An Adoptee Found Her Birth Mother

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Marit Fischer, Looking at a Stranger and Seeing Myself Clearly; The story of two women begins with a rapturous hello. New York Times, Feb 16, 2025, at page 6 of SundayStyles section (in the column of Modern Love).
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/ ... -seeing-myself.html

Note: "Marit is a Scandinavian female given name equivalent to Margaret."  en.wikipedia.org/ for Marit.
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To protect myself and my family, I used an alias. On my Ancestry profile, I called myself “Pearl.” Then I took the DNA test.

When my results posted, I was surprised to find out how many people in this world I am genetically related to. But I didn’t care about how many; I was looking for just one. She was not there.

There was a match, however, that held the key. It was to an aunt who had the obituary of her father on her profile. I read through the names of the survivors, including her siblings, then used Google to do a quick age calculation to narrow it down. Then I looked at pictures of all those children growing up over the years. For the first time in my life, I was looking at a stranger and saw myself.

I had found my birth mother.

Her name was Rose. Thanks to Google, I learned that she was a hospital administrator in Louisville, Ky. She had been married twice and divorced twice and had no other children. And she was beautiful. Her smile was radiant in every picture: lined up short to tall with her siblings on a 1960s family vacation; in a portrait with the same big, permed hair I had in the ’80s; at the Kentucky Derby in her floral dress and wide-brimmed rose-covered hat; and badged and lab-coated on the hospital website. I was so proud of her.

But because I had found her through her sister’s profile and not her own, it was not an invitation for me to reach out to her directly. So, I didn’t.

Not long after, I received a message on Ancestry from one of Rose’s cousins. This woman was really into genealogical research, so imagine her surprise when someone she didn’t know with a name she couldn’t trace suddenly popped up as a close relative.

She asked me who I was.

I responded with my story — that I was born in 1972 in a small town in southwest Minnesota to an 18-year-old who had come from somewhere on the East coast to spend her pregnancy and have me. Then I was taken over state lines and adopted out of Sioux Falls, S.D. I told this woman, Susan, that if this matched the story of any of her cousins, to do with this information what she felt was best.

She put it all together.

Thankfully, her ethics matched my own. She had empathy for decisions made all those years ago, and she had a deep respect for boundaries. Together, we decided that she would not tell Rose that she and I had connected unless Rose gave her an obvious opportunity to do so.

A few months later, Rose went to visit Susan in Pennsylvania. Susan’s mother had recently died, and she and Rose had been close. Rose asked Susan about Ancestry, saying she had always wanted to take a DNA test but had been too afraid. To Susan, this was a sign, and she was prepared.

As Rose was leaving, Susan gave her a small, wrapped gift. She told Rose not to open it until she was back home in Louisville, was alone, and had poured herself a glass of wine.

When Rose opened that little box, she found a note tucked inside. Susan had written that this gift was both a token of her mother’s love for Rose and a message she felt her mother wanted Rose to have. Then she told Rose about me.

She said she really liked me but didn’t know much about me because I had been using my alias. She also told Rose that I was the mother of a 10-year-old girl whom I called “Little Pearl.” In that box was a pair of Susan’s mother’s pearl earrings.

Rose called Susan and in a cathartic rush, told her story, one that for five decades she had hardly shared with anyone, not even her husbands or closest friends. Rose said that she had always loved me and had tried to find me, but because it had been a closed adoption, she always hit dead ends. Then she lost her courage.

She told Susan that she still had the baby blanket I had been wrapped in after I was born, and that her mother had convinced the social workers, against protocol, to let Rose hold me, which she did in that little hospital room for three hours until it was time to let me go.

After I had processed this, I reached out to Rose via email. I began by introducing myself by my real name, Marit. Marit means Pearl. For Rose, I had always been the Pearl of Great Price — her rare and cherished treasure that she not only sacrificed, but for whom she sacrificed so much.

I told Rose that I wasn’t ready to talk on the phone yet. I wanted us to have all the time we needed to think and feel and take care of our hearts. I suggested we do “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” that appeared in this column, because those questions are not just for lovers.

She agreed, and we began our correspondence. We took those questions three at a time and we took our time, and it was perfect.

That fall, I sent Rose my daughter’s first-day-of-school picture. She didn’t respond.

Her job was important, and she was busy. There had been times when she had taken a few days to get back to me, so I didn’t think anything of it. But weeks went by. When she finally did respond, she apologized. She said she had not been feeling well, and that actually — she had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

I called her right then.

The first time I spoke to my birth mother was when she told me she was dying.

In our way, I was with her through it all. I wrote her every day, and she responded until she couldn’t anymore. And she got sicker.

On May 1, I got a phone call from her sister. She told me that if I wanted to meet Rose, the time had come. I had offered several times, but Rose had wanted to be well again before we met. Now “well” was no longer an option. I knew that the choice was mine.

The next day, as I was checking in at the airport, her sister called again. She said, “Rose isn’t going to make it through the night,” and she asked if I still wanted to make the trip.

“Tell her I’m coming,” I said. “She will wait for me.”

I went straight to the hospital from the airport and arrived a little after midnight. Her sister and partner were there in her dark room, and I saw her in the bed but vanishing under the beeping electronic sentinels. The thin monitor lines of green, blue, red and yellow together made a soft, warm gold-white light, like a candle’s. Rose was both shell and wisp, awake and asleep, a patient just on this side of the border between life and death.

From the doorway, I spoke her name. At the sound of my voice, everything shifted, whoosh-like, and that tiny woman who had been unresponsive arched her body from the bed and cried out and reached for me.

I went to her bedside and took her hand. I started talking. I told her how proud I was of her. And grateful.

It did not take long for me to realize the inefficiency of speaking out loud. Words, the spoken kind, were not necessary here. She could not talk but we could hear each other’s thoughts. In this quiet integrated spaciousness, she communicated to me that she was afraid. Silently, I shared with her what I know of death.

I told her she was safe and that everything was going to be OK. I described the gentle release from the confines of her body, even more exquisite in the freedom from her illness. I assured her that letting go would not be a goodbye but a vast and rapturous hello.

She relaxed into the relief of my confidence like a child.

As she faded from this life, I told her that I loved her.

The room chilled. I felt her spirit kin all around us, and I looked up and I saw them. Then I heard in the shared liminality that it was time for me to let go of her hand, because she would not die while I was holding it. So, I did.

Her body illuminated from within as she took her last breath.

Just as she had done with me 50 years earlier, I held her in that little hospital room for three hours until it was time to let her go.

Marit Fischer is a transpersonal therapist who lives in Spokane, Wash.