My letter from Cheri

My first letter from Cheri was a pretty long one with lots of tear drops on it. She told me about herself and her family, she is the oldest of 9 kids and has two sons. She had been divorced for a about 4 years and her oldest son was almost exactly one year younger than me and her youngest was 5 years younger than me.
After she had given me up for adoption she had started dating a guy that she knew and they were married 6 months after she had me. She had my brother Eric 6 months later.
She also told me that my grandmother had been pregnant with her 9th child at the same time she was pregnant with me. Her parents offered to raise me but Cheri felt it would be to hard on them to do that, her mom was having a hard time with this pregnancy. After she started showing she went away to a "home for unwed mothers", which she doesn't like to talk about too much, then she went back to her life.
Now the adult in me knows that was probably the hardest thing she ever had to do and the strength it took to do that was more than I would have had. But the child in me feels "how could she give me away!" There's a lot of child vs adult feelings that have to go with being an adoptee. My brain feels one thing and my heart another. I don't think that I will ever feel differently, it's been all this time and it doesn't go away. The child in me feels she took the easy way out, get rid of the problem and go on with life like nothing ever happened. As a women and mother I know that she couldn't help but think about me every day and the pain never went away. Having my brother right away only made her constantly see what she was missing in my life, first steps, first words. I wonder if my brother ever felt like he was a replacement when he found out about me??? My brothers were great right from the start, they were so happy to find out they had a sister and my brother Eric was actually the first one I talked to on the phone.
After my mom got married they moved to Arkansas then to Florida, so when "we found each other" she was living in Florida and me in Michigan. We kept writing to each other and finally I got up the nerve to call her on the phone, boy was that first time ever scary and emotional! After that first conversation we would talk to each other for hours getting to know each other. She told me her mom had died about 5 years earlier of cancer and that her mom had told her sisters that they needed to help Cheri find her daughter. Most of her family still lived in Michigan and she would visit a few times a year, they lived in a small town about 2 1/2 hours from me. This all started in September and we decided we would meet in person for the first time when she came to Michigan for Christmas........