When I was born, my mother named me Heather. She loved the beautiful resiliency of those purpley-pink, stalky flowers. Somehow she knew I would need this flower’s characteristic ability: to withstand shock, to adjust easily to misfortune.

As she birthed me,  she was 19 years, 3 months and 10 days old. She was just a girl–a girl whose father abused her, whose moods ruled her life. She had fallen in love with the singer in the band, and then she was pregnant. And terrified. And broken.  Her mother tried to convince her to abort me, but she would have none of it. She found an agency, signed a contract. She knitted me a yellow blanket. Something to remember her by. And on June 13, 1969, when I was two days old, she ran.

I spent a week in the nursery. I imagine myself as a newborn, eyes milky blue and barely open, waiting for someone to hold me. Wanting my mother. Did I cry? Or was I in too much shock from being abandoned to make a sound? The woman who adopted me, who I call Mom, says I was a good baby, quiet, smiling. Never any trouble. If I was good, if I didn’t cry, did the nurses hold me except to feed me? Did that first week without loving touch set up my lifelong craving for skin-on-skin contact?

My adoptive parents didn’t know I already had a name, so they named me Christy Lynn and called me Lynn. They didn’t know about the yellow blanket; it did not come home with me. All they knew was they wanted to be parents. After seven years of trying, they gave up and decided to adopt. That is how I came to be in their family.

In the meantime, my birthmother moved to Aspen to make skis, sailed the ocean, had a son, became a massage therapist and moved to Maui. She thought of me around my birthday, but she made herself forget the exact day I was born. She never told the singer in the band about me, in fact had graduated from high school a semester early, before her belly grew round. She thought he never knew. But he did, because her brother let the secret slip, told him that she was living with a doctor, nannying his children. The singer would drive to the doctor’s neighborhood to lurk across the street in the hopes of seeing her, of confirming she was all right. He never knew if I was a boy or a girl. He only knew I was born in June.

He joined the Army, went to Europe, but not Vietnam. He was lucky, because in 1969 not many 19-year-old boys avoided the jungle. He fell in love with a Brit, had a child–a son. They broke up. He moved home, dealt with addiction, kept writing music and singing. He lived in Denver for a long time, not far from me, until settling down in Alabama and finding Jesus.

When I was a kid I would lay in my bed and make up stories about how my real parents met, how they were torn apart and forced to leave me in the hospital. I imagined my mother was a beautiful princess, and that I looked just like her. I am pale with hazel eyes. My family is dark. Family pictures are like that Sesame Street game: Which of these things is not like the other.

When I was 10, my mom mentioned she had a little information about my birthparents, but she didn’t think I was ready to have it. I knew it had to be in the gunmetal gray lockbox hidden on their closet’s top shelf. When I had opportunity, I pulled my mom’s vanity chair over, climbed up and took the box down. Inside, among my dad’s Army medals, was a yellowing piece of paper folded in thirds. Typed on that page was everything known about who made me. I devoured the words: Mother-5-7, 115 pounds, strawberry blonde hair, brown eyes, liked to read and swim. High school graduate. Ancestry: English and French. Father-6-0, 180 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, an artist and high school graduate. Ancestry: Slavak and Scot.

I remember how smooth the paper felt under my fingertips, how the typewriter keys had struck the paper unevenly, how the ink was slightly smeared. The paper was creased, as if it hadn’t been unfolded in years. It hadn’t been.

I stole it, along with my adoption papers. I hid them in my American Heritage Dictionary under M for Mother. For mine. For me. I took them out from time to time, running my fingers along each short bit of information. My mother liked reading. I liked reading too! My father was an artist. I, too, would become an artist then. The paper became my most prized possession.

But it couldn’t answer the question I most needed to have answered: did my real mother love me? I deserved to know. I had a right to know, I declared, sobbing one day in my sophomore French class. But the State of Colorado had sealed my records. I was not allowed to know who she was, where she was, if she loved me, if she was even alive. I made a pact with myself that I would never have a child until I found her. And I kept it.

I didn’t know about the yellow blanket then. Now I do, because my birthmother told me about it in a letter she sent after I found her in 2001. She asked me if I had it, and I don’t, and I want it so desperately–but not as desperately as I want to have a relationship with her. She is skittish, uneven. She sends birthday cards with crisp $100 bills. I use the money for things that nourish me, that make me feel alive. And she sometimes sends empty replies to my emails. I save them all in a folder. I read them on Mother’s Day.

She keeps her distance. I want to chase her, but I am so afraid she will run again, and that I will lose her if I do. So I let her be, let her set the parameters of our relationship. Because when she sends me those cards, she thanks me for having her in my life. And she signs them Love, Laura.

This post was inspired by a post written by Catherine of Her Bad Mother, Lost Boy, which she read at the Blogher 2009 Community Keynote.