Jen Wicki, like so many other children around the world, was given up at birth.
She lived with a foster family for 3 months before eventually being adopted. Because she was so young, Jen had no memories of these events.
When she finally learned about her adoption at 7-years-old, she was devastated.
After she learned the truth, Jen would constantly find herself wondering about her birth family:
“Who was my mother? Did she think about me? Did I have siblings? What were they like? Who did I look like?”
Jen became more serious about the search in her early 20s, after years of scanning faces in crowds.
She tried everything she could think of to find her birth mother, including posting viral photos, contacting the local news, and even signing up for DNA testing.
For two full years, Jen worked extensively at building her family tree by finding relatives who had similar ancestors. It was a long process, and Jen explains:
I narrowed down to 3rd great-grandparents pretty quickly, but we all have 32 of those! I still had a long way to go!
Eventually, with the help of an expert, Jen manages to identify who she believes to be her mother and birth siblings. She decides to contact her mother through a letter, ultimately writing and rewriting until the words come out right.
Jen’s certified letter arrived on April 9th, 2015, but her mother refused to sign for it, and it was ultimately sent back. So, Jen wrote another letter— But this one too was returned unopened.
Understandably, Jen felt rejected. She believed her birth mother was avoiding her and didn’t know what to do.
But, almost a month after her second letter is rejected, Jen received an alert on Facebook.
When she checked the notification, it was a message from her birth sister.
In her YouTube video, Jen describes how she felt in the moment:
“I was too anxious to comprehend what she had written, but I saw the words ‘my little sister’, ‘hardest decision of her life’, and ‘always loved you’.
The next day, Jen finally got to speaks to her birth mother for the first time. As it turns out, she was right. Her birth mother had been avoiding her, but not for the reasons she thought.
As Jen explains, “She was afraid that [the letters] said that I hated her.”
After their phone conversation, Jen and her family decide to make the 17-hour trip to Georgia to meet her family.
The reunion, 36 years in the making, is an emotional one which Jen describes as “surreal.”
According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, about 135,000 children are adopted in the US every single year.
And, in a study described by Adoption.com, 72% of adopted teens wanted to know why they were adopted, 65% wanted to meet their birth parents, and 94% wanted to know which birth parent they look like.
Unfortunately, not every adoption story ends as happily as Jen’s. But after years of searching, her hard work has finally paid off.
All her questions have been answered. And, in the end, she even found out who she looks like.
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