It was rush hour. My excitement registered on the speedometer. I kept the rear-view mirror cranked down to check and re-check myself every other moment. In retrospect I wonder how bad I could have possibly looked to her for this, this second glance at her firstborn. My hands were moist with that rare and exhausting mix of exhiliration, apprehension, and hope. Most of all hope.

Throughout my chidlhood I was matter-of-fact about the idea of having another mother out there somewhere. I remember fantasizing only once or twice that she was really one of my mother's friends, someone I'd known all along. When my father asked me, soon after my mother died, if I wanted to find my birthmother, my interest blossomed from its dormancy.

Since mine was an independent and open adoption, I had virtually no search. My birthmother's name was right there in the San Francisco white pages. I don't really remember what Liz and I talked about during that first phone call. I was floating through an unreal place, and our mundane chit-chat felt surreal in juxtaposition. The bottom line was the setting of our blind date.

Liz spotted me immediately as I walked into the restaurant. She had brought me a gardenia. We hugged awkwardly then talked - a lot. The content of that conversation has also faded from memory. It was beside the point. The point was to gaze at this woman and catch glimpses of my own face reflected back, not as in a mirror but ethereally, like through a lake or through enchanted eyes. That was an incredible high, a genealogical fix that would overshadow the negative aspects of our relationship in subsequent years. It was the heady rush of connection that would keep me coming back.

We went to her tiny apartment to spend the rest of the evening looking through scrapbooks. She showed me pictures of my half-siblings, who'd come shortly after her marriage, which'd come shortly after me. Alongside their pictures were pictures of me that Mom and Dad had sent her over the years.

Her story unspooled. She'd been dating my birthfather, had gotten pregnant, and neither of them wanted to get married. They weren't teenagers; she was 21, and he was 28. One day she poured out her story to a neighbor who happened to have two friends hoping to adopt.

Liz didn't think much of it until the neighbor showed up on her doorstep with Bee and her husband Bob. They all hit it off and soon made arrangements with a lawyer who was one of the pioneers of open adoption. Liz and Bee spent some time together. They chatted. They shopped for baby clothes. They had lunch at Blums. As Liz explained to me, "I was carrying you for Bee and Bob."

"After you were born, I held you once. You spit up on me, and I gave you back to Dr. Norris," she said, "and that was that. I never did believe in ownership of children."

I hated hearing that. I wanted to hear that it was excruciatingly painful for her to have me wrenched from her aching arms.

Over the following seven years, I fell in step with Liz as I'd done with all the other important people in my life. I picked up her tempo and danced to the tune she wanted to play. The song was always about her - her needs, her interests, her spaces which needed filling. My needs, my spaces - which were silently ravenous - were given virtually no attention.

I finally wrote her a long honest letter and eventually rescinded her invitation to my wedding. Thus our ties were once again severed, seven years after being reconnected. My only feeling then was one of relief. There was one less person to dance for.

Over the years, I came to learn about the caustic nature of broken ties. Ultimately I longed to connect with Liz once again. Inspired by a day at an adoption reform conference, I summoned my courage to telephone Liz. She was surprised and understandably cool. It had been ten years since she'd heard from me.

After covering the requisite material - such as the fact that she was a grandmother twice over - I told her how I'd been looking deeply at how adoption had affected me. I told her about the exciting healing work I was doing. I told her that I was finding great relief, even growth and joy. She coolly asked me to keep her apprised of my progress.

I immediately wrote her a long letter assuring her that I felt no blame towards anyone. I explained my deeply karmic view of my adoption, how I know it was part of what had brought me to exactly where I was meant to be.

Liz didn't respond for months. When she did, it was on a postcard which apologized for not writing. She wrote that "there've been no letters to anyone lately." To be reduced to just "anyone" felt like another kind of rejection, a dismissal of any kind of significance I might hold for her.

Was the feeling of anger towards her a present feeling for not responding to me as fully as I wished? Was it an ancient feeling from the past for giving me away? I think the answer is simply yes. To the unconscious mind, which is timeless and fluid, the past and present are super-imposed in a lifelong double-exposure.

I let Liz know that I wanted us to have a relationship again, but I wanted us both to be willing to honor how the experience of adoption had shaped us. Over several subsequent years of receiving only sporadic, brief postcards, I diagnosed that the prospect of reconnecting with her own relinquishment trauma was simply too terrifying for Liz.

I don't necessarily believe that anymore. I have come to understand that people process things differently. Perhaps the fact that she knew my adoptive parents made relinquishing me less painful. Perhaps her own psychological makeup provided a certain detachment that mitigated the ache of separation. Maybe she does, in fact, live with a veil of denial. Who knows?

I now accept that, for whatever reasons, letting me go was not the excruciating trauma for her that it is for many birthmothers. As much as that still annoys me on some deep level, I am gratefully able to embrace the reality - finally - that Liz really enjoyed her pregnancy with me and truly felt she was creating a gift for someone else.

Not a bad way to begin a life.

Marcy Wineman Axness writes and speaks internationally on the tapestry of issues that encompass adoption. Formerly an award-winning television news and documentary producer, Ms. Axness is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in the field of pre- and perinatal development.