By Aimee Seiff ChristianMy hair is unusual. Thick, coarse, wavy, and curly all at once. Every stylist I’ve ever gone to marvels at it, fears it, or both. People tell me they envy my tresses, but for most of my life I did not appreciate their tenacious temperament. Step outside in the summer humidity and poof, I am a dandelion, a big frizzy, fuzzy one. I leave souvenirs of myself everywhere: little fuzzles of hair, reminders that I sat in that seat, used that pillow case, or borrowed that jacket. My hair listens to no one and wants everyone to know it.

I’m adopted; I am boring brown hair brown eyes white skin, but in the guess where Aimee’s from-from game, my hair is always a special contestant, and no one ever surmises its origin. Least of all me.

The first time we played the game it went like this:

Neighborhood kid: Where are you from?

Me: Here.

Kid: No, I mean where are you from?

Me: Here. Queens. Jackson Heights.

Kid: No, I mean, where are you from-from?

Me: Oh. Well. I don’t really know.

Kid: Wait, what?

My parents have garden variety Jewish hair. You know. Basic. Brown. Like mine, but not. Fine. Straight. Even if I passed as their biological kid a lot of the time, people looked at me quizzically, touching my hair without permission, saying you sure didn’t get your hair from them!

There are pictures of me as a toddler with my hair in rollers. The night before school photos my mother would furiously comb and set and trim my bangs. In every single elementary school photo, my bangs are a line graph plotting steady progress from where she started just above one eyebrow across a series of cowlicks to where she ended on the other side of my face, some two inches higher. By middle school, I refused to let her anywhere near me when a camera was about. In high school I stopped brushing it altogether.

My hair became a stand-in for the rest of me. In elementary school was when things with my mother began to go awry. In middle school, she and I stopped talking. By high school, well, shit was bad, and it was not just my hair, which was down to my waist. I was studying art history and I joked to everyone that soon I’d look like Mary Magdalene emerging from the forest. When I shaved my head in defiance of not even I knew what, people started to worry.

When I reunited with my birth mother at 26, I saw she too had thick brown hair. In a photo she gave me of herself as a teenager, her hair was shiny, lush, and smooth, brushed out long over her shoulders. She was salt and pepper by the time she was 45, like I am now, but her hair, while thick and wavy, was less wild than mine. It responded to blow outs, perms, and keratin treatments. She looked like she just came from the salon up until the day she died. On the other hand, I looked like I’d never set foot in a salon. But at that point I hadn’t. Box dye, crimpers, Aussie Sprunch Spray, bandanas, clips, and backcombing all made my hair even more impossible than it already was. Over time I vowed to embrace the curl and the thickness and the rest, learning to go natural thanks to my Black friends and the internet. But it was harder than I expected. I wanted to look like my birth mother. I did. But my hair didn’t.

Turns out, she too had been adopted. Generations of adoption, I learned, are not uncommon. But this left me not knowing anything more about where I’m from-from with my birth mother in my life than without her. After she died, I spat in a cup and discovered I was only 25% Ashkenazi Jew. The rest of me was Northern European. All British and Irish.

When I met my birth father, it was like looking at the definition of a recessive gene: blond hair closely cropped to his head, blue eyes, left-handed. All the things I was not. But then he emailed me later, apropos seemingly of nothing:

Do you need to buy your baseball caps at the extralargebaseballcaps.com online store?

I have never worn a baseball cap, I responded. And I hate hats in general. They don’t stay on my head. My hair is too thick.

Well, you got that from me, he replied with a laughing emoji. Try that store.

I investigated. They sold about three ugly caps, so no thank you. But when I looked at him closely, I could tell that his very short, now white hair was coarse and feral with cowlicks. I recalled the blurry high school yearbook photo my birth mother had given me years before: a teenaged, cranky expression and a bushy, blond bob that refused to obey, pointing this way and that. His adolescent hair was just like mine.

I never would have guessed that my wild mane came from these roots, but that’s the irony of not knowing the answers to the where are you from-from questions. Anything’s possible.

My birth parents created the perfect genetic storm for this riotous hair. They created me, this person with otherwise innocuous features and hair that no one could figure out. And now that I know where it came from, I’m kinda loving it. And now that I know where I came from, I’m kinda loving me too.—Christian is an adoptee who writes creative nonfiction, essays, and memoir about identity, adoption, parenting, and disability. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Independent, Cognoscenti, Pidgeonholes, Entropy, Hippocampus, the Brevity Blog, and more. She reads creative nonfiction for Hippocampus and is an instructor at GrubStreet and privately on her own website. Find out more about Christian at her website, find her on Twitter and Instagram, and see more of her work here. She is offering Writing Personhood: For Adoptees beginning Sunday January 9, 2022. Find information and register here. 

By Holly BerryFrom a very young age, I was always deathly terrified of cockroaches—these slimy, dark creatures that live in the smallest and darkest crevices where nothing else could ever imagine existing. I think this fear originated from being allowed to watch horror movies with my older brother before the age of 5. My mom told me that if I started to believe any of the movies were real, she wouldn’t let me watch them anymore. She assured me that the events in these films were just fiction, even though a lot of the scenes felt very realistic. If I started to have nightmares or be afraid because of the movie, I would not be permitted to stay up late and hang out with my older and cooler brother. I simply hid my terror about the many scenes that elicited fear. That’s how I continued to hide my feelings for the rest of my life, stuffing them below the surface so no one could access them and use them against me.

I specifically remember watching a particular episode from the 1980s series “Creepshow” in which a cruel germaphobe is killed in his apartment by a swarm of cockroaches. I don’t remember all the details, but I was terrified by the scene in which hundreds of bugs crawl out of his mouth and over his eyes. I was convinced that these filthy, awful creatures would find me and bury me too.

In the southeast, we make up special names for these creatures so they don’t sound so grotesque. In coastal North Carolina, they’re referred to as water bugs to differentiate the larger insects from the smaller bugs. The large cockroaches usually thrive in conditions with more rain and humidity and typically are more present when the seasons change to cooler weather as they search for warmer environments indoors. This important distinction is made so people will know that this type of cockroach exists through no fault of theirs. The other kind—the smaller variety—may signal to others that there’s an infestation due to less than ideal conditions, such as uncleanliness. As an adult, I find this differentiation ridiculous; it seems to reflect the way that our society silently judges others for their simple existence today. Because why would an infestation be anyone’s fault? This seems to place blame on being dirty or being poor or having no ability to rid yourself of the infestation.

In the picturesque city of Charleston, South Carolina, a true representation of the genteel south, these disgusting creatures are referred to as Palmetto bugs. I still remember the first time I saw one. I squealed in a panic while my then-boyfriend calmly explained that the Palmetto Bug is the other state bird of South Carolina, a true beacon of the city—a flowery term to describe a very ugly insect in hopes of accepting its indigenous right to exist in a city that barely stays above water.

Strangely enough, I’m not that afraid of spiders or other insects. I have a healthy fear of snakes, but an irrational fear of cockroaches, especially the large ones. Regardless of what they’re called, my fear of them continued to grow. Whenever I saw one, I broke out in goosebumps all over while silently trembling and desperately trying to escape the room. What is it about the creatures that live in the dark that make them so terrifying? Is it the idea that they live in a place of darkness or is it the darkness they bring with them that’s frightening? Maybe it’s the darkness that morphs them into these ugly creatures. Or is it that they live in the dark because they are terrible and are unworthy of living in the light?

Whenever I saw one, I’d chase it down with bug spray until it eventually drowned and went belly up. I couldn’t force myself to get close enough to hit it with a shoe; even the thought of hearing its shell crack or seeing its guts splattered would terrorize me. Being close to this  roach would seize me with a fear I struggle to describe. I’d wait until I could find someone else to dispose of the remains after the cockroach had died. I couldn’t even face the dead carcass in fear that it would come back to life and fly in my face. It was irrational, but most fears are.

When I was older, I’d learn about the idea of totems—spirit beings or spiritual objects that tell stories. An early form of communication before writing and documenting history with words became the standard—a way to provide value and show respect for all people and living things of the world. Any time I’d see a random animal—a bunny rabbit crossing my path or a tree frog in my window—I’d look up the significance or the totem meaning, much as I might try to interpret a dream. It gave meaning to everything.

During a pivotal time in my life, I decided to take an over-the-counter DNA test “for fun” and unexpectedly discovered that my dad was not my biological father. After uncovering many lies and secrets that my mom had used to manipulate me, I decided to estrange myself from these family members so I could focus on developing my truth and reclaiming my identity. At this time, I started seeing cockroaches everywhere. My house was sprayed twice a year for insects and yet I saw three in my kitchen over the span of a month as the weather turned cooler. I sprayed a third time that year. At a restaurant, one crawled across the wall behind my back. At a coffee shop, one crawled up the wall and flew across the seating area, much to the barista’s colossal embarrassment. I woke up in the middle of the night to see one crawling next to my night stand, dangerously close to my face. For some reason, I was seeing them everywhere.

I searched for the totem meaning. As a default, every totem website includes a picture of the juiciest cockroaches. As I scrolled quickly past these pictures with my eyes half closed, I found this description: “Cockroaches can sneak into a place through the smallest openings, so they bring the message that you should utilize every opportunity life offers you. Moreover, this creature is likely to come to you if you’ve been hiding your true self from others.” As I went on to read about the cockroach totem, I learned that cockroaches symbolize resilience and survival.

I thought about my own journey. Discovering at the age of 37 that my dad wasn’t my biological father opened a Pandora’s box of lies that had been built around me. My dad, with whom I could never form a connection, had always suspected I wasn’t his biological child. I was expected to have a relationship with my older, wiser brother, regardless of the abuse he inflicted on me as a child. All of this was facilitated by a mom who so desperately wanted me to think she was the most important person in my life. Born out of her own desire to not feel bad for her terrible past and a desperation to be loved unconditionally by someone, she withheld information.

Inadvertently, she’d teach me that I must be unlovable if my brother could hurt me and my dad couldn’t even hold a conversation with me. I felt I must be a bad person if, after their divorce, my dad would move far away and not take me with him. Eventually, I also grew apart from my mom and pursued my own interests. No matter how much I tried to anticipate her changing emotions and be what she needed me to be, it always ended in brutal arguments that left me emotionally drained. I concluded that also made me a bad person. If I could no longer be around the woman who did everything for me, then I must be bad. To cover my guilt, I worked tirelessly to make her happy. I put myself through countless holidays and numerous family events to show her that I cared for her and would never leave her, even when she made poor decisions about money and relationships. And she reminded me she’d never left me, even when everyone else had, and, therefore, I couldn’t leave her. I would be her fallback plan. It was my duty and my calling in life because I must be bad if no one else loved me but her.

I didn’t use the revelations of the DNA test to find belonging in a different family, but rather to find belonging within myself. I became the detective of my own life. Finally asking the questions I’d like to have to asked my dad decades ago, I wanted to know more about what the relationship between him and my mother had been like and why he left me after their divorce when I was so young. My childlike brain remembered it one way, but I was curious about his memory. I could finally understand that both of our experiences were valid and provided important information for my healing. Through these conversations, and, eventually, telling him that he was not my biological father, I discovered much about him as a person. He also carried a lot of blame about his own shortcomings as a father. We weren’t able to have a meaningful conversation when I was younger because he was also running away from his fears and guilt about not being the dad he wanted to be. I was simply a reminder of a very difficult part of his past, but I was also his obligation, much like how I felt about my mom. Ironically, after discovering he wasn’t my biological father, I felt closer to him than I ever had before. I could see him as a perfectly flawed human who was willing to take accountability for his mistakes and apologize for them.

By speaking my truth to my closest friends and family members, I discovered how much they hadn’t known about me. Many knew I wasn’t close with my dad, and because they hadn’t met my older brother, they thought of me as an only child. They saw me as super smart and fiercely independent. My mom was okay in their book because she was very charismatic and she seemed to love me. I felt as if the people who knew me only loved me because of the version of myself that I had built for them to see. As I spoke more about my truth, many were appalled that I survived such terrifying conditions. But as I unraveled all the information, even I was appalled that I had survived. Looking at the life I had made, it was difficult for me to be proud of myself. I was a highly functioning trauma survivor. I was the first in my family to go to college and achieve a secondary education. I had a successful career, a beautiful home, a financially stable life, and a very handsome dog. By society’s standard, I was just missing a close intimate connection and children of my own. Even with all that I’d accomplished, society reminded me that I did not have the thing I craved the most, a connection with other humans, but also with myself—one that I would only find after discovering the truth. I was still lacking this connection because I had buried who I really was under the fear that no one could love me because of my history. Knowing the truth and opening up about my past, finally living as my most authentic self, allowed me and others to love the truest version of myself—a bold, bright, beautiful, and resilient woman.

That DNA test shined a light on all the dark corners of my past and cleared the lies that had scurried to find darker corners. It gave me freedom from the dark and made way for the truth, which liberated me from the lies. Today, I’m not perfect, far from it actually. But I live my truth and I love myself more than ever. I forgive myself for the pain I inflicted on others when I was living in the dark, and I forgive myself for all the opportunities I lost to allow others to love me. I was trying to protect myself from being hurt by loved ones again. The truth is, I never would have been able to let anyone love me until I loved myself first. The truth, I now understand, is that I am loveable and I am loved. I am full of love for myself, and that love spills over onto others, even those who have hurt me. That doesn’t mean I allow them back into my life; those healthy boundaries are for my protection. But I can practice loving kindness from afar so the darkness stays away.

Now, when I see a cockroach, I welcome the opportunity to reflect on where I might be hiding again, where I might be falling back into habits of self-loathing or negative self-talk to keep myself small and hidden and safe. But I also grab a shoe or a book and I squash the bug and dispose of it quickly. Because I haven’t quite mastered the Buddhist zen of letting it live peacefully. (That’s my next lesson.) I can face the fear now; it doesn’t hold onto me or terrify me in the same way. While I’m still scared, I know that none of this is my fault. Cockroaches exist as the most resilient creatures alive today. They don’t seek to terrorize my life and they don’t exist to remind me that I am unworthy. They remind me that secrets live in the dark and have a way of escaping from the smallest cracks and crevices. It’s best if I just accept them as they are and face them head-on instead of allowing them to bury me in fear.Holly Berry is a healthcare professional in North Carolina. She was an aspiring creative writer in high school and college until she gave up these pursuits for a predictable career path. She was even featured in the extra credits of the film adaptation for the novel “Big Fish” as one of Daniel Wallace’s creative writing students. She’s revisiting her passion for telling and writing stories after a DNA discovery helped her understand her purpose. Berry is drawn to healing and hopes to use writing not only to further discover herself but also to help others discover themselves too. You can find her budding fiction book review account on Instagram @bottomlinebookreviews and follow her personal account @holliipop.

Everyone who’s had a DNA surprise will recognize themselves in the pages of Leeanne R. Hay’s NPE* A Story Guide for Unexpected Discoveries. Hay, a freelance journalist who’s earned certificates from the University of Florida College of Social Work, has crafted a memoir/guidebook hybrid, drawing substantially from her own NPE story and those of others to illustrate common experiences and issues that arise when family secrets are revealed and individuals learn that the families in which they were raised may not be their families of origin.

In 2017, on a whim, Hay purchased a DNA test, the results of which were shocking. Not only did she learn that the man who raised her was not her father, she discovered at the same time that her biological father was a man she’d known and loved since she was a child. And there began a quest to learn as much as she could about her origins, her ethnicity, and how such a monumental secret could have been kept from her. She felt rage toward her mother, by then deceased, bewilderment about her ethnic identity, and, soon, an overpowering sense of anger and helplessness.

If you’ve had a DNA surprise, these feelings likely will be all too familiar, and Hay offers the much-needed comfort that comes from knowing that you’re not the only one whose ever had these experiences and emotions or the only one who doesn’t know which way to turn. She offers gentle guidance about the range of situations and complications that may arise, from how to communicate an NPE discovery to others, how to use DNA to search for family, how to communicate with new relatives, and how to contemplate and make a name change, as well as the steps needed to move forward. She addresses the emotional pitfalls, including isolation, loss, and grief, and the repercussions for others who are affected by an MPE’s discovery. In addition to noting helpful resources, Hay also advises readers about the need to carefully assess resources to determine if they are truly helpful, expert-based, and reputable.

Although the book is written for MPEs and offers strategies for navigating the journey toward understanding, healing, and hope, its greatest strength may be as a guide for friends and family members, both families of origin and birth families. MPEs often rightly complain that no one understands what the experience is really like and struggle to express their feelings. Others may not understand and may believe that the MPE is overly sensitive or exaggerating the impact. Hay makes it clear that isn’t the case and advises people contacted by MPEs how to receive them with grace and understanding. This important aspect of the book can go a long way toward increasing awareness and understanding of the NPE/MPE experience and the needs of individuals in the wake of a DNA surprise.

A compassionate and clear-eyed guide to a challenging subject, it’s likely to inspire others to help fill the knowledge void and shine more light on the needs of NPEs and MPEs.Leanne R. Hay is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. She’s a graduate of Villanova University, with a BA in history and minors in sociology and criminal justice. While researching this book, she earned professional certificates from Florida State University College of Social Work in Trauma & Resilience. She lives in Texas with her husband and their miniature Schnauzer rescue pup Arfie. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter. Find the book here. 

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to pose abortion as a problem and adoption as its solution. The adoption argument has become a pillar of the anti-abortion movement’s platform. Each time the words abortion and adoption appear together in headlines, there’s a rapid and robust response from adoptees and others to counter the fallacious proposition. This time, however, Barrett’s comments have roused ire not only for their essential, objectionable content with respect to adoption, but also for the cavalier language she used to dismiss the impact giving birth has upon a woman’s health, her career, and her life.

During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments concerning Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Barrett, an adoptive mother, not only posed adoption as a substitute for abortion, she further suggested that if the consequences and obligations of motherhood are deleterious to some women, they can simply sidestep the “problem” by taking advantage of safe-haven laws, as if dropping off a baby to a police or fire station has no repercussions to a mother or her baby. As if there were no career reverberations and no health risks. As if the wellbeing of the child were of no concern. As if it doesn’t matter that adoptees may be weary, enraged, or traumatized by having again and again to field a question that should never be posed: Would you rather have been aborted?

Unfortunately, the burden of dismantling these destructive narrative falls upon adoptees and allies. Following is a sampling of their efforts. Please join the conversation by adding your comments.—BKJ“I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict,” by Elizabeth Spiers, The New York Times

“What We Get Wrong About Adoption,” by Gretchen Sisson and Jessica M. Harrison, The Nation

“Adoption is Not the Answer to Abortion,” by Lora K. Joy, My Adoptee Truth

“Barrett is Wrong: Adoption Doesn’t ‘Take Care of’ the Burden of Motherhood,” by Gretchen Sisson, The Washington Post

“Why Adoption isn’t a Replacement for Abortion Rights,” by Anna North, Vox

“I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda,” by Stephanie Drenka, HuffPost

“Amy Coney Barrett’s Adoption Myths. ‘They’re Co-opting Our Lives and Our Stories,’” by Irin Carmon, New York magazine.

“A Choice in Name Only,” by Nicole Chung, in “I Have Notes,” a newsletter from The Atlantic.

“Is Pro-Life Evangelicalism Killing Adoptees,” by Sara Easterly, Red Letter Christians

“Adoption is Not a Simple Solution to An Unwanted Pregnancy,” by Lucia Blackwell, The Seattle Times

“Adoption doesn’t mean abortion isn’t needed, even if some Supreme Court justices think so,” by Aimee Christian, NBC THINK