My Birth Mother Wanted Me to Find Her - Jenny Wallentine of Origins Shares Her Story

if you are an adult adoptee from a closed adoption you think about finding your biological mother one of the biggest questions you probably have is does she want me to find her hi i'm jenny wallentine i was almost 30 years old when i finally found my birth mom i want to share with you my story i am also the co-founder of origins genealogy a company dedicated to reuniting adult adoptees with their birth families if you are looking for a birth father or mother or biological siblings you can contact me directly at the number listed at the end of this video so here's my story when i was 17 years old i helped my mom with a lot of things that she did but she happened to get sick one day and we took her into the doctor and she found out that she had cancer um it was grueling for her and it was really hard to watch her suffer because you know that was the mom that was the only mom i knew of course this is my adopted mom that i'm talking about and i don't like the word adopted because to me she was every bit my mom it didn't matter that she wasn't biologically related to me anyway long story during her cancer one day i'd asked her if there was anything i could do to help her and she asked me to find my biological parents without thinking of course i wanted to do anything i could for her because i knew how bad she was suffering i said of course i promised i would do that when i left the hospital that day i realized i had no idea how to find them i knew absolutely nothing about them i didn't know their names where they were from their ages absolutely nothing unfortunately a few weeks later my mom did pass away and we buried her the day that i graduated from high school sorry it's been over 30 years but it's still an emotional thing for me the next month was july and i would happen to turn 18. instead of having a birthday party like most people do with friends and family i chose to go to the adoption agency where i was adopted from my hope was that i could learn anything possible about my birth parents and to be honest i was kind of hoping that they would tell me their names um if you've you've been adopted you know that doesn't happen in closed adoptions and so when i left the adoption agency the only thing i had was an eight and a half by 11 inch piece of paper that contained what they call non-identifying information about my birth parents it doesn't sound very much but it was really cool for me because it's the first time i had learned anything about my parents um if you're wondering what non-identifying information means this is things like um the year they were born where they were born their hair color their eye color what they did for a living if they liked any kind of hobbies or things like that or if they even were a member of a religion um some of the things kind of surprised me and then other things really didn't surprise me things like my parents had dark hair and my mom had blue eyes that didn't surprise me because i have dark hair and i have blue eyes well as you can see i used to have all dark hair now i'm starting to get some gray hair but i guess that comes with wisdom right um so while you might think i was kind of discouraged with that because it didn't really help me i actually was really motivated and encouraged to keep going and keep looking what i didn't realize was it would take me another 12 years of constantly searching to find my birth mom once i had gone through all that process of looking at vital records and things like that i learned a few things that you may know that all adoptees have two birth certificates what i didn't realize is the first birth certificate is what you get when you are born list your birth mom and for mine it was i was known as baby girl with the last name of my my birth mom and then what i had learned is that when you're adopted that original birth certificate gets sealed and it is no longer accessible and you get a new one with your new birth or your new adopted parents and that's your new name so i kept looking for years trying to find that and it didn't work with years of trying to find my mom or my dad i had a lot of frustrating moments tons of emotion i would go down rabbit holes thinking that for sure i was on the right track only to end up with a dead end or a door slammed in my face once i finally had located um my birth mom or who the lady who i thought it might be i um had to decide how do i contact her right i knew i wanted to talk to her but there was that fear of rejection i think in our society we talk about babies that are quote given up for adoption i don't like that term because given up to me sounds like you're discarded uh like you're an old toy that you no longer want there's something better to replace you and it leaves you with that feeling of being rejected so knowing that i wanted to call my mom i was you know having to deal with the fact i might be rejected again a second time and that's really really hard to accept it's not easy to be rejected by anyone but especially by a biological parent so i had to consider that but i also knew that if my biological mom was anything like me i already had had children at that time i had three daughters i would have done anything to know everything i could about my kids especially if i had given one up as you call a given web or place one for adoption um i would love to know anything i could so i came up with a plan with a friend of mine who had helped me search during these 12 years that we would call this lady what we thought who we thought was my mom and my friend would do the talking we kind of knew that um from some of the case studies we had heard about it was a lot easier if it was a neutral person who called um rather than the actual adoptees so the plan was my friend would call and talk to her and one thing i wanted was i wanted my friend to be honest with her i didn't want her to lead her on i just wanted her to be honest and tell her why she was calling but in case my mom did quote reject me i would i would listen on the other line so that i could um at least hear her voice that sounds probably silly if you haven't been adopted but if you have been adopted you totally get it because it's weird to think you go all your life never hearing the voice of your parents so we placed that call one evening in february of 1998 and my mom answered and my friend said hello and she asked my mom asked who it was calling because she did notice it was um a long-distance number so my friend was honest and told her who she was and that she was calling because she wanted to know if my this lady remembered my birth date now remember i was almost 30 years so if this wasn't my mom she would have probably said no but when my friend asked her if she remembered the date of my birth my mom gasped and i knew i knew we had finally found my mom it's um it's an emotional time when you when you realize you've actually completed the search and you found her my mom told my friend that i was a complete secret and nobody in her family knew about her about me um in the time that i was born in the 60s unfortunately society kind of shamed unwed mothers um my mom was one of those that had to move away from her town to keep it quote a secret so this was a heavy heavy burden and i my immediate thought was wow i can't imagine the weight that that's put on my mom for 30 years to never have told anybody about me my mom was thrilled to know that i was a girl now that probably sounds kind of weird but my mom was so upset about having to place me for adoption that she had asked the doctors and nurses to knock her out so that she would not know my gender she felt that um not knowing would maybe make it easier for her and actually it probably it did because she already had a older boy so i had a brother that was older than i was and i think if she had known i was a girl it would have made her harder it would have made it harder for her to leave me there so during that phone call my friend told her as much as she could about me but my mom also mentioned that she couldn't talk long because her husband was coming home from work soon so she took down the number and promised that she would call um so my friend hung up and told her thank you and as you can imagine that night i i didn't sleep much at all i couldn't stop my mind from racing the emotions i was happy i was sad for my mom what she had to go through but i also you know was wondering questions like is this going to be good for my mom um it's just you need to tell anybody i didn't want to make it worse for her i worried about that i never had felt any anger towards my birth parents my parents that adopted me were always very good to tell me that even though they didn't know much about my parents they had to have been wonderful people because they produced me and that always made me feel really good about them so i did have a lot of sympathy and compassion for my mom and i was just sure that the next day my mom would call so as you can imagine when i woke up the next morning anytime that phone rang i ran to the phone but that whole day came and she never called so i started thinking maybe she had changed her mind had some second thoughts about it and realized it might be harder to tell people about me or keep me a secret and have anything to do with me so i tried to stay positive because i'm a pretty positive person and day two came same thing no call by day three i was pretty much sure that something had gone wrong and i thought wow i'm going to be rejected again and i kept thinking now that that can't be my mom that's if she's anything like me there's no way so day three absolutely no phone call from her and the same thing on day four until about 10 o'clock that night and the phone ring and i thought who's calling me at 10 everybody knows i'm gonna be heading to bed i picked up the phone and it was my friend who had actually called my mom and she said guess what and i said what she said your mom just called me and i said you've got to be kidding me and she said she'd like you to call her and i said oh my gosh i can't believe this and once again i felt a ton of emotion coming over me even now it's been over 30 30 years now that well 25 years that i'd known my mom and uh i remember clear as can be how what the emotions i felt like i was really excited but i was also kind of nervous and one of the things that i kept wondering about was what do i call her um do i do i call her mom do i call her peggy that was her name right i i wanted to call her what she felt comfortable with but i i didn't know so without knowing i started dialing and my my hand was shaking it was very very kind of confusing to know and understand and process all these emotions so i dialed it started ringing and two rings later she said hi jenny and i said hi mom and i had no idea what she would say or even why i said it it just kind of felt right and she said i am so glad you feel you can call me that and i told her of course she said i've been lucky to have two moms and i said i know you placed me for adoption but that doesn't change the fact you're still my mom and i i'm thrilled to be able to know you and she started crying and i was crying and we had about a two and a half hour conversation and we talked about everything that you can think of things like they're kind of silly like she asked me what my bra size was that's a weird question right but things like my shoe size and it turns out my mom and i share the same bra size and the same shoe size so funny things like that she asked me about my parents um she was very very considerate about them and was grateful for them um she asked me if i still lived in utah because that's where she had come to have give birth to me and place me for adoption and of course i did and it was a really really touching phone call right at the end after i told her i know it was getting late her time because she lived east of me and and the time was later i i said i i want you to to know something mom and she said okay but before you tell me that can i tell you something and i said well of course and she said jenny i want you to know i love you and sorry that was exactly what i was going to tell her and it was probably the best thing she could have told me because i knew that my mom loved me and that i wasn't an embarrassment to her and that i wasn't just something she wanted to quote give away that it was a hard situation for her so i told her thank you and told her that i loved her and i had always loved her and thought about her often she mentioned to me that she had thought about me every day of her life and um one of the most ironic things was is that her husband that she was married to of course he's older than i am but his birthday is the same day as mine so i felt so bad for my mom to know that every birthday that came around for her husband that she baked a cake had a party was celebrating silently she was wondering about me was i a boy or a girl was i alive was i having a good life and i just felt so bad for her and the weight that she had to have carried so she was ready to say goodbye and i was ready to say bye but she told me to call her every day call her anytime and i did for the next couple of weeks we talked on the phone for hours and three weeks after we first talked my mom flew to salt lake and i was able to meet her for the first time that was 1998 and i had a relationship with my mom and she told my grandpa she who was still alive how cool is that he was in his 80s i was able to meet him and my three siblings that she had had from uh other relationships and for 18 years i had a relationship with her until she passed away in 2016. my children were able to know her know her their grandma know their great grandpa she came out for my children's dance recitals for their baptisms in our church and we just had a wonderful relationship and for me it was important for my mom to know that i was really grateful for her i knew i could have been she could have an abortion or could have left me in a dumpster right you hear about those stories or left at a hospital or on a fire station door and i knew it took a lot of courage for my mom to do what she did so i was very appreciative of that during our relationship it was a lot of fun because we we did have a lot of similarities not everything of course but i looked like my mom and had her same coloring i tan very easily like she does just neat things like that i love to cook like she did i like a clean house things like that things that are kind of funny that if you are raised with your biological parents you kind of take for granted but as an adoptee you want to learn to know i can say that my mom was thrilled that i found her and i think most birth moms are that way as well so um i didn't get rejected again and her i really never felt i was rejected in the first place but many adoptees do so i i know that's a question many of you are wondering about um am i going to be rejected again and it's it's a fear that i shared and it's it's a real fear right it's it's not something to be made fun of or made light of so if you're wondering if your birth mom will welcome a reunion i don't know her situation or your story but i can say it's probably a risk worth taking i know it was for me um it's true that many birth or a few birth moms aren't welcoming but it is rare most of the clients i have have had the same experience i did with a warm welcome and a reunion many in fact most birth moms spend their entire lives thinking about the child they place for adoption and dreaming of the day that they can be reunited so if if you're going to look for your birth mom i really wish you all the best it is a big decision if there's anything i can do to help please call me at 801 500 0 900 i look forward to hearing from you and helping you find the answers that you deserve and that you desire

Channel: Origins Genealogy

Views: 113,888

Keywords: does my birth mother want me to find her, find birth mother, find my mom, how to find my birth mother, origins genealogy, genealogy, genetic genealogy, find biological mother

Id: 78YZFTwSJME

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021