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I was born to a 15 year old at St. Mary's Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. She attended a boarding school and was Catholic. My birth father was a neighbor and friend of her brother's She had an older brother. Her father and sister were dead. She stayed at St. Anthony's Maternity Home. She got really sick at my birth.
She named me Susan A. Gates. Catholic Charities handled the adoption. My adoptive parents named me Julie Ann Arena. I grew up in Kansas City and have had a GREAT life! But something is missing. I have wanted to find you forever. I knew when my mom told me I was adopted (at 4 years of age) that someday I would find you but now I am beginning to doubt that it will happen.
You are not on any registries. That was such a long time ago. The whole thing was a nightmare for you. Why would you want to remember it?
I have had Emergency Medical locators trying to find you.
I cannot imagine giving up my one of my babies after carrying them and talking to them and already loving them before they came out. What a sacrifice! When I first saw my oldest, he weighed 2.4 pounds. I did not get to see him for 3 days and then I snuck to see him in the NICU. We have a picture of the first time I saw him. The first thing I thought was, I cannot even imagine how anyone can question the existence of God after seeing a newborn baby. The second thing I thought was--that even though it had always been instilled in me what a sacrifice my birth mother made, I could never have known until that moment what a selfless, loving thing YOU did. I have a need to thank YOU and assure YOU that your decision was the right one. I have loved you for it and I do realize how courageous you were. I have been blessed many times over.
I know that I must somehow make peace with the fact that I may never find you.
My birthday is Saturday--I will be thinking of you in the evening around 5 when I was born and as I do every year, I will imagine that you too are thinking of me.
Julie
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Julie,
I was born in Kansas City, Mo at the Willows in 1956. I really think that Mo. adoption laws are the pits for adults but wanted to give you hope.
Several years ago, I had a overwhelming urge to locate my bmom and thank her. Tell her I had a great life and appreciated all she had done for me. Let her know that I was loved and never felt abandoned. My sister, also adopted from the Willows, had found her bmom about 10 years earlier and was thrilled when I told her she could search. We thought we had found her based on the non-identifying information that we had. But it wasn't her. When I called, she was very nice and let me tell her what I needed to say and that took the pressure off me.
Last year my amom died and I registered here. Over Memorial Day a friend of my bmom looking for me found me. Amazing! My bmom had believed that I had died in a car accident when I was 16 - she said she just had this gut feeling. So. of course, she had never looked for me - she said she probably wouldn't have anyway, because she thought she had no right to interfere in my life. I would never have found her because she had never gone by her legal last name on my adoption papers, had gone by her stepfather's name all her life. So all of this is truly a miracle. She had remembered me and obviously had talked about me in enough detail for a friend to locate me with a birthdate. A cousin about my age, said that she had spoken about her daughter with love and regret for years. So just because your bmom isn't registered, doesn't mean that she has forgotten you. In my opinion, no one can ever forget a child they gave birth to - no matter the circumstances.
Reunion has been an amazing experience for me - so keep hoping. One of the interesting things to me was that right about the time that I had the overwhelming urge to find her and thank her - she was in the hospital and almost died. Have you done everything you can with the Mo. court system? I know you can pay someone to search - if you have your aparents permission or death certificates. Isn't that insane - at our age to have to have a permission slip to find out our own heritage?
Good luck and just keep believing in miracles.
Jill
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