For years, I tried to find my birth mother. I wrote letters. I called the social worker assigned to my search, hoping for anything, a name, a photo, a single fact to hold onto.
“Can you just tell me her name?” I pleaded.
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“No. I’m so sorry. But by law, I can’t,” she explained sympathetically. “Any information that is identifying cannot be relayed. But I can tell you two things from this file: She served in the military. And she was estranged from her family.”
“Estranged from her family? Can you tell me what that means exactly?”
“It says here that she was in foster care. That’s about all I can tell you,” she said. “I’ll keep the file open for a few extra months. Maybe we’ll hear back from her.”
There was never a response. The social worker closed the case. The named birth mother on the other side of the phone remained nameless on my side. It would be decades before I would allow my heart to try again.
Although being unable to connect with my past was difficult, it didn’t stop me from exploring my story in the present. I wrestled with how something so horrible — my conception in rape — could happen to my birth mother. I hoped the man who hurt her faced the justice he deserved. And I needed to help the world see that there’s no such thing as “unwanted.”
None of us can control the circumstances of our conception. None of us can control much of what happens in our lives, for that matter. God turns brokenness into breakthroughs all the time. How we rise when we’re faced with the seemingly insurmountable shows the true beauty and resilience of our humanity.
“I could never go through that. No way,” people often say about difficult things they can’t imagine having to navigate. But we are stronger than our circumstances, no matter the challenge or the person. It’s why we root for the underdog in a movie. We want to see impossible situations overcome and a once-broken spirit triumph over hurt and harm. We’re wired that way.
We live in a culture that says if you’re unplanned, you will be unwanted and unloved. It’s so untrue. It’s hard to combat the poisonous propaganda that devalues human life over circumstances none of us can control. Every human life has purpose, whether planned or unplanned, able or disabled. Yet too many pretend we can, and must, put limitations on just how valuable certain lives are.
The strength of a society is not in how it destroys the weak. It’s in how it defends the weak.
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I thank God for two parents who wanted me despite how I came to be. I can’t imagine growing up without any of my 12 siblings — take one person out of that frame of life, and it changes everything. Decades later, I’m forever grateful that the woman who gave me life didn’t remove me from it. That single, courageous decision sent ripples through time I’m still discovering today: biological family I searched for and finally found, decades after I was born, who told me, over and over, “we always loved you; we always wanted to know what happened to you.”
Everyone is wanted by someone. I am proof of that. So is every unplanned life the world is too quick to write off.
This is an adaptation from Ryan Bomberger’s new memoir, Should Have Been Aborted.
Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, international public speaker, and columnist. He was the first of 10 adopted in a diverse family of 15. Ryan’s the author of the brand new autobiography, “Should Have Been Aborted.” His books also include “Not Equal: Civil Rights Gone Wrong,” and the children’s books, “He is He” and “She is She.”