Christy Kilgore-Hadley had never known the story of how she was born.

In September 2007, she met with her birth mother for the first time.

Kilgore-Hadley, 30, was adopted as a baby.

While growing up, Kilgore-Hadley, a graphic designer for Eastern in marketing and communications, said her parents were always open about her adoption.

Her father, John Kilgore, a professor of English at Eastern, said he never hid the fact that she was adopted.

“As soon as she could pronounce the word, she was saying it,” her father said.

Last week marked the end to National Adoption Awareness Month.

Kilgore-Hadley said 99 percent of the time, she did not think about how she was adopted but at times, she was curious and wondered what her birth parents looked like.

That curiosity led Christy to search for her birth parents when she was about 18 or 19.

While at Eastern, Kilgore-Hadley decided to find her birth mother.

Her parents had her birth mother’s maiden name and her location when she was born.

Kilgore-Hadley’s birth mother’s last name was unusual, which aided in her search.

This was in 1997 – the days before Google – in the early years of the Internet.

Kilgore-Hadley said there was not much information online. She began searching for her birth mother’s name elsewhere and found names of people who lived in the same area.

She tried calling one of the names she found. It was her birth mother’s cousin.

This then led to her calling her birth mother’s parents.

“I actually called my biological grandparents, and that was really crazy because I didn’t know if they knew or anything,” Kilgore-Hadley said. “So, at first, I just said, ‘I’m an old friend of Sharon’s’ and tried to play it off like that, like I was a detective or something.”

She said they were rightly suspicious but once she told the truth, they were more than willing to let her have her birth mother’s phone number.

Now that it was actually time to talk to her mother, Kilgore-Hadley said she was nervous.

“I didn’t really know how to feel about it because you don’t have anything to base that on,” she said. “If you’re nervous about a job interview, you can kind of relate that to other times you’ve had situations like that, even if it’s your first job interview.”

Both Kilgore and his wife, Dolly, were there when Christy made the call to her birth mother, Sharon Gritsko-Nichols, of Texas.

Kilgore said Kilgore-Hadley wanted her mother to make the call for her. Dolly made the first call, but got Gritsko-Nichols’ machine.

Kilgore suggested his daughter call the answering machine so she could hear what her birth mother’s voice sounded like.

“Christy thought that’d be a cool idea, so she picked up the phone and placed the call and all of a sudden her face just went white,” Kilgore said. “She said, ‘Mom, she’s answering!’ and gave (the phone) to Dolly.”

Kilgore said Dolly had been playing the “calm-guiding parent figure,” but after she took the phone and said, “Hello,” she burst into tears and could not speak for nearly a minute.

After gaining composure, Dolly was able to tell Gritsko-Nichols who they were. She said she would be happy to talk to Kilgore-Hadley.

Gritsko-Nichols said their first phone conversation was very exciting.

“I never knew what her parents had named her, so just knowing her name was exciting to me,” she said. “I loved hearing her voice. It was cool that her phone voice is so much like my sister’s voice.”

Gritsko-Nichols, 52, was also relieved that Kilgore-Hadley was not angry with her. That had been one of her fears.

The two decided to meet in September.

Gritsko-Nichols, a bookkeeper and office manager, said she was nervous and worried about what to wear that day.

“I was finally going to actually hold and touch the little baby girl I gave up for adoption 30 years ago,” Gritsko-Nichols said. “The feelings are more than I can put into words.”

She said she will never forget when she held and hugged her daughter for the first time because it was “the most awesome thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

“Oddly enough, at the same time, I had this unexpected sense of relief,” Gritsko-Nichols said. “I hadn’t realized it, but I never really accepted that she was truly safe until I was able to actually touch (her) for myself.”

Kilgore-Hadley said she was also nervous and did not expect for it to be as comfortable as it was.

“I thought it would be like, you’d get there, and you’d eat dinner, and then you’d just be staring at each other for an hour,” she said. “But, I mean, we talked the whole time, and there was a lot of weird little quirky things that we had in common that you wouldn’t even think of.”

They are both “chapstick addicts.”

“I have it stashed all over the house, in my car and I always say I’m like an alcoholic with chapstick; I’ve got it hidden everywhere,” Kilgore-Hadley said. “And she’s the same way with chapstick.”

During the visit, Kilgore-Hadley was able to learn about why she was put up for adoption.

Gritsko-Nichols said it was the hardest decision she ever had to make.

Now that Kilgore-Hadley has two kids of her own, she respects her birth mother even more because of how unselfish it was.

“It’d be really easy to do what you want to do in the moment and keep the baby whether or not it’s the best thing,” Kilgore-Hadley said “And to be in that kind of situation and still be thinking of what’s best for a child, rather than what’s best for yourself, is a pretty incredible decision.”

Gritsko-Nichols was 21 years old when she learned she was pregnant.

She said her thoughts were only of what would be best for the baby growing inside her. She said it was not a time to think about her feelings.

“I had to fight against the voice of that selfish woman inside my head – the

voice (that) was telling me to think of ‘me, me, me,'” Gritsko-Nichols said. “It was a familiar voice – one I’d been listening to, and acting on, for years.

“I was quite comfortable with its sound. But now, probably for the first time in my life, I truly understood how important it was to fight against that voice.”

Gritsko-Nichols said she developed a mantra and repeatedly asked herself, “What is best for the child?” to help her get through the difficult times.

“Financially, and, more importantly, emotionally, everything was so wrong in my life that it would have been extremely selfish of me to bring a child into my screwed up world,” Gritsko-Nichols said.

Meanwhile, Kilgore, then a 25-year-old graduate student in California, and Dolly, then 28, wanted to start their own family, but Kilgore said that was beginning to look as if that might never happen.

They looked into adoption, but there was a four-year waiting list.

However, a friend of Kilgore’s family had adopted children as a single mother. They talked to her to see if she could help them with a private adoption.

Nothing could be done at the moment for them, so Kilgore said they forgot about it until four or five months later when the phone rang. It was their friend, asking if they were still interested in adopting.

That was in April 1977, and Kilgore-Hadley came along in July.

“It was like instant parenthood,” Kilgore said. “We went from being not-parents to parents awfully quick there. We didn’t have that nine-month line up.”

Kilgore-Hadley said she is well aware she could have ended up anywhere, but she got the family she did.

“I feel very really connected to my family because I know that it wasn’t inevitable that I was a member of their family,” she said. “I know that there’s a million different ways that it could have gone.”

This is part of the reason why when Kilgore-Hadley married, she decided to hyphenate her name and not take her husband’s name.

“I wasn’t just born into that name, so it was important to me to keep that,” she said.