TAKING A CHANCE

After I made my first blog post, I was suddenly confronted with questions from people in my life who were surprised, interested and simply just intrigued about my new journey. It was one friend in particular who spoke to me and asked me questions, which have stuck with me. He asked me why?

Why would I want to search for parents who gave me up?
Why would I want to search for them when I am already part of a loving family?

It made me realise that this may be a question on many people’s minds and I hope that maybe understanding my reasoning will give others some insight into my journey and people who are like me, adoptees, may be able to relate to this as well.

The first and easiest reason to understand is simple, curiosity.
Where am I from? Who are my parents? What are they like?

These questions, are simple questions that are easily answered and so small that they can be taken for granted. But these are the questions which would always be there – where do I actually come from?  I am sure a lot of you reading this have received the comment from someone saying ‘oh you look like your mum’ or ‘you look like your dad for sure’. Then you talk about how you look nothing alike but there are clear distinguishing features you have from your birth parents. I have never been able to experience this during my life. I know it is a small thing, but it is the small things that count and slowly add up, to the point where I would randomly start seeing people and wonder if maybe my biological parent would look like this or that.

As well as looking at the physical similarities of my birth parents I am also interested in other potential similarities and interests they have. Research has shown that we will always have hereditary aspects to our life style despite the way we are brought up. I have basic information detailing their existence but right now, I have no idea who they are as people, not just names printed on a single document.

I briefly touched on the idea of feeling a sense of disconnection with my family and that feeling of being lost in my first blog post. No matter how loved or welcomed you feel, or how much you are part of a family, there is always that search for identity which I cannot escape. Whilst I can be happy everyday, smile and laugh, eat dinner with my family and be completely content – I can’t help but be curious and let these little and small questions grow in my mind. At the end of this journey, I will be the same, I will know where I have lived, what I do, where I work, but there are hidden parts to my identity, my past that are unknown.

Some information will only be known to my birth parents, questions only they will ever answer. I want to know why I was adopted, what the reasoning behind it was and what led them to make the choices they did. But most of all, I just want to know who they are and find out the small part of myself that I myself don’t know.

I may never find them, they may never answer my questions and I may always have this curiosity.
But this is my journey to find out.
And in the end, I will only regret not taking the chance.