Love Has a Long Memory

What Adoption Leaves Behind — and What Love Restores

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was searching long before I ever knew how to look.

Adoption has a quiet way of shaping you. It doesn’t always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it shows up as a question you don’t know how to ask, or an ache you can’t quite name. I was adopted — and so were all of my sisters. We were scattered before we ever had the chance to know one another, connected by blood but separated by circumstance.

I was about two years old when I was adopted.

Years later, my daughter Angie was taken by the State before she was even two years old.

I didn’t understand the weight of that parallel right away, but my body did. It remembered what my mind could not yet explain — the rupture, the confusion, the sudden absence of what should have been constant. Some separations leave no visible scar, but they mark you all the same.

My life growing up wasn’t especially gentle. My adopted father was good to me — and I thank God for him — but my adopted mother was not. I learned early to stay quiet. To be agreeable. To read the room before I spoke.

I learned that safety could change without warning, that order could be demanded in the middle of chaos, and that perfection was often expected without mercy. Those lessons settle into a child’s body and stay there, long after childhood has passed.

Because of that, fear took root early in my life. Not just fear for myself — but fear for the child I would one day lose.

So when Angie was gone, the question that haunted me wasn’t where is she?
It was who is raising her?

What if the woman caring for my daughter was cruel and unkind?
What if Angie was learning the same things I had — to stay small, to stay silent, to make herself easy to live with just to survive?

That fear followed me for years.

My sisters — Teresa, Helen, Carolyn — and I were all adopted out. We were told something that still echoes painfully in my memory: that our mother didn’t love us, didn’t care what happened to us, that she gave us away like a litter of puppies. Those words weren’t just an explanation — they became a story we were expected to believe about ourselves.

So when Angie was taken, those lies came rushing back. I wasn’t just grieving the loss of my daughter — I was grieving her safety, her tenderness, her chance at being loved well.

I searched for her for years.

Sometimes the search was active — phone calls, paperwork, closed doors. Sometimes it was quiet — a prayer whispered into the dark, a name spoken softly when no one else could hear. I told myself not to hope too hard. I told myself to accept what I couldn’t change. But a mother’s heart doesn’t obey logic. It waits. It watches. It remembers.

For a long time, nothing happened.

Then, in September of last year, everything changed.

After decades of wondering, Angie and I found each other.

There are moments in life that don’t need embellishment — they carry their own weight. Finding my daughter again was one of them. I don’t remember every word we said, but I remember how my hands shook, how my breath caught, how the years collapsed into a single moment of recognition. Love doesn’t forget its own.

Now, almost a year later, it still feels miraculous.

We hardly go a day without talking. Angie comes to spend the evening with me almost every Thursday, and those nights have become sacred to me. Sometimes we talk about the past. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we sit quietly, just sharing space — making up for time that was taken from us.

Finding Angie didn’t erase the pain of what was lost.
But it gave that pain somewhere safe to rest.

To my daughter:
You were never forgotten. You were never unloved. Not for a single day.

To my sisters — and to the little girls we once were — the story we were told was never the truth. Love didn’t abandon us. It was interrupted.

And to the mothers still waiting, still searching, still carrying hope quietly:
Please know this — love has a long memory. It survives systems, silence, and time. Sometimes it takes years to find its way back, but when it does, it arrives whole.

What I know now — what I didn’t know then — is that love is not erased by paperwork or silence or time. It doesn’t disappear because someone tells you a different story about yourself. Love can be delayed. It can be buried. It can be misunderstood. But it is stubborn, and it remembers where it belongs. Somehow, against every fear I carried, it found its way back to both of us.

I don’t believe anymore that the years we lost were wasted. Painful, yes — but not wasted. I believe God held what I could not, guarded what I feared would be broken, and returned it to me when I was finally ready to receive it. What I once thought was gone forever was never beyond His keeping.

And this is the truth I am learning to say without shame:
I did the best I could with what I knew and what I had — and love did the rest.

Some stories take years to unfold — if you’re still waiting on yours, please know that hope has not forgotten you.