Nothing personal

In May 2018, thanks to Paola Klechman and Lorena Quiroga — who, like me, had their identities substituted and sold by Doctor Bartucca — I arrived at the doors of the Human Rights Office inside the Civil Registry of Buenos Aires. As I mentioned before, by that time Lorena and Paola had been searching for years, so it was thanks to their earlier efforts that I eventually met Mercedes Yañez. The Huma...

“What happened was a long time ago, Natalie. You’re the one who won’t let go of the past.” How I wish I could. Just let the past go. Be free, live in the here and now. My whole life—what now amounts to thirty years of therapy, thirty years of meditating, and seventeen in the twelve-step program—has been about trying to accept and let go. I can’t control the world, but I can take responsibility for...

Reaching out directly to the source of information about my illegal adoption would have probably been the most logical and sensible thing to do in this entire search. After all, I knew who they were—or at least who the person was that informed my mother of my existence. In fact, one of my best friends in Sweden, an Argentine son of exiles from the military dictatorship, gave me the idea, but I nev...

Romantic relationships are a reflection of the attachment model with which we relate to others. As I mentioned before, this model is based on how our parents, or those who raised us, showed or taught us to connect with them. That's why, first and foremost, it's important to put my story in context. It's also important to remember that this is only my personal experience and not the absolute truth....

The family that adopts us is our world. In that world, we live, we breathe, and we grow. They are our reference, our starting point, our home. There's no way that whatever our adoptive family does won't influence us.  Of course, it's important to remember that all families are different, all adopted individuals are different, all adoption situations are different, and all forms of relationshi...

Mercedes, like most of the people I crossed paths with in my search, with a couple of exceptions, initially treated me with a bit of distrust and distance. Almost as if she had said to me: "Did you come here to waste my time?" Sitting in her office, she showed me a stack of folders that were cases waiting to be picked up. "See that pile? Well, it's from people who came, left their birth certificat...

The DNA result of The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo was negative, and as the judge in charge of my case said: “This case is closed now”. Even though Claudia Carlotto told me that since technology continued to develop, there was still a chance that a relative could be found in their DNA bank, for me the path was now closed. After receiving the news on that 30th of March, 2016, I didn't want to know...

By 2016, the search had taken me to Dr. Bartucca, to the trafficking of babies, to the social consensus that makes everything possible, to the tyrannical reality that decides the fate of babies born to poor mothers in municipal hospitals, to people's impunity, to the fear of our adoptive parents of losing us, and the wound that comes with having been trafficked, sold like a pet. And  while we...

“Identity is a right Naty” “The truth about your origin is your right Natalie” From the outside it is so obvious, so clear. Especially for everyone who grew up knowing their biological origin. Every so often I come across a series or movie where one of the characters is adopted and shortly after the viewer is presented with that truth, the character goes in search of their biological origin. ...

“Your birth certificate is fake”, “your adoption is illegal”, “if they ask you at school, your mother is from  Argentina”. Since I was a little girl, they told me that I was adopted and that it had been an illegal adoption. According to what my parents said, the story was the following: A mother from my brother's kindergarten had told my mother that there was a baby who needed to be adopted,...

After seven years of not having any contact, we got in touch again thanks to social networks. He appeared on Facebook one day and we became friends there. At that time, 2009-2010, I was recovering from a burnout that left me isolated at home and from which I more or less rehabilitated little by little and with a lot of patience. One day I saw that Martin had posted something about the military dic...

One of the things that I never get tired of repeating is that , if there is something I have learned over time, it is that in life, things are not black and white, people are not simply good or bad. Life is not like a Hollywood movie, where the characters lack nuance and the bad guy is easy to spot from the beginning of the story. Reality and people are much more complex and are full of gray areas...

Since I first found out I was adopted, around the age of 5 or 6 years, every time the subject is brought up in any possible situation, what follows directly after is some kind of comment that tries to direct my perception of what happened at the beginning of my life to a place of non-importance – trying to normalize it. Needless to say, 99% of people who have done this, are not adopted and grew up...

Years passed and as I have said in previous episodes, when my mother died in 2013 and after hearing that one of her last wishes was for me to find my truth, always thinking that I was the daughter of the disappeared, I finally took the courage to speak to my dad. It was important for me to inform him what I was going to do, because of the consequences it would bring him. To my great surprise, his...

The day I went to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo my legs were shaking. I went there with a friend who held me the last few meters to the door of the building.  I made my “spontaneous presentation” at the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo-which basically means that I presented myself there saying that I had suspicions that I was the daughter of a disappeared person. Back in the days there were...

I grew up in a German middle class family in an area that’s called Martinez, San Isidro, Buenos Aires. Those who are from Buenos Aires know exactly what that means, but for those who are not from Buenos Aires here is a summary. San Isidro, located in the northern part of Buenos Aires, is known for being an area of ​​rich people, with European-English, German and French surnames, and for being very...

The relationship with my family was, in general, difficult. The relationship with my family during my search was particularly difficult. At my age, I have understood that we all do the best we can with what was given to us in this life and that it is impossible to give what you never received. So it was impossible for my parents to give what they never received A couple of years ago I asked my dad...

I have always felt an immense loneliness. The feeling that my life is a mistake and that I should never have been born has haunted me from a young age. I remember that sometimes at night I prayed to God to take me away and at the same time not wanting my family to know this, cause I didn’t want to make them sad. I never questioned myself feeling this way until I was 17. That's when I asked my pare...

In order to find something, you must first understand what you are looking for. And I don't think I understood what I was looking  for until I actually began knocking on doors. Doors behind which might reveal my biological mother. Our identity is not something permanent. There are components of our identity that are constantly changing. And there are also other components that don't change th...

In order to answer that, it is necessary to start by explaining what happened in 2015. After getting the call from the Argentine Embassy that the Argentine Foreign Ministry was looking for me, I panicked. Panic to the point that I did something I had never done before in my life. I called my boyfriend and told him crying: "They found me, they found me. Please come home." I'm not that kind of perso...

The simple answer would be in 2015, when The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo contacted me to leave my DNA, to see if there was a match with their DNA bank . For those who don’t know who they are, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a human rights organization with the goal of finding the children stolen and illegally adopted during the 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship. It happened like...