Late Discoveries: An Adopteee

Late discovery adoptees have a lot of catching up to do . . . Susan was forty-three years old before she ordered a DNA test and learned the truth that she had long suspected: that she was adopted. By this time, the woman she had always called her mother, who had kept the adoption a secret, was dying, so Susan never got to talk with her directly on this important matter of identity. Then came the long, involved search for her half-siblings and her biological family roots, a roller-coaster of emotions that uncovered secret after secret, revealing truth after truth. At the climax of the book, she visits the building where she was born (when the building was a facility for unwed mothers) and makes a remarkable, almost magical connection with her deceased birth mother. She discovers, still stuck to a wall, a painting of a Christmas tree signed by her eighteen-year-old mother. The most important truth Susan learned from her quest was that she had been wanted and loved by both her mothers.