Two Families Become One

Let’s start off plain and simple, I am Nacole and I am adopted. I have a great family now but my family that gave me up was a different story. My biological mother was a drug addict, alcoholic, and for some time was in prison due to some poor choices she had made in the past that came back to haunt her. To tell you the truth I don’t think anyone knew who my biological father was, he didn’t come to the hospital when I was born and from what I know he wasn’t super involved with my biological mother and her family. Besides all that when my biological mother came to the hospital the only person that came with her was my biological grandmother, they brought diapers and other things for my family now because they were very aware that they were new to the whole parenting thing and they needed a little help in some areas.

My whole life I have been with my family now and I’m pretty sure I told my parents that I was adopted when I was about three years old, granted that had read me books about adoption since I was born but I was never told to my face that I was adopted from birth. I have always annoyed my parents with questions about my mother asking what she looked like, what she sounded like and the two big questions that are quite common among adopted kids, why didn’t she love me enough to keep me and can I meet her. I had always gotten very bland answers out of them such as, “She looked just like you!”, “She loved you very much”, and the one I have heard a thousand times over “She couldn’t give you the life both she and I believe you deserve.”, all infuriating answers to the young and very curious mind of my younger self.

As I grew older I would plan my eighteenth birthday with my best friend Chelsea. My parents said I could look for my biological family when I turned eighteen but until then I was still too young to know who they were. Over the years Chelsea and I would go through thousands of ideas but we finally landed on our favorite, a scavenger hunt on my eighteenth birthday for my biological family with all of our friends. I practically counted down the days until I could meet my family and every year it got closer and closer and to me became more of a reality every time I wished on my birthday candles and blew them out with the strongest hope a teenage girl could muster up with all of her being. I was at wits end, I wished on stars, stayed up ‘till 11:11 most nights and oh boy you can bet I prayed to God and the heavens above day in and day out, I just had to know where I came from, who I looked like and why I wasn’t wanted.

Finally after years of wishing and waiting the day had arrived, the day I had waited to happen for so long, the day that was going to change my entire life. I remember it like it was yesterday, July 9, 2024, my eighteenth birthday. I stayed up the whole night before with all of my friends talking about the day to come and what it was going to be like. That morning we all got ready and we were out of the house by five o’ clock in the morning driving straight to the courthouse. With the papers and documents we had collected we had a pretty good stack to go through even with me adding on the very little hard evidence that she had left me the day I was born, it was only a poem but it made me tear up every time I read it from the time I was little. I sat on the park bench where we decided to continue our research with a poem in my hands titled “Different Kinds of Love” by John Trapani. I have read it a thousand times and somehow it still manages to make me tear up.

We filed through the papers for hours on end learning more and more with every page. Through all of the tears and shock we found her name, address, and a telephone number. I called the phone number and a woman picked up, she sounded around 45 years old and had a voice that I had never heard before but for some reason it just felt right, like a home I had never been to but was meant to be in. “Hello?” my mother said, all these years I thought I would just ramble on for days and talk for hours but all of the sudden there were no stories, no words, nothing I could say that could explain the relief and gratefulness that I had for her picking up the phone. Without warning I burst into tears as all my friends gathered around me listening to the conversation on speaker phone. Again she said “Hello? Who’s there?”, through the sobs I managed to ask her a few questions, I asked her if she had given a child up at birth in July of 2006, with no surprise she said “yes… I did.”, every word ment the world to me and all of the sudden the only word I could say was “Mom!”. Almost as if my words were a knife cutting the tension over the phone I heard a gasp and then the water works came, there were a few seconds of silence as we both sobbed in relief and pure love. I couldn’t tell her fast enough that my friends and I were coming over right that second and with no hesitation or resistance she said “ok, drive safe but get here quick!”. We hung up the phone and got in the car, the seconds seemed to pass like hours, we could not drive fast enough. All of our hearts were racing and our minds going thousands of miles per hour. 

After what seemed like an eternity we finally pulled up to a house just outside of Jackson California. It was a Victorian style house with a beautiful yellow color to it and the cleanest white shutters I had ever seen. With all of the anxiety and pressure of the world on my shoulders my friends and I walked through the small iron gate and on to the luscious green lawn. We raced up onto the porch and before we even knocked on the door a woman who resembled me almost exactly opened the door with tears streaming down her face and what you could describe as a long lost mothers glow to her perfect face. As if we were magnets that had been pulling their whole lives we piled into each others arms and just stayed there, it was where I belonged, where I was meant to be.

The rest of the week was us visiting, telling stories, answering questions and introducing the rest of the family to each other. My aunt and grandparents were so excited to meet me, I even had first cousins which was new to me after being an only child my whole life. I had three older siblings, two of them being brothers and one sister, I was the youngest, my mom got her tubes tied after she gave birth to me. My family that adopted me were so open to meeting them, I couldn't have asked for a better reunion of my two families, one being the one I came from and the one that made me into who I am today. This was the reunion of two families and groups of friends that shared one common thing, the love for a baby that was given the life she deserved thanks to two amazing families that are now one.