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  In 1972, Nixon went to China. Eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic games. A stamp cost eight cents. The Oakland As won the World Series, and M[?]A[?]S[?]H premiered on CBS.

  On January 22, 1973, nineteen days after I was born and living with the Gates family, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

  Did my mother hear about that and curse her bad timing?

  A few weeks ago I had started scouring the records of Hillsborough County for marriage certificates from the summer of 1972. If my mother was seventeen, there must have been a parental consent form attached, too. Surely that would limit the numbers I had to wade through.

  I had blown Joe off for two consecutive weekends while I waded through over three thousand marriage certificate applications, and learned incredibly creepy things about my home state (like that a girl between thirteen and seventeen, and a boy between fourteen and seventeen, could marry with parental consent), and yet, I didn't find an application that looked like it might belong to my birth parents.

  The truth is, even before Joe dumped me, I had resigned myself to giving up my search.

  I went back to work after I left his office, and somehow phoned in a performance the rest of the day. That night, I came back to my house, opened a bottle of wine and a tub of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, and faced the truth: I had to decide if I really wanted to find my birth mother. Presumably, she had gone through significant moral contortions deciding whether or not to give me up; surely I owed her the same self-assessment in deciding whether or not to find her. Curiosity wasn't good enough; neither was a medical scare that had left me wondering about my origins. Once I had a name: then what? Knowing where I came from did not necessarily mean I was brave enough to hear why I had been given away. If I was going to do this, I was going to be opening the door for a relationship that would change both of our lives.

  I reached for the phone and dialed my mother. 'What are you doing?' I asked.

  'Trying to figure out how to TiVo The Colbert Report,' she said. 'What are you doing?'

  I glanced down at the melting ice cream, the half-empty bottle of wine. 'Embarking on a liquid diet,' I said. 'And you have to push the red button to get the right menu on the screen.'

  'Oh, there it is. Good. Your father gets cranky when I watch the show and he falls asleep.'

  'Can I ask you something?'

  'Sure.'

  'Am I passionate?'

  She laughed. 'Things must be really bad if you're asking me that.'

  'I don't mean romantically. I mean, you know, about life. Did I have hobbies when I was little? Did I collect Garbage Pail Kids cards or beg to be on a swim team?'

  'Honey, you were terrified of the water till you were twelve.'

  'Okay, maybe that wasn't the best example.' I pinched the bridge of my nose. 'Did I stick with things, even when they were hard? Or did I just give up?'

  'Why? Did something happen at work?'

  'No, not at work.' I hesitated. 'If you were me, would you look for your birth parents?'

  There was a bubble of silence. 'Wow. That's a pretty loaded question. And I thought we'd already had this discussion. I said that I'd support you--'

  'I know what you said. But doesn't it hurt you?' I asked bluntly.

  'I'm not going to lie, Marin. When you first started asking questions, it did. I guess a part of me felt like, if you loved me enough, you wouldn't need to find any other answers. But then you had the whole scare at the gynecologist's, and I realized this wasn't about me. It was about you.'

  'I don't want to hurt you.'

  'Don't worry about me,' she said. 'I'm old and tough.'

  That made me smile. 'You're not old, and you're a softy.' I drew in my breath. 'I just keep thinking, you know, this is a really big deal. You dig up the box, and maybe you find buried treasure, but maybe you find something rotting.'

  'Maybe the person you're afraid of hurting is yourself.'

  Leave it to my mother to hit the nail on the head. What if, for example, I turned out to be related to Jeffrey Dahmer or Jesse Helms? Wouldn't that be information I'd be better off not knowing?

  'She got rid of me over thirty years ago. What if I barge into her life and she doesn't want to see me?'

  There was a soft sigh on the other end of the phone. It was, I realized, the sound I associated most with growing up. I'd heard it running into my mother's arms when a kid had pushed me off the swing at the playground. I'd heard it during an embrace before my newly minted prom date and I drove off to the dance; I'd heard it when she stood at the threshold of my college dorm, trying not to cry as she left me on my own for the first time. In that sound was my whole childhood.

  'Marin,' my mother said simply, 'who wouldn't want you?'

  Honestly, I am not the kind of person who believes in ghosts and karma and reincarnation. And yet, the very next day I found myself calling in sick to work so that I could drive to Falmouth, Massachusetts, to talk to a psychic about my birth mother. I took another swig of my Dunkin' Donuts coffee and imagined what the meeting would be like; whether I would come out of it with information that would send me in the right direction for my adoption search, like the woman who'd recommended Meshinda Dows and her prophecies in the first place.

  The previous night I had joined ten adoption support groups online. I created a name for myself ([email protected]) and made lists from the websites in an empty Moleskine notebook.

  1. USE STATE REGISTRIES.

  2. REGISTER WITH ISRR - the Index of Search and Reunion Resources, the biggest registry there is.

  3. REGISTER WITH THE WORLD WIDE REGISTRY.

  4. TALK TO YOUR ADOPTIVE PARENTS . . . AND COUSINS, UNCLES, OLDER SIBLINGS . . .

  5. FIGURE OUT YOUR CONDUIT. In other words, who arranged the adoption? A church, a lawyer, a physician, an agency? They might be a source of information.

  6. FILE A WAIVER OF CONFIDENTIALITY, so if your birth mom comes looking for you, she knows that you want to be contacted.

  7. POST YOUR INFO REGULARLY. There are people who really do forward all over in the hope that your info gets to the right place!

  8. PLACE ADS IN THE PRIMARY NEWSPAPERS OF YOUR BIRTH CITY.

  9. ABOVE ALL ELSE, IGNORE ANY SEARCH COMPANY YOU SEE ON TV ADS OR TALK SHOWS! THEY ARE SCAMS!

  At two in the morning, I was still online in an adoption search chat room, reacting to horror stories from people who wanted to save me the trouble of making the same mistakes. There was RiggleBoy, who had contacted a 1-900 search number and given them his credit card information, only to be socked with a bill for $6500 at the end of one month. There was Joy4Eva, who'd found out that she was taken away from her birth family for neglect and abuse. AllieCapone688 gave me a list of three books that she used when she was getting started - which cost less than all she'd spent on private investigators. Only one woman had a happy ending: she'd gone to a psychic named Meshinda Dows, who had given her such accurate information that she found her birth mom in a week's time. Try it, FantaC suggested. What have you got to lose?

  Well, my self-respect, for one. But all the same, I found myself Googling Meshinda Dows. She had one of those websites that takes forever to load, because there was a music file attached - in this case, an eerie mix of chimes and humpback whale songs. Meshinda Dows, the home page read, Certified psychic counselor.

  Who certified psychic counselors? The U.S. Department of Snake Oil and Charlatans?

  Serving the Cape Cod community for 35 years.

  Which meant she was within driving distance from my home in Bankton.

  Let me be your bridge to the past.

  Before I could chicken out, I clicked on the email link and sent her a message explaining my search for my birth mom. Within thirty seconds of sending it, I got a reply: Marin, I think I can be of great help to you. Are you free tomorrow afternoon?

  I did not question why this woman was online at three in the morning. I didn't let myself wonder why a successful psychic w