When a man answered--it was the adoptee's father!

Lorraine

A few weeks ago I wrote that adoptees who find their parents--which is most often a mother--contact them directly via telephone if they can, rather than write a letter. Letters can be put aside, answered in the great foggy future, forgotten if one has "neglected" to tell one's spouse or other children about the one given up for adoption.

As I was writing I realized that since adoptees have every right in the whole blooming world to take matters into their own hands when they find their birth/first natural parents on their own. I urged them to call rather than write. It occurred to me that since adoptees talk about free choice being taken away from them (it is), this was a case where they could grab it by the horns, so to speak. I wrote: You don't know what will happen when you make that phone call, but it does put control into your hands rather than someone else's, and control over your life and identity to a large part has been taken away from you.

A week later an adoptee wrote this to me:

I recently popped back on FMF and it changed my life.