At the age of 4, I was adopted along with my brother Anthony and my sister Melinda to Chris and Terry Hooker. We were three little blonde haired and blue eyed kids who were on their last chance of being adopted together as a group.
The circumstances around my adoption and pre adoption life have been lost to time. I do know that we 3 kids did some amount of time in foster care while permanent placements were trying to be found. I only have a few memories of that time in my life and those are all bad, so I push those down into the dark recesses of my brain. The last effort to find a permanent placement for all three children was successful.
Who were my birth parents and what were the circumstances that led to me being put up for adoption are questions that I probably will never have answers to. I was aware from an early age that I was adopted but that really didn’t mean much to me as I knew no other parents before my adoptive parents.
My older sister Melinda was the leader of our little gang and I was the hot tempered and defiant enforcer. From an early age I was an angry child but kept that pretty much in check through most of my youth by keeping my hands and mind busy with farm work and being naturally smart and inquisitive as well. Only a few instances of childhood drama that I remember but maybe my brother, sister and parents would probably disagree?!
At the age of 18, I decided I wanted to reach out and see if I could find information and possibly contact my birth mother and father. This turned into more of an ordeal than I had expected. I was adopted while living in the state of Virginia which had at that time very restrictive laws that sealed the records of my adoption. As a legal adult after 18 I was able to request the unsealing of those documents however they were still heavily redacted when I received the copies of all the paperwork involved. One mistake that the state of Virginia made when supplying these documents was to not block out my birth mother’s name on the live birth certificate. So at that point I had some information and had instructed the court to also seek out and request if my birth mother and father would agree to being contacted. I never received anything from my birth mother but my birth father sent me a letter after about six months. That was the only communication as I believe he passed away within that same year.
I kind of put on hold all investigations as life changed for me significantly after high school. I had already met the love of my life in high school and started down the road of the military career that I had always dreamed of. I left for Navy boot camp the fall after graduation and had little time or interest in digging up things of the past at that point. It wasn’t until around 2002 that I revived my interest and searched again for my birth mother. We did have one phone call where I got to speak with her for a little while and it was completely overwhelming. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from that but it was very emotional and I wasn’t ready to receive the level of energy that she was projecting.
In my search for my birth family, I found out that I had at least two half siblings one on my mother’s side and one on my father’s. I was very shocked to receive contact information for my half sister on my mother’s side whose name was Kariki. I called and talked to her to see about getting information, any photos or medical history information from my mother. She did not have very much information that she could share, and it was very apparent during our discussions that she had lived a difficult life. One good thing that came from our connection was that I found other members of the family who I reached out to and connected with, one of which I’ve actually been able to ask questions from and friend via Facebook.
As a conclusion to my adoption saga, we had a family trip several years ago to go to see my parents in North Carolina and took a trip to the park where they first met us three kids. During that same trip, we were able to stop by my grandmothers house and meet her; her name was Addie. The meeting was fairly uneventful but she did tell us a few stories about my birth mother and of the circumstances of her passing. One thing I learned during that meeting was that stubbornness runs very deep in my blood.
Overall being adopted hasn’t changed my life that much that I can tell. I grew up with a caring and loving family who provided great stability, life experiences and core values that make me the man that I am today. The only negative that I can think of about being adopted is that I always had a sense of separation anxiety or concern that it could happen again. For many years in my youth, I harbored the questions “Why did they give me away? and What did I do?” Over time and after learning more about my birth mother and the circumstances of my childhood the realization finally came through that it wasn’t about me, it was about the circumstances and events in their lives.
