall night, my sister landed not only her most explosive blow thus far in our young lives, but the most volatile. To be honest, I can’t even remember what we were arguing about that night. In the back of my mind, I am aware that we were engaged in battle about her pregnancy, and I will own the fact that I was likely goading her for being pregnant and still in high school, which I am now very ashamed of, now. I may not remember what I said, but I do remember, however, the words that rolled off of her bitter tongue that night. Her words initially filled me first with hilarity (once again, she was appearing to show her apparent ignorance), and later, upon reflection, dread.

“AT LEAST MY PARENTS WANTED ME,” she screamed at me into the living room from her spot in the middle of the brightly lit kitchen (There it is again, that single trademark attack that had been crafted years before). As I spun around, laughing at the sheer foolishness of her statement, preparing to shout back a sharp-tongued, teenage retort, the seriousness of her face stopped me dead in my tracks. “Just ask Mom tonight, you’ll see,” she ominously directed as she stormed out of the room.

Now, knowing Tammy, I took her foreboding with a grain of salt. Yet, despite my doubt of her credibility, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something different about her this time, a slight amount of concern that she had exhibited towards me. It was very unlike her to leave an argument as she did that evening, purposely avoiding an opportunity to go in for the kill, to verbally rip me apart at the seams of my soul. That night, for probably the first time in my life, I took her advice, and waited up to speak with my mother.

Like most Friday nights, I was still awake when my mom returned home from work late. As she sat down on the couch next to me that night, like so many nights before, I shared with her the mystifying conversation that I had with Tammy that evening. The crushed look on my mother’s face, how it fell when I shared my story with her, confirmed to me that my sister was actually on to something big.

It was there, in the half-light of a lamp cutting through the darkness of the night, that my mom told me the painful reality of how I came into this world. In her maternal protection of me, avoiding this conversation was something that had come quite easily to her, not that I blame her one bit. In that brief moment of time, the world stopped spinning, and everything stood still.

“I just always thought that you knew,” she started. “You were born so premature, you were so little…” Yes, I was born four months premature; yes I was just a little over two pounds when I came into this world.

Much like being adopted, I had seemingly always been aware that I had been born prematurely. In fact, my prematurity was sewn into the fabric of my life. “Mom, I don’t want to go to bed yet,” I can remember moaning as I slumped against the hallway wall by my bedroom one night when I was around six years of age. “Missy, you know you need to go bed. You were born premature, you need your sleep,” she answered back to me. “Aw, man, you’re right,” I responded as I begrudgingly made my way to bed. That memory makes me smile now, realizing how my mom was able to play me like a fiddle back then. Back then, however, it seemed like an absolutely valid argument to me—you lose four months of sleep, you need to make up four months of sleep, right?!

“I don’t know how else to tell you this, so I need to just come out and say it. Please know that we love you, and that we never meant to keep this from you. There’s just no easy way to say it.”

Nothing could have prepared me for the words that came next; not an ounce of my being could have ever fathomed the great secret that the world around me had harbored the past 14 years of my life. “Your mother had an abortion during her fifth month of pregnancy, and you survived it.”

All at once the wind was sucked out of my lungs and my stomach turned sour. Tears streaming, cries racking my body, my mother consoled me that night, and our lives were forever changed.

It all started innocently enough one late evening in February of 2008. Progressively pregnant and increasingly more exhausted, I mindlessly surfed the Internet while I was watching TV in bed. Just like so many times before, I typed my biological father’s name into the Google search engine, curious to see if there were any new hits related to him. In the past six months, I had been lucky enough to find out, with the help of the Internet, that he was a computer programmer at an insurance firm and that his wife was a nurse at a local hospital. I had spent hours upon hours endlessly reading the multitude of posts that he made on professional computer programming sites, even though I had absolutely no idea what any of the things that he was referring to in his posts even meant. With the aid of the Internet, I even discovered that Elliot and his brother were connected with horse racing and training.

Looking back on it now, I was probably one of the lucky ones during my first 12 years of searching for biological family. My search may have not been easy, but I was blessed to not encounter any embarrassing family stories, significant criminal histories or even obituaries for members of either side of my immediate biological family when I began my search on the Internet. Little did I know that my fate would change that auspicious February evening.

Glancing down the list of 111 hits that were found for him, I couldn’t believe my eyes as they settled onto the third hit on the list. The Sioux City Journal, the local newspaper, had a recent article that pertained to him. On first glance, this was a very exciting new prospect for information. However, on second glance, sadness welled up in my throat with a lump, and hot tears stung my eyes. This was no ordinary news article that I had uncovered about my biological father, this was his obituary!

With a mixture of pride, anger, and deep sadness, I curled up under the warm, safe covers of the bed and blindly read through my tears about the life and death of the man that I had been searching for and waiting to hear from for so long.

Although the obituary provided me just a brief glimpse into the far too short fifty years of Elliot’s life, I read and re-read it over and over again, attempting to remember every piece of information by rote, tucking it away into the corners of both my memory and my heart.

I couldn’t help but be struck with sadness and disappointment that I was now learning more about Elliot in his death, than I had ever learned about him in his life. Learning that he participated in football and was a member of the National Honor Society in high school, that he had received an appointment to West Point Military Academy after high school, that he was an accomplished database administrator at a local insurance firm and an active member in the community personally and professionally as an adult; learning that he even donated his organs at the time of his death, the depth of my pride for this man that I had never met truly caught me by surprise.

Yet, mixed with this pride was a strong dose of anger; anger at him and at God that he had died before I ever had the opportunity to meet him, anger with him for living a life of fullness and happiness that did not bear any mark to the anguish that punctuated my arrival into this world.

Despite the overwhelming strength of both my pride and anger that evening, as I read of my biological father’s untimely death, the undercurrent of sadness swept through my heart and soul with a fierceness all its own. Deep down in my heart I knew, even in that brief moment of time, that it was not really anger that I felt towards my father and God, but great sadness that I had lost one of the few people that I had a biological connection to in this world. I had now lost any opportunity to one day meet him, learn about him, and even learn about myself through him.

Never again would I have to worry about accidentally running into him in the grocery store; never again would I anxiously arrive home from work to check the mail, wondering if today was the day that he had finally responded to my letter. Never, never, never…..my list of nevers could continue on and on.