As promised...

My mom was adopted when she was born. It was a private adoption, done with just one attorney, the birth mother, and the adoptive parents. As long as I can remember, my mom has been searching for her birth mother. She's hired people, she's written to Unsolved Mysteries, and she's searched and searched and searched.


She never really talked/talks about her search. My mom is a very strong woman, and she's very independent. So most of the time, because she doesn't talk about it, we (the rest of the family) doesn't think about it. But, I know she thinks about it all the time.


There are so many things she doesn't know. Her medical history, her heritage, if she has any family, etc. She was an only child to her adoptive parents & they both passed away more than 15 years ago. They gave her the world, but there's really nothing like knowing where you really came from.


Basically, in her years & years of searching, she's come up empty-handed. She has a name, no idea if it was her married or maiden, and that's about it. She has the city where she was born & the adoption took place, but there's no certainty that her mother was actually from there. In all the searches she's done, most of them have taken her to the Texas area, to a woman with a similar name. I don't know the details of her previous searches, but today, she came in with a name, a husband, two addresses, a birthdate, and a phone number. The number was disconnected, the addresses were outdated, but I searched for hours and hours on the computer to find her a new number/address/e-mail/anything. We were pretty hopeful for a while. I mean, my mom was born in the 40's. The likelihood of her birth mother still being alive is getting lesser and lesser each day. This woman we found would be 84 today.


After 3 hours of searching, I found what I was really hoping I wouldn't... a death record. I even found a listing of a woman that goes around the country taking places of headstones & posting them online to help people find their loved ones. And there was this lady's, right next to her husband. She passed away in 1998. For the sake of my mom, I really hope that this woman isn't her mother, but all signs are pointing to the fact that she was. 


Regardless, I'm trying to convince her to apply to be on either The Locator or Find My Family. I know they would have the resources that she doesn't have to find her mother, if she's still alive. As tacky as it is to be on a reality show to find your family, maybe she'd find an answer. 


So, thank you to those of you that said a little prayer today. I really appreciate it. Hopefully, one day, we'll have a definite answer. I was just hoping for her sake it would be today.

Edited to add: (somehow it got left out of the original post)

All-time favorite picture. Ever.