I DIDN'T plan on seeing my birth mother again. I had already had the dramatic face-to-face reunion. I knew where she lived, understood the broad strokes of her family history, the details of my birth and the secrets she kept from her other children, including my existence. Yet after a couple of years of clandestine contact, she decided our relationship could not work, we parted ways, and in the eight years since I have done my best to accept her choice. ...

Our airport meeting was strained by awkward pauses and unasked questions. Still, I thought there were signs our relationship would work. She took me to her house nearby, introduced me to her husband while her children were away and told me family stories. When I left, she said she would write a letter soon. I had faith we would figure it out.

It took six weeks for that letter to arrive, during which I screamed, cried and swore her off. I had a thousand conversations with her in my mind about the past. By the time I got her kind note about how great I had turned out, I was way ahead of her. Real time was not fast enough to keep up with all I had lost.

Her subsequent letters came at slower intervals: three, then six, then nine months apart. She wrote about pedestrian matters like cleaning her basement and sports rivalries. I described the cherry blossoms in Prospect Park, interspersed with questions she did not want to answer.

Inevitably, our relationship crumbled, piece by unspoken piece. The last letter I got was months after my daughter was born, when she sent an outfit with the kind of obligatory card of congratulations one might receive from a great-aunt. Its last two lines read: "My husband does not think it is good for our family to tell our children about you. Know that I pray for you and your daughter every day."

I was furious. But as I tried to make sense of her choice to walk away again, I knew, holding my own infant daughter, about the fierce love and fear that molds mothers. I knew she loved her children, wanted to protect them from the facts of her life before they were born: how as a young woman she had gotten pregnant by a man twice her age, how her parents had arranged for her to go to another city, where she signed the papers for my adoption hours after labor, and then returned home, leaving me when I was 5 days old.

How was she to tell them that after I was born she erased that part of herself completely? As a mother I understood this struggle even as it pained me. She had only told one other person, her husband, in the 40 years since it happened.

Yet as my finger hovered over the Facebook search button that night, I fantasized that this history could be overcome. I thought if only she were to see my profile, my passion for hula-hooping, my joy in eating coffee fudge ice cream every Friday afternoon with my daughter -- her granddaughter -- she might change her mind.

Labels: adoption, motherhood

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