When Maine state Sen. Paula Benoit got a bill passed last year, she got more than a new law: She found pieces of her past.

For years, Benoit, 52, had wondered about the parents who had put her up for adoption. That helped lead her to support a plan to give adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates. After the bill passed, Benoit learned the names of her birth parents and their hometown. She e-mailed a colleague, Sen. Bruce Bryant, who represents that area and supported her bill, and asked whether he knew them.

His reply: The deceased couple were his grandparents.

“Oh, for the love of God, I need to call him and say, ‘I’m your aunt,’ ” Benoit recalls thinking. “Can the world be any smaller?”

…

“For 52 years, I know I’ve been loved,” Benoit says of her adoptive parents, who are alive and support her desire to know birth relatives. Even so, she says, she wondered whom she looked like. She wondered why, despite diet after diet, she couldn’t lose weight. “Does obesity run in my family?” she’d ask herself.

“This is really about identity and the truth of a human being’s existence,” Darryl McDaniels, known as the rapper DMC, told lawmakers last month in New Jersey, where bills to open birth records have languished for decades. McDaniels, 43, learned at 35 that he was adopted and has since backed a bill to unseal birth certificates.

“We never start a book from Chapter 2,” he said. “As adoptees, we live our lives from Chapter 2.”

from As adoptees seek roots, states unsealing records

 

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