Writing a letter to the child you gave up for adoption

Lorraine

How do you write a letter to the son or daughter you gave up for adoption? Before you know her/him? How to begin, what to say? It's a question first/birth mothers are faced with if they must make contact through a confidential intermediary. At the end of my memoir, Birthmark, I have a letter to the daughter I did not know yet--she was thirteen at the time the book was published in 1979, and as many of you know, I did reunite with her less than three years later. No letter was necessary, I made a phone call and spoke to her adoptive mother, and then her adoptive father, and within ten minutes or so my daughter was on the line. Yep. That was, in a sense, the easy part.

But what would I say today if I had to write such a letter? How would I introduce myself?