An essay by Mary O’Reilly

When my older brother was born—my parents’ firstborn—my mother was given a firm warning. “If you leave this child, I’ll kill you.” Knowing my father’s gentle nature and that leaving would never occur to her anyway, she simply replied, “Okay.” She understood. His fear subsided as my brother grew, musing aloud to our mother, “You really love him, don’t you?”

My father had no memory of a mother’s love. When he was a toddler, his own mother left to visit her family in Boston. As days, then weeks, then months passed without her returning to Indiana, they had to accept that she wasn’t coming back. He never saw her again. Maybe she decided that the whirlwind romance with her dashing and decorated World War II sailor had gone too far. He had disembarked in Boston right after the war. They promptly fell in love, and he whisked her from her city-dwelling family to a land of cornfields and small-town life. Nine months and three days after their wedding, my father was born.

When she didn’t come back, my grandfather was eventually granted a divorce on the grounds of abandonment. About nine years after his wife’s abrupt departure, they received word—presumably from a letter or phone call from her mother—that she had died of tuberculosis. Though it’s not clear what my father had been told, it was then that it dawned on him that the mother he had been yearning for had been alive the entire time.

My grandfather, the consummate gentleman, would only ever say of his late ex-wife that she was a wonderful woman. Perhaps he meant to comfort his son with warm feelings toward her, but the unintended consequence was my father’s default assumption that it must have been his own fault. I found out only recently that at least into his young adulthood, he wondered what he could have done that was bad enough to drive her away. I’d always thought in the back of my mind that because she died so young, she must have been sick for a very long time, maybe even in the hospital. Maybe she couldn’t come back, and if she could, she didn’t want to be a burden or have her child grow up with a sick mother. I’d wondered if my father thought this too. I’d hoped he did.

But the rest of my grandmother’s story remained a mystery—a 9-year gap—until almost 60 years later, when my mother found a hint on Ancestry.com. It had been sitting unopened in her inbox while she busily cared for my rapidly declining father. The hint led to a cousin, and then to a cemetery. I had just moved back to Boston from California. So when my mother visited from Indiana over a Thanksgiving weekend five months after my father died, we found ourselves scouring a cemetery in Mattapan. We found her, my grandmother, alone with her new last name that had made it so hard for my mother to track her down. She had remarried in 1950. This macabre scavenger hunt was enabled by my mother’s genealogical sleuthing and an equally savvy first cousin of my father’s named Karen. When she and my mother found each other, pieces began falling into place.

Throughout his entire post-toddler life, the closest my father ever came to seeing his own mother’s face was in a blurry overexposed photograph of her in a bulging coat taken in 1946, shortly before he was born. In February 2022, over lunch on the outskirts of Boston, his newly discovered cousin Karen handed my mother and me envelopes bursting with photos of extended family that my father never knew existed. Among them was a pixel-perfect black and white portrait of my grandmother’s beautiful young, smiling face. My father’s inquisitive eyes looked uncannily back at us. “Were they blue?” I asked, without looking up. “The most beautiful blue,” his cousin Joanie answered. Karen was the one who first enabled the genealogical connection to this family, but she was born after my grandmother died. Joanie on the other hand has a clear memory of my grandmother, whom she called by her nickname, Aunt Mimi. She remembers her Aunt Mimi coming back to Boston from Indiana, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, cigarette in hand. Joannie was about six years old and thought she was devastatingly glamorous.

In the summer of 1999, my father drove me, along with my 20-lb cat, in a moving van from Indiana to Boston, where I was to start graduate school. Did he think about the fact that he was retracing the path of his mother’s own departure from him more than 50 years earlier? Did he wonder where she might have lived, which streets she’d walked?

A few years later, my mother visited me by herself. We had a couple of beers in Doyle’s Café, a bar in the neighborhood where we believed my grandmother had grown up. Doyle was her maiden name, and we wondered if there could be a connection. We tried to make sense of our complicated feelings about it, using a characteristically minimal number of words while our eyes were on the Notre Dame football game that connected us umbilically to my father watching it from his armchair in Indiana.

Twenty years later, in April 2022, Dad’s cousin Joanie picked me up and drove me to the old neighborhood in Dorchester that had been home to her grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts (including my grandmother), brother, and five cousins. Doyle’s Cafe had closed, but it turned out not to be a namesake anyway. My great-grandfather by that name had never even lived in Boston. He died in a mining accident in Nova Scotia when my grandmother was barely a year old—roughly the same age my father had been when he lost her. Soon after, my great-grandmother married a man who was by all accounts a good husband and adoptive father to her children—two girls and a boy. The boy, my father’s uncle, legally changed his last name when he left for World War II in case he didn’t come back. He wanted to be buried with his adoptive father’s name. This small detail, in addition to my grandmother’s new married name, explained why it took so long for my mother to find them.

In the old neighborhood, my new cousin (once-removed) Joanie showed me the house where she grew up, then the house where my grandmother had grown up, and finally the one she’d lived in with her second husband after returning from Indiana. We followed the path Joanie used to walk on her way home from elementary school—past the Italian bakery (gone now) on Dudley Street where my grandmother worked. Joanie stopped in everyday after school, knowing her Aunt Mimi would give her an anise-flavored cookie. I wondered if this might have been the happiest part of my grandmother’s day—the part she looked forward to. Because when she was done at the bakery, she went home to an abusive husband. If she tried to hide at her sister’s house, Joanie recalls that he would come and beat on their front door, demanding to know if his wife was in there. Joanie’s mother would never let him in. She remembers her Aunt Mimi disappearing into numerous glasses of white wine.

She also remembers that the Consumptive Hospital in Mattapan where my grandmother spent her final days didn’t allow children to visit for fear they would contract tuberculosis. Joanie was nearly a teenager by then, but when she joined her mother and grandmother to visit her Aunt Mimi, she could only stand outside and wave back to her at the window. And then one day, she wasn’t there.

Joanie was aware of a photograph of a smiling little boy displayed on her grandmother’s mantelpiece. She would look at it when she was a child. She knew who he was, but she didn’t know where he was or understand why he wasn’t with his mother. She’d always assumed her Aunt Mimi must have escaped a horrible situation. Karen, the cousin who’d first connected with my mother, remembers their grandmother telling her and the other younger kids that the portrait on the mantlepiece was just a cute photo she found in a catalog. But family legend had it that their grandmother said a prayer for him every day. She died in Nova Scotia at the age of 75, just a few months after my brother was born. The little boy in the photograph was 25 years old. When I texted photos of my father as an adult to Joanie and Karen, Joanie immediately recognized the smiling face from her grandmother’s mantelpiece.

I knew from a young age that my grandmother had left my father. It was relayed to me in such a matter-of-fact manner that it felt distant, the way history was taught in school at that time—all names and dates of battles with none of the emotional toll of war. I kept it in my peripheral vision until I grew up. By allowing only sidelong glances, I wouldn’t have to feel the enormity of it in my chest and in the pit of my stomach. I suspect it was normalized for Joanie, too—that it lived in the back of her mind, filed under decisions that seemed odd but that the grownups must have had logical reasons for.

Joanie had a vague notion that she might have a cousin in the vicinity when she drove through Indiana once to visit her daughter in San Jose, but she wouldn’t have known where to begin to look for him. Anyone she knew who might have had a clue was long gone. The story may have felt like a long-forgotten dream to her by then. But when Joanie, who is a mother of four and grandmother of ten, looked me in the eyes for the first time, it must have become real to her. She wondered aloud, “How can a mother leave her child?”

As Joanie and I kept in touch, I shared my memories of my father, of the cousin she never met. Even up to the end of his life, I told her, he was irreverently funny. She said he would have fit right into the family when I relayed the story of him, upon hearing my mother come home from a grocery run while he was getting bathed by a hospice nurse, exclaiming, “Oh my God, my wife’s home!”

Joanie loved hearing how well my father’s life turned out despite his losses. He was raised with the help of his paternal grandmother until she died painfully of cancer. My father was barely a teenager. My grandfather had lost a brother to meningitis at a young age, and then his own father in 1949, right around the time he had become a single father. Then, it was just the two of them—father and son. Through his grief, my grandfather remained a steadfast father, once noticing a George Orwell novel his future English major was reading and worrying about its age-appropriateness. He stayed up all night to read it. Having never gone to college himself, my grandfather was over the moon when his only child went to Notre Dame and then to law school in New York City. But I suspect he was happiest when my father returned to Indiana to settle down and start his own family.

In his quiet way, with neither billboards nor television commercials, my father slowly made a name for himself throughout Indiana. Specializing in workers’ compensation law, he saw that factory workers were taken care of financially when they were hurt on the job. His proud father remained his best friend and moral compass until the day my father buried him. Now they are buried next to each other, tended to by my mother.

The more she learned stories about my father’s and grandfather’s lives, the less Joanie was able to reconcile them with her lifelong assumption that somehow her aunt must have been a victim. Why else would she leave, she’d thought. Now she calls it an awakening. It didn’t—and shouldn’t—change her love for her Aunt Mimi, whose sadness she always felt in their interactions. But in her mind it exonerated my grandfather.

My grandfather wasn’t perfect. But what I always come back to is this. If my grandmother left because my grandfather wasn’t a good person, why wouldn’t she have taken her child with her? Even if, as is likely, she was struggling with her own demons from traumas I’ll never know, she had an abundance of family support in Boston. If it feels unnatural to imagine a mother leaving her child, it feels much more so to imagine her leaving the child in the clutches of a villain.

With her new perspective, Joanie was delighted to hear that my grandfather eventually found love again. When my mother was eight-months pregnant with me, he married the woman I knew as my grandmother—the one who knit blankets, taught me how to make a pie crust from scratch, and cared for my grandfather in his final years so lovingly that my father always insisted she added 10 years to his life. In an odd mirroring of fates, she had suffered an abusive first marriage and would gush about what a gentle and loving man my grandfather was.

When my mother retired and her interests turned to genealogy, all my father cared to know was what ever happened to his mother. My mother still feels a twinge of regret for not unearthing his family before he died. As much as I wish he could have met his cousins, who already feel like family to me, I can’t imagine that hearing his mother’s story would have given him any peace. He had the wisdom to understand the flaws in the question, “Why wouldn’t she just leave her abusive husband?” But it would have to sting to know that on some level she had chosen to live with him over being with her only child. It would have to sting to know how his mother had suffered.

I’ve felt my father’s loss deeply my entire adult life—I recently found myself bawling while reading Because of Winn Dixie to keep up with my eight-year-old. I feel for every child who has ever blamed themself for their parents’ decisions. But now that I have my own children, I feel my grandmother’s loss too. Nothing is more unbearable to me than the prospect of missing out on watching my sons grow into adults—not seeing what the world has in store for them, and they for it. Their professional successes are much less interesting to me than the hope that our small biological contributions to the world will tip the balance toward kindness, even if only by less than a billionth.

My father was kind. He didn’t pepper people with compliments or make small talk, but he listened, and he noticed everything. He had no patience for gossip. He thought deeply and saw every issue from multiple angles, which must be why I never heard him criticize anyone, including his mother, especially his mother.  Weeks before he died, he detailed his remaining three cases from his hospital bed to a trusted lawyer and old friend. He needed to know that these people would be taken care of. He didn’t want to abandon them. That his mother never knew the goodness she added to the world might be one of the most tragic losses from her short and unhappy life.

Mary O’Reilly is a science illustrator, designer, and writer in the Boston area, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and three guinea pigs. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Science Magazine, and Chemical & Engineering News, and she writes about the role of art in science in a newsletter called The Art of Basic Science at maryoreilly.substack. com. For more about Mary you can visit her website at www.oreillyscienceart.com or follow her on Twitter @oreillymk.

By Michelle Tullier

“Are we related to anybody famous?” I asked my mother when I was about twelve years old.

I didn’t like that the answer was “No,” so I repeated the question until she walked over to our encyclopedia set and took down the volume for the letter L. Her finger made a quick skim of the index, and she flipped to the page covering Louisiana.

“Him. We’re related to him,” my mother said.

I grabbed the book eagerly and saw an image identified as the 17th-century French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle who canoed the lower Mississippi River and claimed its fertile basin land for France. Something didn’t feel right. If we were related to someone as important as the founder of Louisiana, why hadn’t I ever heard about him? Why hadn’t we made a family trip to walk in his footsteps? I wanted to believe that man was my ancestor. I had longed to be related to someone who was not just a celebrity but a person of import and impact. In high school when I learned about Simone de Beauvoir in philosophy class, I daydreamed about being related to her—a possibility, I thought, given my French heritage, though I knew few specifics of that lineage. It seemed every time I asked about family history my mother swooped in like a defensive back making an interception to save the game, and I didn’t understand what game she was playing.

Decades later, I ordered an Ancestry.com DNA kit just for kicks. I hoped the results would shed light on my French ethnicity, hand me a long list of not-too-distant relatives, and, perhaps, reveal a notable person in my family tree. When the results came back, my ethnicity breakdown seemed odd, showing more Irish and English than I would have expected. Disappointed by the ethnicity results, but not suspecting anything untoward, I turned to the people matches. I did not recognize any surnames, but that didn’t concern me either. Most were third or fourth cousins, or even more distant. I was very busy at the time that I saw my results, juggling a demanding job and parenting a teenager. I told myself that someday I would take time to build a family tree and figure it all out.

Two years later, that someday had still not come, but I was having an unhurried lunch at my desk, so I took a few moments to log back into Ancestry. I was heading to Ireland on a work-related trip and happened to remember those ethnicity results, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit them before the trip. I logged in and was met with a red dot on the bell-shaped notifications icon. The bell tolled for me, so I clicked there rather than going straight to the ethnicity page. The message said I had new DNA matches to explore. Anticipating screen after screen of unrecognizable names stretched out to Saturn’s seventh ring, I rolled my eyes. But I still had half a turkey sandwich to eat, so what the heck, I would take a look.

The first match was displayed as initials only, with the statement “Predicted relationship: Close Family.” The match was made at a confidence level classified as “Extremely High.” I pictured long strands of genetic matter strutting amongst puffed up DNA coils, double helixes cocked, so proud of the match they’d made for me. I saw that this person’s profile was administered by someone who listed their first and last name in full. I recognized the last name as that of close family friends when I was a child, and I realized the initials of the person I was matched with were those of a son in that family, who was around my age.

There is a technique in photography called bokeh, from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze.” Taking a bokeh photo makes the primary object of focus sharp and clear, while surrounding or more distant objects are blurred. There is good bokeh—Isn’t that a striking close-up of a pink camellia with the green leaves softly blurred behind it? And there is bad bokeh—What is that jarring mess of shapes and shadows, ruining a perfectly nice picture of a flower? I didn’t know if what I was seeing in that moment of discovery was good or bad bokeh. The books that lined the wall several feet across from my desk, arranged by topic and by rainbow colors within each grouping, streamed like melted Neapolitan ice cream. The files stacked on the credenza a few feet to my left blurred. The cell phone resting on my desk was barely visible through the fog. The keyboard below my fingers was, well, maybe not even there anymore.

Oddly, through the fog, there was clarity. I knew the connection of that name to my parents. I knew the connection of that name to my mother, who had always seemed particularly friendly with the father of the family. I knew, on some preconscious level, how this had come to pass. My mother would later admit to having had an extramarital affair and said she had planned to tell me on her deathbed. I couldn’t even begin to unpack the narcissism and grandiosity in that statement.

I had never, for one single moment in my life, suspected that my loving and generous “Daddy,” was not my biological father. But I knew this was not a mistake. I knew this explained what had been missing in my life even though I had never thought anything was missing. I knew this was how my life was supposed to turn out. I knew I was losing a father and gaining a father. People speak of life flashing before their eyes at the moment of death; my life flashed before my eyes at this moment of birth as a new person. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense.

I also discovered that I had been right all along: I am related to someone famous. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, renowned 18^th-century philosopher, statesman, and author of Faust, widely considered Germany’s answer to Shakespeare, is someone I can now call “Cousin Wolfie.”

I took the last bite of my turkey sandwich, closed my eyes, and waited for the fog to lift.

Michelle Tullier is the author of nine self-help books, including the Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination (Penguin, 2012) and has recently turned her focus to creative nonfiction, with the book No Finer Place in progress—a memoir of DNA secrets and finding one’s sense of self in the murky middle of the NPE experience. A graduate of Wellesley College with a PhD in counseling psychology from UCLA, she is a former university career center executive director and faculty member who taught the psychology of work. Tullier lives on an island in Maine because her goal in life is to not be hot. Find her on Twitter @Tullierauthor and reach her through www.michelletullierauthor.com.

By Michèle Dawson Haber

I’m a step adoptee. I was raised by my mother and a stepfather who legally adopted me. For a long time, I didn’t identify as a step adoptee, but now I talk about it a lot. Why? It’s probably easiest to explain by telling my full story. After all, stories are the connective tissue that bind so much of our fragmentary experience in the world. In my experience, there were things I didn’t understand or accept about myself until I reached my fifties, when I started to explore how my step adoption impacted my identity. I was so blown away by what I discovered that I wanted to share it with others so that they too would understand how important it is to have a complete story of one’s origins.¹

My father died when I was a baby, and my mother subsequently remarried. Two years after they married, my stepfather legally adopted me. An adoption decree ordered that my last name be changed, my birth certificate be altered, and that I henceforth be considered “born as the issue of the marriage between” my mother and my adoptive stepfather. I was five, about to start school, and had a new half-brother. I never asked my parents why I needed to be adopted, but I can guess now at some of their motivations: my stepfather had known me my whole life, we had as secure a connection as anyone could hope for, they wanted to be a complete family unit that wasn’t divided along last names and past history, and they wanted to spare me the awkwardness of answering questions about my different last name once I started school. All reasonable motivations. But when they decided not to give me anything more than the most rudimentary information about the father I was genetically tied to, when they urged me to forget about the past and be grateful that my stepfather loved me enough to adopt me, when curiosity about my father was met with tears, tension, and refusal—they created an environment that encouraged me to deny the existence of any longing I might have.

Would anything have been different for me if my stepfather had not adopted me? Is my mid-life search for details about my father simply a delayed mourning for the loss of a parent that I never knew? Yes and no. There are lots of similarities between my experience and those who have lost a parent very young. But what step adoption does is legally switch one parent for another, thereby facilitating the erasure from history of that former parent through name change and document amendments. I can’t know for sure, and I can’t ask them now, but it seems that this was my parents’ objective, and it was buttressed by their refusal to provide me with any narrative history of my father. I learned not to ask; I got the message that it didn’t matter.

Yet despite their efforts and hopes, my origins could not be erased, especially because I looked like no one else in my family. I was the only dark haired, olive-complexioned child in my family of six, and, for most of my growing up years, I felt like an alien amongst them. I knew there was a past that I was connected to that no one was willing to talk about. While home life was mostly harmonious and I did my best to look toward the future, my parents’ withholding of information about my own history had an impact. Their silence created a narrative hole that left me feeling like a floater, and I didn’t consider myself as belonging wholly anywhere—not in my family, not in my social circles, and not even with myself (whoever that was). I adapted by trying to please everyone and doing what I thought was expected of me.

I didn’t understand any of this until recently. My “coming out of the fog”² event occurred when I heard the sound of my father’s voice decades after his death from an old tape reel recorded in 1963. Until that moment, I believed I wasn’t affected by my step adoption, and I didn’t think my pre-step adoption history was relevant. But hearing my father’s voice when I was fifty-three years old changed everything. I thought I understood about how my life had unfolded and how I became the person I am today. I suddenly realized I knew nothing about my early history and wanted to know more about this enigma of a man who made up half of my DNA. I embarked on a quest to uncover the details of his life and write the first chapter of mine.

My quest took three years. I was fortunate that the information I sought was discoverable. When I first filled in the gaps of my personal history, I experienced feelings of anger and loss—finally understanding the full import of what had happened and all that could have been that had not. But after a while, something more powerful overtook the negative emotions: a feeling of calm contentment. I finally had my origin story and, with it, a feeling of wholeness and self-acceptance that until that moment had eluded me. Although the loss will never go away, I now have a sense of continuity and belonging. The story I can tell of myself has some coherence where before it was disjointed and incomplete.

After this experience of searching and filling in my personal history, I started to wonder if there were other step adoptees out there like me who don’t know anything about one of their parents or who don’t even think that knowing might be important. I went looking for data on step adoptees and found very little information.

In the U.S., government reports do not track step adoption as a separate category,³ so whatever is known about step adoptees comes primarily from the few national surveys that identify step adoptees.⁴ According to these studies, it’s estimated that 23% to 25% of all adopted children are step adoptees. (One study conducted by the National Council for Adoption put the number as high as 50% based on data from nine states and the District of Columbia where the number of step adoptions is tracked.)⁵

Researchers who have studied step adoption posit that step adoptees are most likely to be a result of a birth outside of marriage rather than a divorce. In other words, a single mother gets married, and her new spouse adopts her child.⁶ Researchers further suggest that when the child is a product of a previous marriage, adoption by stepfathers of their stepchildren is most likely to occur when the first father is out of the picture for some reason, for example because of death, desertion, or having stopped visiting and paying child support.⁷ This makes intuitive sense since the process of getting the agreement or terminating the parental rights of a non-resident parent who is still in the child’s life after a divorce is viewed as neither easy nor desirable. The statistics within stepfamilies back this up: only 5% to 8% of all stepchildren are adopted by a stepparent.⁸

So, with these statistics and assumptions in hand, what can we say about the likelihood that these step adoptees are in the same position as I am of not having met and/or knowing very little about one of their natural parents? How many of these step adoptees grew up in families where the first father was a secret or never spoken about? How many of these step adoptees grew up with big gaps in their origin stories? I sure wish I knew—no such research exists.

While I may not know how many, I do know there are step adoptees out there who can answer “yes” to these questions. It is for them that I write about my experience. As it was for me, they may not even know they are called step adoptees. They may have never explored their feelings of disconnectedness and may have repressed their desire to learn anything about their absent fathers or personal histories. My hope is that my writing and these conversations will reach step adoptees who are, unknowingly, still in the fog. I want them to know that uncovering their origin stories, if possible, can be transformational. Even just acknowledging that each of us has a pre-step adoption history that rightfully belongs to us and is part of our personal narrative can subtly change a person’s perspective of themselves and how they carve out a space in the world.

I also hope to reach those who have been impacted by other types of severance from their genetic identities. Although each of our experiences are different in important ways, there is also overlap. Step adoptees who have never known one of their first parents and/or have little or no information about them can understand how it feels to have an identity formed by a deficient life narrative. I believe step adoptees can make meaningful contributions to conversations happening in the MPE community. More importantly, step adoptees, by virtue of their overlapping experience, are natural allies in the fight for legislative and societal reform. We need more voices to join the movement against secrecy, obstruction, and the denial of everyone’s right to know their genealogical origins.

And so, with these objectives in mind, I will continue to write about my experience and hope more research will be done on step adoption. If you’re a step adoptee or know a step adoptee, send me an email, I’d love to hear from you!

Notes

1. I am indebted to Michael Grand for first introducing me to the ideas of narrative theory (The Adoption Constellation: New Ways of Thinking About and Practicing Adoption). In addition to Dr. Grand’s writing, there is a solid amount of scholarship devoted to using narrative theory to examine the adoptee experience. I have written about this elsewhere in a little bit more detail—click here to read more.

2. “Coming out of the FOG” is both an expression and an acronym formed by the words fear, obligation and guilt. Amanda Medina of This Adoptee Life website and podcast provides a great definition: “…the process by which adoptees who have considered themselves unaffected by adoption, start looking to their past, their background, their origin and as a result start shifting their view on adoption, their own and in general, as well as the effects it may have had on their life.” The AdopteesOn episode with Lesli A. Johnson also has a great discussion of this expression.

3. Adoption researchers have mostly ignored step adoptees because of this lack of data. Step adoptees, if they are not tracked separately by states, are included in the category of “relative or kin adoption.” Step adoption is thought to comprise the largest group within this category. (From Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571.)

4. In the three published academic papers that I could find on step adoptees (unfortunately all dated), the following survey instrument were used: The 2002 National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), The 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP) in combination with the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH).

5. National Council for Adoption, “Adoption by the Numbers, 2019-2020,” 2022.

6. Although step adoptions by stepmothers do exist, they are vastly outnumbered by stepfather adoptions. This is a function of mothers being 83% more likely (2004 data) to be awarded custody of children after a divorce. (Matthew D. Bramlett, (2010). “When Stepparents Adopt: Demographic, Health and Health Care Characteristics of Adopted Children, Stepchildren, and Adopted Stepchildren,” Adoption Quarterly, 13:305, 248-267.)

7. Susan D. Stewart, “Stepchildren Adopted by their Stepparents: Where do they fit?” Iowa State University, 2007. Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571. It should also be noted that in the U.S., a child is not allowed to have more than two legal parents.

8. Stewart, 2007; Stewart, 2010, Bramlett, 2010.Michèle Dawson Haber is a Canadian writer, potter, and union advocate. She lives in Toronto and is working on a memoir about family secrets, identity, and step adoption. She interviews memoirists for Hippocampus Magazine, and her writing has appeared Salon.com, Oldster Magazine, The Brevity Blog, and the Modern Love column of The New York Times.

By Matthew Jackson

Our assignment was to find an ugly coffee mug. One we hated, or at least had an indifference to, and then smash it to pieces. Then we were supposed to record our thoughts and feelings as we smashed this cup. But this isn’t about my take on that assignment. Not exactly. One of the other members of the writing group talked about a ceramic bowl she’d had for a long time. Over time, the bowl became cracked, but she still used it.

Until the day that she found a piece of the bowl in her salad. She knew it was time to stop using it. So, it sat, unused. Then along came this writing assignment. What better way to dispose of this cracked, useless bowl than to smash it and then write about it. So she took the bowl, placed it in a box, and destroyed it. She posted pictures of the smashed bowl and talked about it. And it bothered me. I didn’t know why at first.

Would I have thrown away this broken bowl? I will admit that sometimes I find myself holding onto things like that without reason. Sometimes I do get rid of stuff that I don’t use, or can’t use, and it makes me feel, well, better? Maybe? Maybe a bit better that I have more room or less clutter. But the bowl bothered me. Couldn’t it have been repaired? Did she try to glue it and it didn’t work? Why the fuck did I care? It was her bowl, not mine. And it was just a fucking bowl.

Then I remembered reading about a way some ceramics are repaired. Not just in a functional way, but as art. If something is broken, the pieces are carefully gathered up and put back together by a special process. It’s Japanese, and not just an art, but a philosophy. Kintsukuroi, sometimes called Kintsugi, is more than 500 years old. Kintsugi means “golden joinery, Kintsukuroi means “golden repair.”

Kintsukuroi is the art of repairing cracked and damaged pottery with gold dusted lacquer. The process is used to accentuate the damage and show the beauty in the flaws, the breaks. To show that there is beauty even in broken things. Especially in broken things. There is no attempt to restore it back to original. No attempt to hide the damage. It becomes whole again, but with bright golden lines where once there were cracks. And it goes even deeper. Wabi-Sabi is the Japanese philosophy of embracing the imperfect, the flawed. It is the belief that nothing stays the same forever, and we must accept that. We must see the beauty in things that are used, worn, broken. Sometimes, ceramics are even broken on purpose, in the belief that Kintsukuroi is the way to bring out its true beauty.

All of us struggle. That’s one of the reasons some of us are taking a writing course/support group for NPEs. I don’t think I’m out of line by saying that every person in the group has cracks. For fuck’s sake, I’m shattered. And I’m not even sure I believe it’s possible to fix me. But maybe there’s a way to mend some of my cracks. Maybe there is someone out there that would look at a broken, heavily used Matt, gather up the pieces, pull out some lacquer, and start gluing. Maybe that’s why the bowl bothered me. It represented a need. It, like me, like all of us, needed someone to embrace its cracks, its flaws, its breaks, and to mend it back together. Not like new. But with shining, golden seams that make it whole where once it was broken.

Matthew Jackson is a late-discovery adoptee. A retired police officer, he lives in Omaha, NE, near his birth family, with his cat, Aiden, and an extensive collection of Star Wars props and Lego sets.