There comes a time in every adopted person’s life when they want to know the answers to some questions. What drove my birth mother to put me up for adoption? Does she think about me? Do I have a sibling somewhere out there in the world?

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Some of us spend most of our lives thinking about these questions, while others do not give it much thought. For me, these questions (and more) suddenly became a near obsession when I hit my 30th birthday. I don’t really have any explanation as to why this deep-rooted curiosity to explore my past occurred then, but I am sure it had something to do with me being in the state of reflection that milestone birthdays have a tendency to inspire.

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It was when I was cleaning out my mother’s co-op, helping her put it up for sale, that I came across a binder with a lot of documents in it, a video, and some photos. It occurred to me that these were all paperwork relating to my adoption, something I had never seen before. The binder contained the court document, medical records, information on my birth mother, whose name and details I knew nothing about, and more. It became a mystery that I knew I wanted to solve to gain more clarity on a part of my life I knew nothing about.