Slow down, you move too fast

What a whirlwind this is turning out to be! So much has happened, and so quickly, that I hardly know where to start. I want to tell you all what's going on, even though I can hardly believe it myself.

There are people who are associated with the group (OBC for ME) who volunteer their time to help people separated by adoption find their biological family members. They call them Search Angels. These people have access to a myriad of databases - old phone directories, social security, driver's license databases, marriage and death records, as well as a bunch of databases that I didn't even know existed until now.

Over the weekend, I decided to put my information out to the search angels. My thought was that it probably took months; after all, there are hundreds of people with any given name, and dozens of people here in Maine who all just got their original birth certificate. How quick could it possibly be?

It turns out, it might not be that long. Within 24 hours, I was starting to get emails from one of the searchers, then from two. They were working together, searching for my birth mother in every database they had. The first thing we found out was that it appeared that she got married, in Maine, almost exactly one year after I was born.

They also tracked her through census info and something called the Polk Directory and found the names of others living in the same household as the address she gave on my birth certificate. We almost certainly found relatives of hers who lived at her address in 1959, one year before my birth.

The information was coming fast and furious at this point. New last name. A second marriage. Another last name. Two daughters. Parents and grandparents. Driver's license with a physical description that matches. Evidence that she had a certain job, which matches my non-identifying info. Of course, none of this is confirmed - it's only certain that someone with her name existed at various points. It's kind of like following a trail of bread crumbs during a wind storm.

But, the final consensus of the search angels was that she's alive. And we've found her.

Oh my God. She may be alive and living only 40 minutes away. I have an address and a telephone number. The telephone number of my biological mother.

What the hell am I going to do now?

What I am not going to do is grab the phone and make a call. Not yet. I am planning to spend today attempting to confirm some of the info that I have. I'm headed to Portland to the library, where I can verify certain facts through phone directories and obituaries. I need time to process and need to feel a little more confident that I have the right person, although I may not be completely sure until she says, "it's me."

I know I'm not ready yet. I need some time to process all of this. I had no idea it could happen this fast. I know what you're all thinking - she's been waiting for 48 years already; why isn't she already on the phone? It's a good question. Anybody got a good answer?