Amelia Young's Story

I was raised by a wonderful couple who are now my best friends, with the knowledge that I was adopted, and I always longed to know my birth parents. So, at 14, I dug through my adoption papers and found an old home phone number. I called it, and lo and behold, my birth mother answered (it was her mother’s house).

I flew to meet her and her three children shortly after that, and they met up with me a handful of times after that and kept up on social media, until my birth mother passed away about 7 years ago. Around the same time that I found her, the Internet was really taking off, and my birth father had once sent me a jacket from the radio station he worked at with his call name on it.

I searched it on the computer and found his personal website. His contact me section included the phrase “If you’re some random love child whose mother wants back child support, hit me up!” So I introduced myself as that random love child. It turned out that he and his partner had been looking for me for a couple years, and we formed a relationship that endures to this day.

My children (I have two… I love how they look like me, something I didn’t have growing up) call him Nonno. Being adopted has been one of the most defining aspects of my life. I love my parents infinitely, and I’m grateful to my birth parents for placing me with them.