Growing up Deaf - Part 3

Adoption part 2 - Birth mom finds me.

My birth mom beat me to the punch by finding me first, shortly after 9/11. Shortly after that, my Geo Metro was totalled after returning from an event in the late evening. It had 166,500 miles on it. Someone went in front of me at an intersection and I hit their rear passenger door. I wasn't injured, thankfully, despite the 35mph hit and things from the back coming forward. I managed to stop at the intersection's corner, engine fluids leaking a path. As I got out of the car, someone asked me how I was. "I'm fine. The car ain't." Exiting the car, I found my fire extinguisher got stopped by a few things, resting between my headrest and side of car. It could have been painfully worse.

As it turns out, I wasn't at fault, since I had the green light. I had no chance to avoid them. For some strange reason, they were parallel to and just about on the white stop lines in my travel lanes. Going into the median or or down a hill on the intersection's corner probably would have been worse.

The accident was a major factor that got me deciding what I was going to be doing next. Was I going to attend two local training programs, the local community college, or Gallaudet? The local community college won out since my applications to the training programs were lost in the mail when the anthrax attacks hit DC. One could say it was an interesting time for me.

I received something in the mail forwarded to me from adoptive mom in KY, since I had moved to VA a year earlier. It was from an investigative agency in Texas that said my birth mom had been searching for me and had certain pieces of information about me at birth. Responding to it via email, the investigator put me in touch with her.

After a couple emails, I asked her a few questions that only she would know. She answered them accurately. When I told adoptive mom about it, she said she nearly threw away that piece of mail. Had she done so, birth mom and I most likely would never have found each other, or we would have given more time. When I mentioned my hearing loss, it didn't matter to her. All she wanted to do was find her long-lost son and she did.

(Note: Rather than weekly serial posts, I'll be posting twice a week. If I get enough requests, three a week.)

Next - Birthmom and I meet.