The person who made the report was my mother’s name. I stared at it for a long time because my mother had died in 2008, and I knew her handwriting better than anyone. The social worker’s note said she’d reported that I was being neglected at home and that a county worker should visit immediately. I told the woman on the phone that couldn’t be right because my mother was the one who had cared for me. She said there was more. The report claimed my mother wasn’t my mother at all — she was listed as the woman caring for me temporarily while my “real mother” was recovering from an illness. I asked who the real mother was. She said the name had been crossed out on the original and replaced with mine.
I called the county archives and asked whether they still had the 1974 case file. They found it in a box that hadn’t been opened in decades. The clerk read me the names from the first page, then went quiet when she reached the referral section. The person who requested the home visit wasn’t my mother. It was a woman from a hospital forty minutes away. I asked whether there was a birth record attached. She said yes, and the baby’s date of birth matched mine. But the mother’s name on that record wasn’t my mother’s. I asked who had signed the correction years later, and the clerk said my father had. The date was 1975. My father had always told me my mother was too sick to have children after me.
Then the former teacher called me again. She said she’d found one more page tucked inside the file — a handwritten note that had never been indexed. It said the county worker had returned to our house six weeks after the first visit because someone had called again. This time, the note said, my mother wouldn’t let them inside. At the bottom was one sentence: “Child appears to have been placed here permanently, but no legal transfer was completed.” I asked the teacher why she had kept the file all these years. She said she didn’t know she had it until she found the box. Then she told me the strangest part: the woman who made the original referral had left another message in 1974 asking the county to contact her if I ever came looking for my birth records. The teacher looked at the final page and said, “Honey, she left a name and an address.”
The address is the house I grew up in.
