It’s not hyperbole to say I’ve never seen a book quite like Megan Culhane Galbraith’s extraordinary hybrid work of creative nonfiction, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book. Experimental in form and structure, it’s memoir, but at the same time a striking visual art project, an intellectual inquiry into the nature of memory, and a frightful window on the failures and brutalities of the American system of adoption.

While each aspect is equally compelling, the emotional heart of the book is the origin story of a girl who had three mothers before she was half a year old and the experience of the woman she grew to be, who, only during her own pregnancy, was overwhelmed by need to know her history and learn about her first mother.

It’s written in a powerful voice that can veer from playful to mournful and lingers on wonder and curiosity. The language at turns is discursive, fragmented, stream of conscious, and deeply thoughtful. Although Galbraith expresses a unique sensibility, adoptees and others who have yearned to know about their origins will see themselves here. The author’s meditations on the nature of identity, her compulsion toward self-erasure, and her fear of abandonment likely will resonate.

Here, the author shares an excerpt from this exceptional book, which will be released on May 21, 2021. You can support Indie booksellers and pre-order The Guild of the Infant Saviour at bookshop.org.

BKJShe was nineteen when she gave birth to me. I’d lost my virginity when I was nineteen.

She was a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin. I’m a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin.

On the pages, in her halting and nearly unintelligible penmanship, I was struck by how much I identified with her. Even her handwriting resembled mine.

TALENTS, HOBBIES, SPECIAL INTERESTS
very organized
good singing voice
interest in the arts, dancing (ballet + modern)
acting, writing poetry, reading

FUTURE ASPIRATIONS
To be a magazine editor

———

It is incredible how few concrete details I needed to feel connected across time. We shared a mutual love of books, music, and dance. I’d begged my parents to let me play the violin beginning in fourth grade. I’d danced with The Royal Academy of Dance up until high school, written poetry, fiction, and essays, and spent so much time reading in solitude that my adoptive mother once asked, “Honey, don’t you want to go outside and play?”

On my father’s side, she’d listed no age, just that he was Caucasian and English. He was more than six feet tall with blue eyes, blond hair, and fair skin. In the sections for his interests and aspirations she noted:

TALENTS, HOBBIES, INTERESTS: ?
FUTURE ASPIRATIONS: ?

I began to think about who I was at nineteen—a virgin for starters—and how incomprehensible it would have been to become a mother when my own future felt like it was just beginning.

———

MANNER IN WHICH PLANS FOR THE CHILD’S FUTURE WERE MADE BY THE PARENTS. REASONS FOR CHILD BEING PLACED FOR ADOPTION:

Since the birth mother is unwed, she is receiving no support from the birth father and thinks it best for the child to be adopted by a stable, loving family to best offer the child all the advantages she is unable to give.

———

She didn’t receive prenatal care until she was five months pregnant according to the paperwork. And he was no saint, but she also seemed forthright and unashamed.

———

DRUGS TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY

Alcohol:                                        AMOUNT: an occasional beer                                        HOW OFTEN: once/twice a week

Marijuana:                                    WHEN: first 4–5 months                                                 AMOUNT: total about 1 oz.

Cigarettes:                                   WHEN: throughout                                                          AMOUNT: 10–15/daily

———

She’d updated the paperwork within the last ten years. Her mother, my grandmother, had taken a drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES) during her pregnancy. DES was a synthetic form of estrogen given to women between 1940 and 1971 to prevent miscarriage. The daughters of women who used DES were forty times more likely to develop cancers of the cervix and vagina.

Medical terminology deemed them “DES Daughters.”

The drug’s side effects were known to skip a generation, meaning, they may have affected me—or worse my unborn child. Late-onset and irregular periods were one side effect for DES granddaughters like me. I didn’t get my period until I was sixteen: my biological mother got hers at around eleven. Other risks included infertility, cancer, congenital disabilities, and “fewer live births.”

I worked myself into a frenzy about this. I called my doctor; I demanded they double-check the health of my baby. I went to the library and researched the effects and side effects of DES. After I’d calmed myself, what struck me most was that my birth mother had cared enough to update my file.

One of my biggest fears about finding her was that she wouldn’t want to be found. But here she’d left a medical clue in these papers that signaled she was thinking about me. She’d left a Hansel and Gretel-like trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, as if willing me to find her.

So I did.

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2017, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Redivider, Catapult, Hobart, Longreads, and Hotel America, among others. She is associate director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Look for her on Twitter, on Instagram here and here, and on Facebook here and here. 

By Jen CarraherThere are moments in our lives when the coincidences of being a human in an often-discordant world can feel overwhelming. In the early 2000s, as a young graduate student, I examined the (then-new) assisted reproductive technologies and ideas of relatedness: how material (flesh and blood) and information (genes) are used to help define different anthropological kin structures. In short, I somewhat blindly argued that the primacy of the biological part of relatedness could be surmounted through “different” ways of relating to define family. In hindsight, it was complacent to exclude the biological from my anthropological study of family. Little did I know that almost 15 years later my life would collide with these notions, head-on.

In late December 2020, I discovered through an at-home DNA test (gifted to me by one of my kin, nonetheless!) that I share no biological or genetic link with the man who, for 47 years, I believed to be my father. What’s more, the man with whom I do share half of my genetic material—and a remarkable physical likeness—has, for my entire life, been living with his family just miles away from my hometown and from the group of people I have always called my kin.

There’s an idea in anthropology that kinship is a mutuality of being: kin are intrinsic to one another’s identity and existence. The relational nature of kinship, traditionalists argue, lies in the fact that all those who are “related” are connected through the lineage of the mother and the father and, therefore, share traits and qualities that can be traced through these parental origins: biological, cultural, communal, genetic. Such ideas of relatedness, which were once seen as fundamental, came under scrutiny in the 2000s as deterministic. Cultural critics argued kinship as outmoded altogether, particularly in light of assisted reproductive technologies such as invitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination, gamete donation, and surrogacy. Today, however, the centrality of kinship to relatedness has been brought back to life, likely influenced by DNA testing. I’ve wondered lately whether this is because understanding ways of relating has come full-circle and we now recognize that while kinship and relatedness can be all-encompassing, the “intrinsic” nature of biology is still fundamental to a person’s identity? As an adult who inadvertently uncovered her misattributed parentage, I would argue that this is absolutely the case.

It is the nature of our progressive and progressing society to believe that we can surmount such simple notions as biological relatedness. But the fact that social, cultural, and biological ties are intricately woven together into the fabric of our selves is crucial to understanding our essence as human beings. We are social animals, but we are closely tied in both familial and biological ways to those with whom we share our DNA. That’s not to say that other forms of relating are not of equal significance; but when I speak with other NPEs about our fundamental nature, I’m struck by the way in which every single person describes the gap between the familial/cultural/social identity and the biological/genetic self. It is remarkably common, in fact an almost universal sentiment, for NPEs to express a feeling of growing up with a lack of connectedness, a feeling of otherness, a clandestine identity as an outsider looking in … even in the happiest of families.

There’s a misconception that discovering the parent by whom one was raised is not one’s biological parent is simple. The argument goes something like: “The parent who raised you did so because he loved you like his own child, regardless of his relatedness to you.” I don’t know how many times since my DNA discovery I have been faced with the “What’s the big deal?” response. Such fallacies, that one’s relationship to the person who raised you somehow supersedes the absence of the person who made you is a painful mistake I, too, made so many years ago. Because the nature of having a misattributed parent means, by default, the relatedness to the person responsible for our being has been erased, we forever live with the knowledge that the person responsible for our creation may not even be aware of our existence. The psychological effects of that erasure permeate all aspects of a life, even before we understand why.

Obviously, a large part of this feeling of erasure cannot be separated from the fact that the relatedness (or lack thereof) has been kept secret. It’s hard to tease out whether the intrinsic biology of kinship or the underlying secrecy is the culprit for the loss-of-self articulated by so many NPEs. Who we imagine ourselves to be and who were are come into stark contrast when our true biological and genetic roots are revealed and we are brought right back to the traditional idea of kinship: kin are intrinsic to each other’s identity and existence.

The fundamental conundrum of who we are should never be denied by “objective” academic observers or obscured by insensitive assumptions like those I made years ago. We actively seek kinship narratives to define who we are. When the biological understanding and the social construct of the family come in direct opposition to one another, we are forever changed. All of the stories we have told ourselves about who we are, how we were made, where we come from, and who we hope to be are altered forever. There’s a new kinship forged through a knowing that was lost to us long ago. There are stories we have told ourselves that make us who we are, and we have to find new ways of relating, new stories to tell ourselves, as Joan Didion famously wrote, in order to live.

*NPE = not parent expected, or non-paternal eventJen Carraher lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is an advanced practice nurse in a busy community hospital. She is also a medical sociologist who has worked extensively over the past 20 years in women’s health, assisted reproductive technologies, and the social studies of science. With her sisters and brother, Carraher grew up in northwestern Montana; she uncovered her misattributed parentage in December while helping her mother, who is adopted, find her own biological father. After her DNA discovery, Jen began a podcast entitled Unfinished Truths and hopes to use the stories she is collecting to reimagine kinship through the NPE experience. Connect with her at unfinishedtruths@gmail.com and read her previous work on kinship through ResearchGate.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Richard Wenzel“My mother believed in me, and because of that, I believe in myself. And I really can’t think of a greater gift that a parent can give their child.” Those words ended my eulogy, so I stepped down from the podium and solemnly returned to my seat. Later, as I mingled among the crowd, quite a few people praised my remarks. While kind words are standard at funerals, their comments seemed heartfelt and genuine. I thanked them, adding that praising my mother came easy because of my strong, life-long bond with her, a bond that would be her legacy forever.

“Forever” lasted 16 years, ending the day my mother reached up from the grave and wrought emotional ruin on the living, particularly me.

I distinctly remember being 11-years-old when my dad heartlessly embarrassed me at a school event. Being at odds with my father was commonplace during my childhood and peaked during my teenage and college years, after which I largely eliminated him from my life. As a child, I recognized fundamental differences between myself and my dad. I looked nothing like him. He was athletic, I was not. I excelled academically, whereas he had struggled as a student. The list goes on. When I returned home after the embarrassing school event with tears in my eyes, I bluntly howled at my mom, “How is he my dad when I’m nothing like him and he’s nothing like me?” “He’s your dad, just try to forgive him,” she replied. Over the next quarter century, I asked her some version of that question on dozens of occasions, sometimes in a calm voice, sometimes in harsh tones through gritted teeth. She always responded with some version of that same answer. For some reason I just accepted her words rather than taking my question toward a logical conclusion, probably because I never realized that trusting your mother was fraught with risk.

Today, I know her answers were lies. Presumably well-intentioned, but calculated deception nevertheless. I cannot condone dishonesty, but I might forgive her for lying to me when I was an impressionable 11-year-old. But she lied to me when I was in my 20s, past the age when I needed her protection. And she lied when I was in my 30s, when I had attained a level of stability, independence, and success that her life never had. I will not forgive those transgressions. Where is the inflection point between my mother’s lying being a misguided protection of her child (and herself) from embarrassment and her lying being a selfish, unkind act of cowardice toward her adult son? Frankly, I believe that upon my 18^th birthday my mother should have been criminally charged for having knowingly falsified a legal document—my birth certificate. Imagine a world where parents and their enablers face legal consequences for their DNA identity deceptions! Unknowingly, I’ve been her criminal accomplice; over the years information I wrote on critical documents such as family medical history questionnaires or life insurance applications was fiction, even though I believed it to be true at the time.

I was not my mother’s only secret. When I was 8-years-old and already had two younger siblings, she gave birth again, immediately placed the child for adoption, and then spent the remainder of her life pretending that event never occurred. Other adults—my dad, aunts, uncles, and family friends—kept silent as well. I stayed silent too, as I’d been conditioned to do. To this day, I regret my blind obedience and lack of inquiry, as I will never know why my mother chose different fates for me and my sibling. Attempting to rectify this error, about a year ago I submitted my DNA test.  The results did not reveal my sibling, but I will keep searching. The results did, however, provide an unexpected-yet-not-entirely-surprising discovery—confirmation that my dad is not my biological father. A few months later, I discovered my biological father’s identity. Unfortunately, he, too, died years ago.

Great, just great.

Like any rational person uncovering the lies of their existence, I have many questions for my biological parents, the two people ‘at the scene of the crime,’ so to speak. I wish to ask my mother:

What happened? 

How and when did you two meet? 

Did my biological father know a baby resulted? 

Why did you falsely tell my dad that I was his child? And maintain this charade for decades? 

Why did you never tell me the truth, even though you repeatedly told me how proud you were of me and how mature, responsible, and successful I was?

Actually, my conception may have been a crime: circumstantial evidence suggests that my mother was sexually assaulted. Since the alleged perpetrator and his victim now reside in the afterlife, I’m left to ponder whether I am the product of a rape. How can I remain angry at my mom’s dishonesty and offer her compassion for her trauma? Try falling asleep while such questions bounce through your head. I have no choice but to do so.

My mother had 35 years to find the fortitude to share the truth, a difficult truth, to be sure. Yet she never offered her important words, not even a deathbed confession. For her sake, I wish she would have spoken up; among other harms, she denied herself the catharsis she might have found in honest expression.

Being an NPE sucks! Being among the NPEs whose biological parents are dead at the time of discovery sucks even more! I have empathy for and jealousy toward other NPEs who complain about their arguments with their parents (or in some instances, parent). I yearn to have an argument with my mother, but that opportunity is literally buried underground. I would be grateful to simply meet my biological father, just once, let alone hear his version of this story. But he now exists only in someone else’s memory.

My mom was a strong, intelligent woman I admired. How do I reconcile my memory of her with the truth I now possess? How do I mourn, why should I mourn, can I mourn for my biological father, a man I never knew? My mother’s dishonesty denied me the right to know the authenticity of my existence and so much more.

Sorry Richard, your mom’s dead, your dad too, and they took all the answers with them. So, toughen up and just move on. 

I am trying. What choice do I have?Richard Wenzel grew-up in Illinois, working hard and joyfully playing on his family’s farm with siblings and friends. A health care professional by training, he’s turned his healing skills inward since learning his true DNA heritage. To help raise awareness about NPEs, he writes and speaks whenever opportunities arise and was recently a contributor to the podcast NPE Stories. You can contact him at lone.tree.road.npe@gmail.com.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more essays and articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
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• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
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By Candace CahillFor years I kept his blue baby blanket in the bottom right-hand drawer of my dresser.

I stole it from the hospital.

I remember lifting it to my face and noting the sharp odor of sour milk mingled with the intoxicating scent of baby. Without a thought, I slipped the soft, waffle-like material into my brown paper sack.

When I got home, alone and hollowed out, I curled into a fetal position with the blanket bunched up like a pillow and cried.

I refused to wash it, hoping to hold on to what little remained.

In fragile moments, those times I couldn’t pretend anymore, I’d pull it out to hide my face and collect my tears. When the storm passed, I’d fold and tuck it away, careful to nestle his first pacifier and hospital identification bracelet, the one with the name I gave him on it, into the center, like eggs in a nest.

Now, thirty years later, that blanket cradles the other keepsakes I have of him. Pages of handwritten updates from his early life. A collection of school pictures and snapshots from vacations and holiday parties with his adopted family. A construction paper daisy chain. And now, his funeral program and a favorite stuffed animal, Scrappy, handed over by his adopted dad as an offering of solidarity.

Over the years, the blanket faded from baby-blue to the color of glacial ice, and my tears washed away his scent.

All that remains is the stale smell of sadness.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about and essays by NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.