I was adopted in 1974, and when I found my original file last year, I noticed something that immediately bothered me. My birth mother had signed the same document twice — once in March and again in July. The dates were four months apart, but everything else looked almost identical. Same document, same signature line, yet two different pens.
The woman who helped me access the records had worked there for nineteen years, and she told me she’d never seen anything like it. She explained that the first signature usually meant the adoption had been consented to, while the second could mean that the original consent had been withdrawn and then signed again. I asked what could possibly have happened during those four months.
She couldn’t tell me, but she said there should be a caseworker’s note somewhere in the archived records. She requested it while I waited. A week later, she called me back and said she’d found something. Her voice had changed, and before she told me what was written, she asked whether I was sitting down.
The note was only a few lines long, but it explained why my birth mother had signed the papers twice. She hadn’t changed her mind about me. Someone had changed what she believed was happening to me. And the final sentence in that caseworker’s note was the reason the adoption file had been separated from the rest of my records…
