I Got In Touch With My Birth Parents -- And It Changed All Of Our Lives

This is the thirtieth post of "30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days," a series designed to give a voice to people with widely varying experiences, including birthparents, adoptees, adoptive parents, foster parents, waiting adoptive parents and others touched by adoption.

I Had My Mother's Name!
Written by Chad Cottle for Portrait of an Adoption

Death

Grandma’s house in Ogden, Utah, was where I first learned what death is.

Dad walked through the front door into the small living room of Grandma’s house. It was late afternoon. I was playing with Grandma’s Lincoln Logs on the carpet. Somehow, I knew something was wrong. Dad went down on one knee there on the carpet, ruffled my hair and said, “Mommy died today, Chad.” There were no tears that I remember, but Dad seemed sad. I was 5 years old.

When I was older, I asked Dad what he did when he first heard the news that his wife was dead. “I went bowling,” he said. At first that seemed cruel to me, but then it felt -- oddly -- OK. I didn’t have a problem with it.

I was 5 years and a couple of months old the day Dad told me Mom died. I don’t have a memory of my twin brother Brad on that day. He was probably with me at Grandma’s house, but I only have that ten-second memory of what Dad told me while I played with those Lincoln Logs.

“OK, Dad,” I think I told him, and went back to playing with the blocks.

At age 5, I couldn’t fathom the finality of Dad’s news. Mom was gone. Truly, utterly, never-to-return gone. The world would go on. Someone, somewhere, was laughing. Someone, somewhere, was having the best day of his or her life. What did my mother’s death mean to them? Just another paragraph in the obituaries, a square black-and-white photograph lost on a whole page of other square, black-and-white photographs. Survived by her husband, Lynn, and four children, Luralyn, Chad, Brad and Tiffany.

But I had two other mothers in the world, neither of whom I had yet met. Living, breathing, cancer-free mothers. My biological mother knew I was alive, but didn’t know where I was.

Dad remarried my step-mom six months later and we instantly had two new brothers, one new sister, and then one more sister when they became pregnant. That made eight children.

Adoption

I always knew I was adopted. Dad must have told us at a very young age. I had the notion that somehow it made me special. “I was adopted,” was something I’d say to brag.

Brad and I shared a room. We used to scratch each other’s backs on Christmas Eve, trying to stay up all night so we might get a chance to see Santa Claus but never really making it that long. I don’t remember very many conversations about our biological parents, though. We just didn’t talk about it. Certainly not in any deep sense. We were well taken care of, very much loved, and all our little minds really had time for was playing with G.I. Joe or the latest "Star Wars" figures.

As we grew up, shuffled back and forth to school, baseball practice, soccer practice, scouts and the nearest swimming pools in the summer, there were times and circumstances when I was reminded that I was adopted, that there was a woman out there who was my biological mother, from whose flesh I had come, and that there was a father out there, too, who may or may not know we even existed. Sometimes I would pause and look at all the people around me, wondering if she was in the crowd. Did she think about Brad and me?

Sometimes my curiosity ran wild. I wanted to know the before-story. Why was I adopted? What happened to cause it? And what about our father? Who was he? Dad told us our father was a basketball player, was six feet eight inches tall, and was a mathematician. He said our mother was a secretary at a law firm, that she was 27 when we were born, and that our father was 21.

I remember calculating, a couple times every year, how old they were. I thought about them every year on our birthday, wondered if they were thinking about us, too. How could they not? It seemed like the only connection I had with them. It was the one time during the year that we could somehow share.

Next: "Our mother was thinking of us, that was certain."

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