Disclosure Day

Well, the wait is finally over. And now the wait begins.

It's sure been a long time coming. From the time I first contacted the Adoption Disclosure Register in 1996, to the time I finally got off my ass and signed on in 2003, I became more or less resolved to the fact that I would probably never find anything, and put it mostly out of mind. When you're eighteen years old, a six- or seven-year wait sounds like eternity. I did always nuture the idea of a private search, though I confess it was together with "writing a novel" on my rather dusty "to-do" list.

When I learned of the passage of the Adoption Information Disclosure Act in 2005, I slowly assimilated the idea that I would find something eventually, and with that grew the conclusion that I had been overly meek before in simply accepting the closed-record system. My birth certificate is a falsified document. Whenever I am obliged to put down my (adoptive) surname as "name at birth", I am being obliged by my government to conspire in a fiction. Yes, this is perhaps an overly dramatic characterization, but a true one.

This new viewpoint turned adoption into a project for me, and I started quietly searching in the months leading up to September 17, 2007. When the decision overturning Bill 183 came down I was oddly not that disappointed; I guess I was used to waiting, and I knew that today would eventually come since even the most vocal critics of Bill 183 were only talking about amending the law to have a disclosure veto. But Justice Belobaba's quashing of the law roused in me an even more fervent desire to find the truth, and I pursued my private search even more aggressively.

I think I always knew this obsession would eventually assert itself: I'm very, very good at obsessive information retrieval and have been since childhood. (I suspect now that this and my being adopted are not a coincidence.) I got a list of prospective names with some educated guesses based on my Non-Identifying Information, and in the years since 2007 I have narrowed it down pretty far. Since this past March, I have a good guess as to who my birth mother is. Some important details don't match, so I'm going to wait for confirmation before proceeding.

So now I wait, as do thousands of others. The only question left is one that will only be answered when the envelope arrives: I just hope I'm not one of the 1800 or so adoptees on the other end of a disclosure veto. As long as I'm not, I might just find out what the "M" in my first surname stands for.