I don’t know anyone who looks like me.
I used to stare at family photos and search my parents’ faces for any hint of resemblance to mine.
But there is none. I’m adopted, and my white American parents with their German-English-Scottish-Irish ancestry do not have my almond-shaped brown eyes, high cheekbones, dark brown silky hair or typical flat, round Filipino nose.
I was born in 1988 in Valenzuela, a city in the Metro Manila area, the capital region of the Philippines. Sonya and Vernon Westerman adopted me from a nearby orphanage 10 months later, and I moved to their home in rural western Kentucky, halfway around the world. They had wanted children but had trouble conceiving for years. They decided to adopt from the Philippines, in part because there were already three adopted Filipinos in my extended family. It was the late 1980s, and international adoptions into the U.S. were on a decades-long rise.
Two years after my adoption, their first biological son, my brother John Paul, was born, and two years after that, my brother Eric.
Eric takes after my mom’s side. John looks like my dad. For them, looking at our parents was like instant proof of where they came from. I was about 8 when I decided I wanted that, too. Maybe if I found my birth mom, I would finally be able to see my face in someone else’s.
Some years later, I set my sights on 30 as the age I would search for my birth mother. I imagined I’d be mature enough to handle what has been billed just about everywhere — in movies, books and news stories — as a huge life-changing event.
But what happens when it’s not?
‘Filling that void’
I knew the background of my adoption — or at least the story told to my family by the nuns at the Heart of Mary Villa, a home for unwed mothers and the orphanage I was adopted from. HMV said my birth mother was young and poor when she got pregnant so she decided to relinquish me so I could have a chance at a better life. I also had adoption papers with her name, the hospital where I was born and her last-known address. To read more from Ashley Westerman, click here.