By David B. Bohl, MA

Being adopted is one of those complicated gifts that just keeps on giving whether you like it or not. I am calling it a “gift” because I like to put a positive spin on things and because it has enriched my life—in relationships, in personal discoveries—once I understood how to deal with all the adversity/trauma attached to it. Once I knew how to navigate my own feelings about it all, it became easier to see it as something that made my life that much bigger, now that I was no longer letting it destroy me, as when I used drinking to cope with my inability to fit in.

But recently the gift reared its head again. What happened is that I experienced something called a misattributed parentage event (MPE), which became an unexpected twist in my journey of self-discovery, one that I thought I had already come to terms with. An MPE—most often discovered as a result of DNA testing—describes a situation in which the person one believes to be one’s biological parent is not in fact biologically related. This can result from adoption, sperm donation/IVF, an affair, rape, or incest. For obvious reasons, learning about an MPE is often a traumatic experience.

As an adoptee, I’ve always known that my biological roots were a mystery waiting to be unraveled. However, I thought I knew all there was to know and nothing could have prepared me for the revelation that the man I thought was my paternal genetic grandfather was not biologically related to me or my father. My half brother and I stumbled upon this truth through genetic DNA testing, a tool we initially used out of curiosity, but one that ultimately led us down a path of unexpected revelations.

At first, the finding felt surreal, almost as if I were living in a plot twist from a novel rather than my own life. Because I had always known that I was adopted, the idea of surprises regarding my genetic lineage was not entirely foreign to me—and yet this revelation still managed to shake the foundation of my understanding of family and identity. I didn’t know this grandfather (nor will I ever know the other one) but I couldn’t help but wonder what that was like for my biological father and if he was affected in any way. Was he treated well by the man he called “father” or was he perhaps neglected? Could that explain why he was unable to show up for me? Or was it his mother who only knew the truth and was perhaps deeply affected by it? The possibilities were endless, and I’ve found myself trying to guess something that was impossible to guess as it’s been the case with most of my biological story. The one thing I did know for sure was that this was a new reality that I had to grapple with in my own time and at my own pace.

One of the most challenging aspects of this discovery was navigating the implications for my family members, particularly my father’s living sisters. As I shared this newfound truth with them, I could observe the mixture of shock and confusion they displayed. This revelation changed not just my understanding of lineage, but also theirs, highlighting the interconnectedness of our family narratives. While we were all supportive and understanding of each other, I could sense the weight of this revelation as we collectively processed what it meant for our family dynamic.

Beyond the familial implications, there were practical considerations to address as well. With this new knowledge came the realization that our family medical history was no longer as straightforward as we once believed. My half brother and I embarked on a journey of genetic sleuthing, delving into our newfound lineage to uncover potential predispositions and health risks of which we had previously been unaware. It’s a daunting task, but one that we’re approaching with a sense of determination and resilience.

As a relinquishee and adoptee, I’ve already navigated the complexities of self-discovery to a large extent. The journey toward resilience, strength, and self-confidence is one I thought I’d already traveled deeply into. However, this discovery offered yet another layer of complexity to unravel. It forced me to confront the depths of my own identity once again, challenging me to reconcile the truths of my genetic lineage with the realities of having misinformation. I won’t lie– there were moments when the old sense of betrayal made itself apparent again, when I thought again: Can I really trust anyone, ever? Except that these days I bounce back quickly, and I think I was able to handle it without letting it disturb me too much. Ultimately, while it was a challenging process, it reaffirmed the resilience I’d cultivated over the years, reminding me of my ability to adapt and thrive in the face of adversity.

Today, in reflecting on this journey, I’m reminded of the quote from The Godfather: Part III that resonates deeply with me. “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in!” Indeed, this discovery has pulled me back into a world of complexity and uncertainty, challenging me to confront uncomfortable truths and navigate the murky waters of familial relationships. And yet, therein lies the lifelong “gift” of relinquishment—a reminder that the journey of self-discovery is never truly over, but rather an ongoing process of understanding and acceptance. Reluctantly, I had to accept this new “gift.” What this requires is both radical acceptance (accepting emotions, thoughts, and circumstances that are unchangeable and out of my control ) and amor fati (a love of fate). I’ll be working on both for quite a while.

David B. Bohl, MA, Clinical Substance Abuse Counselor (CSAC), Master Addiction Counselor (MAC), is a relinquishee and adoptee, a professional independent addiction and recovery consultant at Beacon Confidential LLC, and a former consumer of substance use disorder and mental health services. He is also a writer, a speaker, and the author of Parallel Universes: The Story of Rebirth, a memoir that chronicles the intersection of adoption and addiction in his life, and RELINQUISHMENT AND ADDICTION: What Trauma Has to Do With It, a monograph that provides an overview of the complex issues involved in relinquishment and adoption, and in particular, as they relate to susceptibility of addiction. He works with individuals experiencing additions and those where relinquishment/abandonment were experienced as a trauma and/or where adoption was experienced as a developmental/ or chronic trauma or stress as well as their families, genetic and adoptive.

Bohl, who lives in southeastern Wisconsin, enjoys spending time with his wife of 40 years and adult children, and relentlessly pursues Blue Mind (that calm mind state that’s found by being in and/or around the water).

His dedication to the mission of the collective adoption community comes from the fact that, although persons in the relinquished community often lead similar lives to those of non-relinquished persons, they can experience circumstances that need to be overcome, such as loss, grief, identity development, self-esteem, lack of information about medical background (including mental health and addiction predispositions). Bohl is honored to contribute to such worthy endeavors and remains interested in allying with organizations and professionals who are both dedicated and well-positioned to address these challenges. 

Learn more at https://beaconconfidential.com and https://linktr.ee/davidbbohl.

/*! elementor - v3.21.0 - 30-04-2024 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

By Karen Stinger

I participate in a writing group for adoptees and NPEs. We meet every week to share our writing and discuss our experiences, healing, where to go from here, and everything in between. It’s the best therapy I’ve ever experienced for this excruciating wound I’ve never been able to adequately explain to anyone who isn’t also adopted or from our community. For us, togetherness heals.

Seven months ago in our writing group, we were given an assignment to break an ugly mug, feel our feelings, and then write about it. I didn’t want to do it. It would make a mess. There would be broken glass. I would only feel annoyed about it and then have to clean it up. I just did not want to deal with it. So, I didn’t.

Those of us in the group who didn’t want to break something were challenged to consider the anger we felt and to contemplate ways we could move it out of our bodies and out of our hearts. I have felt so much anger surrounding my adoption experience and for so many reasons. Yet, I haven’t done much with this assignment either, other than write about it and share it with the group. So, I’m sure it is no surprise, I’ve remained angry.

Last week, for my 50^th birthday, for the very first time in our lives, four of us biological siblings were reunited in person to celebrate. We celebrated togetherness, family, inclusion, kindness, generosity, compassion, and time together.  We experienced mirroring, recognizing how much we looked alike and had similar mannerisms. We laughed and we cried. And when we cried, we held each other and cried together. When we parted, it was with a date set for the next reunion and a sibling tattoo in the works so that we can carry each other on our bodies wherever we go in the future.

After everyone left, I sat alone contemplating our week together and all that took place. I suddenly decided it was time to release the rage. Time to let go. Time to break the anger. Without any planning, I took a wine bottle left empty from the week, a hammer, some old rags, and an empty box from Costco. I took a photo of the wine bottle and asked my stepson to take photos as I started in.

With my first crack at the bottle, it made an interesting acoustic sound, and the hammer bounced back. No damage was done. With my second whack, the same thing happened, but this time, my three dogs, looking very annoyed, got up and went into the house. Four more tries and the damn thing still wouldn’t crack. Wow! Should I be learning something from this? Is this bottle mirroring me? Finally, with the seventh effort, it let go. Sweet relief.

The sobs began rising up.

A few beautiful green shards of glass from the bottle fell out from under the rag. Vibrant. Sparkly. Brilliant.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

I unfolded the rag to photograph the remnants of the bottle. The once beautiful label was slightly torn and blemished, yet exquisitely perfect, and surrounded by bits of jeweled green glass, glimmering in the sunlight.

I felt myself sparkling with release as the anger and fury drained from my body.

/*! elementor - v3.21.0 - 25-04-2024 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

Karen Stinger is an adoptee living in the Pacific Northwest. She cherishes being a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, and sister (again)! After retiring from a career in human resources, Karen utilizes her past professional experience and her love of helping others to volunteer her time with a DNA search angel organization. She also loves quilting, traveling, writing, learning about different cultures, and spending time with those she loves.

An excerpt from Childless Mother: A Search for Son and Self, the story of the author’s search during the pre-Internet era for the son she was forced to relinquish when she was fourteen years old. 

By Tracy Mayo

1982

Northwest mountains of North Carolina                                                                    

Tracy is 27, Thomas is 12

The elderly chestnut, lone survivor of the blight, stood as a centerpiece of all that could be surveyed from the expansive front porch. Others of its kind had once covered these Blue Ridge mountains like a shawl over shoulders on a cool evening. The deeply furrowed bark belied the ease with which an exotic fungus had slipped into the cambian and felled its brothers and sisters, once giants of these forests.  

A singular sentinel—isolated, yet resilient. When weather was favorable, I would take my morning meditation in the rocking chair on the porch, facing the chestnut. In spring the flowing white catkins waved like streamers on little girls’ bike handles. Come summer the lush, saw-toothed, dark green leaves shaded the cultivated wildflowers beneath. Autumn equaled yellow blaze. But in late fall, when the burrs should have encased three chestnuts each, there were no harvests. The lone tree was sterile. Even so, it grew its canopy year by year, waiting patiently for a favorable wind to carry news of another survivor.  

Most weeks I spent my day off from our business tending to the ample vegetable garden, which lay between the chestnut and our log cabin. The ancient mountains, worn down now to lush rolling hills, grew a dark sandy loam that needed no amendments other than the occasional side dressing of composted manure. I worked in the partial shade of a four-foot diameter, ground-mounted satellite dish that provided live feeds of sports and the BBC. In early fall, with afternoon’s slanted light, the bountiful harvest brought the last of the corn, the first of the autumn squashes, more tomatoes than I could put up, and the final raspberry yield.

I loved these mountains. It was here that I learned how to hoe the soil on top of the new potatoes; how to differentiate between the fringed gentian and the purple fringed orchid; how to be at the ready with one hundred pounds of black-oil sunflower seed when the migratory flocks of evening grosbeaks arrived in the front fields every April.  

I returned the hoe and the cultivator to the shed my husband had built, next to the chicken house he’d built as well. I poured grain into the self-feeder and retrieved eggs from the six straw-appointed nest boxes, apologizing to the unhappy brooding hen who pecked at my hand as I pulled her warm egg from underneath. Normally the hens laid their eggs, then abandoned them to the morning pursuit of food. But two or three times a year each hen yielded to her instinctive need to raise a brood. If we wanted to manage the flock’s size, we had to faithfully remove their egg each morning. 

She didn’t want to give it up, but I took it from her anyway.  Heartbreaking.

                                                ________

It’s been twelve years since I gave my baby away. 

I was the lonely, only child of upwardly mobile military parents. After our eighth move in my thirteen short years, I longed for a normal adolescence—to have friends, to feel settled.  What I got was a pregnancy at fourteen and exile to the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in Norfolk, Virginia. There, I bore not only a child but also the weight of the culture’s shame. I was told to relinquish my son at birth and never speak of him again.

It was 1970. They said it would be “best” if I could forget, which only made me more determined to remember.

                                                            _______

I remembered that boy at the bank the previous morning, about the right age—twelve, brown eyes and light brown hair. His face looked familiar. I could find him again; ask about his birthday. Then I stopped, today’s eggs in my basket, shook my head, and willed myself not to go down that unsettled path I had traveled so many times before.  

Three years before, I’d followed a blond-haired, brown-eyed boy at the spring Ramp Festival in Independence, Virginia. I pretended I was interested in the children’s games, but his mother sensed my focus, glared. Once in Durham, my college town, I thought he sat next to his parents and an older girl at my favorite restaurant, Somethyme. 

And one evening, twilight gathering, Duke Forest, I thought I heard his then four-year old voice. I stopped to listen, knew it was impossible, but with clarity beyond the finest crystal, understood he was out there.

 I had left my brown-eyed baby in Norfolk. He could be anywhere, but almost certainly not in the little mountain town of West Jefferson, North Carolina.

                                                ________

The only time I embraced a move was in 1971, a year after my son’s birth. My navy father was ordered from Norfolk back to the D.C. area.  Grateful to escape the compulsion to search for my baby in every passing stroller, I could focus on recreating my life. I could barely imagine how my Florence Crittenton friends, not from military families, lived with the very real possibility that their child might grow up in the next town, or the next block. An unthinkable torment.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

And yet looking back, I can see that I never stopped searching for my baby in every passing stroller. Unlike the chestnut, I wasn’t sterile: I was a childless mother. A mother to my core, my sense of self rooted in the soil of growing and giving birth to a child I’d been forced to give up. Everything I was doing with my life in the mountains of North Carolina—gathering up my resources both externally and internally—was to serve the eventual search for my son.

                                                ___________

That fateful move to Portsmouth in 1968. Of all of them, the one destined to change my life forever.  

The hair-tinged-green-with-chlorine lifeguard. Cartwheels and broad jumps in the park on a sultry summer night. Giggling explorations in the navy chapel. The sweatshirt around my shoulders on a surprisingly cool evening. The hard buttons on the bare blue and white striped mattress pressing into my hip as I accepted the full weight of him. The realization, the fear, the earnest need for my mother. And the pink and yellow pills on my nightstand. 

I can hear my mother’s voice:

 “This is what you get for playing with fire. Just what did you THINK was going to happen?” Mom handing me two girdles and proclaiming: “Wear these every day to school.  Make sure you only change into your gym clothes in the bathroom stall.” 

In my brown-and-yellow-striped footie pajamas, the eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. 

Mom’s voice again: “We could send her to Seattle, make up some story about my parents.” 

And Dad’s reply: “We could say she went to Seattle, but we could send her to a home for unwed mothers instead.”  

And so it was done. 

What might have happened if my mother, as a mother, had acknowledged the exorbitant price I would pay, and stood up for me? If I had been free to help with the baby when I could, while back in school, eventually to college? If Tommy and I had gotten married and reclaimed our young son? All the TM and LSD that I turned to in crisis, the ways I tried to find a unity of being, a still point of connection in the world: It was all about discovering and holding on to the connection to my son. 

                                    __________                                                   

The canning days passed. I put up my lime pickles, the spicy tomato juice, my serrano-infused corn, the mulberry jelly—and beets, green beans, okra. One day we drove down the mountain to the city below to visit museums and a truck farm, and returned with a new hen and rooster, the heirloom breed known as Plymouth Rock. We would breed and allow the hen to raise a few chicks, contribute to the genetic diversity, before the rooster would grow bold enough to challenge the resident Rhode Island Red—and therefore, be fated to chicken and dumplings. 

 I watched the chestnut drop its leaves, pulling its energy down to last another winter. This deeply rooted survivor, the landmark of my life.

On a chilly fall night when Jim taught at Appalachian State University as an adjunct, I stoked the fire, retrieved the precious photograph of my infant son, now twelve years old. Tucked into the same scalloped blue envelope from 1970, a still ocean hidden in a box of note cards, left bottom drawer, my nightstand, the same home it had occupied through all my moves. I examined his tiny face and imagined how he might look today. 

I placed the photo on my folded knees, closed my eyes and started my mantra. I would practice my TM, I would touch the peace and calm of absolute Being, and wherever I went the universe would keep us connected, through a silvery thread, with me at one endpoint and my son at the other.

Tracy Mayo lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and flat-coated retriever.  Her memoir, Childless Mother:  A Search for Son and Self will be released by Vanguard Press on March 28, 2024. 

By David Daniel

My birthmother rode into town on a Greyhound bus one icy February night. We fed her roasted hen, then sat by the fire as she unpacked her scrapbook. Tucked inside a see-through sleeve was a photo of her as an acned teen, leaning back in a hospital bed, cradling the newborn she would soon surrender. Sipping her tea, she handed me a faded certificate of birth—the original one with the original name, inked with imprints of two tiny feet. Come sunup, she ambled downstairs in a paisley robe, blond hair braided to her waist, and we sat in the kitchen eating eggs my wife had made. Outside, it was unseasonably warm, so she walked our kids around the block, and as she did, I sat alone by the blackened logs, eyeing my birth certificate once again—realizing that my real name was cleaved from me as early as can be. As I saw her off at the Greyhound that night, the penny finally dropped: I had sailed through life under a cover name and never even known it.

David Daniel is a writer and adoptee based in Virginia. 

By Patricia Knight Meyer

I wake from a bad night’s sleep, full of tossing and turning in sweaty sheets. Menopause? Maybe? Most women would ask their mother, but for adoptees like me, that’s rarely possible. At 54, girlfriends say it’s good I still have my periods. Late onset of menopause helps prevent Alzheimer’s they say, so maybe I’m lucky.

I’ve woken up early because I’m also lucky enough to have an award-winning journalist, a pioneer in adoption reform, and a first mother, Lorraine Dusky, author of Hole in My Heart and Birthmark, waiting for me to call her. She’s beta-reading pages of my forthcoming memoir about being sold as a baby on the black market and is ready to give feedback. During my reunion with my birth mother, I’d asked about menopause, and she told me she could tell me nothing, having had a hysterectomy before 40. So I’m almost tempted to ask Lorraine, but I don’t. Boundaries Patricia. Boundaries. Of course, asking my adoptive mother wasn’t possible, as she’d lost her uterus to the tubular pregnancy that had led her to me. And well, she died long before I’d had menopause brain to begin with.

My adoptive mom liked to tell me how maudlin and bizarre I acted my 13th summer, the month my period came. “You locked yourself in your room. Watched TV day and night. Refused to see friends, and sat at the kitchen counter sobbing and eating fried pies. One after the other.” She said she was resolved to take me to “a shrink,” but lucky for me the day before the appointment, I began to flow, and suddenly her daughter’s fall into madness began to make sense. If the going out is anything like the going in, I might be in for something.

What I do recall about that summer was being upset that my best friend took another friend to Europe, not me. Thank God we didn’t have social media back then. I can imagine how hard it would have been to watch them in their parachute pants, spikey hair, and Ray-Bans swinging off the Eiffel Tower. I also recall the summer of ‘83 being the summer I learned my adoptive parents didn’t know my birthday and had no birth certificate for me either. Unluckily, the attorney they used had decided to extort them out of $30,000 in exchange for getting to keep me, their paperless baby. How lucky for me they didn’t call the police and get me taken away, I remember thinking. In retrospect, even if I’d been invited to Europe, I couldn’t have gone. No birth certificate equals no passport, of course.

I end my call with Lorraine, which luckily goes well, by sharing that I am headed off to make the 1.5-hour drive from my birth father’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country to meet the couple renovating the 1952 Spartan trailer I was conceived in. Luckily, the trailer was still there the day I met my birth father, and the passion project of restoring her is now in full swing. Even on his deathbed, Pop lectured me, “Don’t drop the ball. She’s our legacy.” I agree. Today he’d be down-right proud of the plans I have in place for her. She’s going to be home to a non-profit adoptee creative writing residency.

Pulling down his dusty drive. I never forget how lucky I am to have found him. Yes, I was one of the few lucky adoptees to reunite and have not just a good, but a great, reunion.

As I head off for the long trip into town, I pull up sociologist Gretchen Sisson’s new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood on Audible. A 20-year study of birth mothers and analysis of the outcomes of their open adoptions, the book gets me thinking about my close call with becoming one of the statistics between the book’s covers. Pregnant at 18, I wonder if mine was not a subconscious attempt to stand in my own birth mother’s shoes, to right the wrong, to better understand her choice somehow. Would I make the same decision? I found out I would not. Back then, in 1989, I thought it was all a matter of conviction. I would never abandon my baby. No one could ever force my hand.

But even decades later, I still asked myself, had I been selfish to make my child grow up in a single-parent home, on food stamps? Sure, I went to college, but my six-year-old daughter came home to an empty house and stayed with the neighbors at night while I swung around a pole to pay for my sins, for being dumb enough to get pregnant, smart enough to get into the University of Texas, and nowhere self-sufficient enough to afford it. Even with the Pell Grant, we went hungry. What life could she have had if not with me? I’d asked back when I was still in “the adoptee fog” of things.

Had I been able to see all those hard times coming, would I have made the same choice? At the time, my 32-year-old boss/Baby Daddy said he’d help me, and my adoptive parents were thrilled to have another baby to help raise. My father hadn’t died yet, and it was their support that had made it seem possible to keep her. But the adoptee in me was blind to the holes in the precarious net I was so sure would catch me. I just knew nobody was going to take away my baby. Lucky for me, nobody wanted to.

If you ask me today, I would not change a thing. But the me then, had I known what lay ahead, I would have been shaking in my boots.

I pull into the workshop of the master woodworker who’s working on the trailer. He and his adoptee wife have an adopted son. And it was this lucky synchronicity that swayed them to assist this hapless middle-aged lady in turning my tin can conception time capsule into what I hope will be an adoptee’s legacy. I am happy to see she’s coming along fine, and I head across town to talk to a guy about a shed. Actually, a large metal structure meant to canopy the trailer. Protect her from the elements.

As we sit down to bargain, I think, hey, why not throw in the adoption reunion story? It’s guaranteed to bring a smile, and sometimes even a discount. So, when I do go with the whole “I was conceived in a tin can” story, usually like magic, the person on the other end offers their own. This cowboy? Well, his wife had herself a good ole’ DNA surprise. By God, her daddy just wasn’t her daddy after all. And then she found him. And well, it got nasty. So unfortunate, I sigh, feeling for the woman.

“Well,” the man chirps. “Like I said to her, and I’ll say to you. Lucky you weren’t aborted.”

“Yeah, there’s that,” I say, tightening the let’s make a deal smile on my face.

“I mean, I’ll go straight up an’ to tell you I’m a pro-lifer. I mean that fetus. It’s you. It’s my wife.”

“It’s complicated,” I say.

“It’s a life,” he adds matter-of-factly.

“You know what I think,” I counter. “I think if we are bringing all these babies into the world, we need to make sure we do all we can as a society to help those mothers keep their babies. And the dads too for that matter. That’s what I’m for.”

“Well, good luck with that,” he says, eyebrow raised.

When I’m in Texas, I never forget I’m in Texas. And despite the talk across the aisle, the desk I mean, he’s a friendly enough man, and I still hope we can make a deal. I ask for a quote, and I watch him ping, ping, ping, all the costs into a 1980s-style adding machine. I watch the paper roll off in one long untorn spiral to the floor, and I’m reminded of the old-school days, ways, and mindsets my adoptee community is up against.

I shake the man’s hand and let go, feeling lucky to have sociologists like Gretchen Sisson and journalist Gabrielle Glaser (author of American Baby), leading the way for first mothers and adoptees like me. If this guy’s buddies in Washington won’t listen to us, maybe one day they will listen to experts like Sisson and Glaser.

He pushes me a very nice number across the desk. I smile, accept the deal, and appreciate his help in bringing this adoptee’s dream of creating a space to support our community that much closer to reality. How lucky I am.

Patricia Knight Meyer grew up as an undocumented, never legally adopted black-market baby, sold to a dysfunctional couple already denied by the system. Her decades-long search led to a reunion with both her first parents over a decade ago. Since that time, she’s been active in the adoptee community, supporting adoption reform, and speaking and blogging on adoption and reunion. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir and is involved in both adoption and writing communities. She writes and speaks frequently at adoption conferences, and appears on adoption-centered podcasts and blogs on her website. Her reunion video with her first father has 280,000 YouTube views. To learn more about the Spartan Trailer, home of the adoptee writing residency project, follow her Trailer Project. Look for her on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @myadoptedlife and in Instagram at @patriciaknightmeyer and @somebodys_baby

By Sara Easterly

As an adoptee-author whose work involves explaining behaviors to people who often misunderstand us, I love a good backstory. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked enchanted me, and an interest in understanding the developmental journeys for Darth Vader, Voldemort, and The Grinch led me to watching, with great anticipation, their longer character arcs unfold in various Hollywood adaptations. Even in fantasy literature and films, it’s engaging to ask questions like those posed by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry in their bestselling book on trauma, What Happened to You?, to empathize with iconic characters’ early-in-life wounding and see them as well-rounded, hurting humans on a hero’s journey rather than one-dimensional figures used to propel the plot forward.

For these reasons, I was particularly excited to catch Warner Bros. Pictures’ Wonka and consider the mysterious chocolatier and his inner circle in new ways. Even though I enjoyed the film, I left the theater with more questions than answers and more frustration than sentimentality. That’s because, as is common in holiday stories ranging from Dickens to Hallmark creations, Wonka employed the orphan trope, along with a stereotypical happy ending with a mother-and-long-lost-child reunion—both of which lacked substance and depth.

In the movie, “Noodle” is a young orphan who befriends Willy Wonka while they’re held captive by Mrs. Scrubitt in a launderette. Within minutes of Noodle’s on-screen appearance, she’s labeled as suffering from “orphan syndrome.” Having just released Adoption Unfiltered, a book I co-authored in which I write extensively about the lifelong effects of separation trauma, I was interested in whether the movie might explore this further, beyond the insinuation that anyone separated from their parents is broken. I felt a momentary glimmer of hope when Wonka tells Noodle it’s her “orphan syndrome” making her mistrust others. Would we get to see her work through some of her natural emotional struggles? Would we get a sense of her guarded heart softening? But the opportunity to delve deeper into what might be going on for Noodle never came. Somehow, despite losing her parents as an infant, Noodle presents as perfectly adapted, the only emotional residue of orphanhood: yearning for her parents. But where was her anxiety? Her alarm? Her frustration? How could she so readily give her heart to Wonka—and others, without crippling fear that she might lose those she dared to love, as were her formative experiences as an infant? Why didn’t she feel abandoned or deeply rejected by Wonka after he left town without saying goodbye? This isn’t to pathologize Noodle or anyone else separated from their families of origin with “orphan syndrome,” but these are common emotional side effects of unbearable separation due to adoption or infant loss of a mother—left completely unaddressed in Wonka.

While Wonka is the main character, his relationship with Noodle is an important one, so the lack of depth to Noodle’s backstory is striking, making her merely an accessory—as so often happens when orphans or adoptees are presented in mainstream film and literature. That’s because orphans and adoptees are often used as caricature baddies or to serve as touching plot devices—especially when there’s a heartwarming reunion to look forward to in the end.

Wonka doesn’t disappoint in this plot promise, alluded to through the Annie-like locket Noodle wears around her neck and various clues about her origin story. But the film did disappoint by treating the mother-daughter reunification in the shallow way of most on-screen portrayals. As if decades or more time apart doesn’t create any awkwardness at all. As if mother will recognize her grown daughter, even though all the memories she’s held close are of the infant she last saw. As if daughter is comfortable with a mother she’s not seen since infancy—who, despite a genetic connection and meaningful in-utero bonding, feels like a stranger—suddenly intimately embracing and kissing her. As if they can reclaim all those lost years and pick up as if they hadn’t happened. Spoiler alert from experiencing my own reunion and listening to over a thousand adoptee stories in the Adoptee Voices writing groups I run: they can’t. Years and years of missed “firsts” and an evolution of personality unfolding separately for both mother and child can never be replicated or fully repaired. For this reason, reunion often comes with a heavy dose of disappointment and grief for all parties—made all the worse when films such as Wonka set up lofty expectations that cannot be matched.

Please, stop using those of us separated from our first families as plot devices. Just like anyone else, we’re complex humans with a nuanced life story and struggles. Unrealistic cultural stories further marginalize us and cause significant damage to our emotional health by perpetuating myths that we’re merely means to an end, that later-in-life reunion is all it takes to erase our life’s losses. Our stories deserve to be portrayed with depth and care because we’re anything but one-dimensional. We’re not the golden ticket for a movie’s happy ending. Our backstories matter, too.

/*! elementor - v3.18.0 - 20-12-2023 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of essays and books that include her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom (Heart Voices, 2019), and her forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). She is the founder of Adoptee Voices and is a trained course facilitator with the Neufeld Institute. 

By Andrew Perry

In 1912, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he proposed the world’s continents had once been joined in a single landmass that he named Pangaea. Wegener grounded his argument in the agreeable shape of continental coastlines, which look like puzzle pieces asking to be fit back together, and unlikely deposits in the fossil record of similar plants and animals separated by oceans too vast to swim.

Wegener’s proposal was visually intuitive and supported by a body of physical evidence, and it should have found a home among professional geologists at the time, but they rejected the idea and abandoned it for five decades. Wegener was a meteorologist, after all. Geologists didn’t consider him part of their family.

Wegener raised the single continent theory in the public mind and named it, but the idea was not his. It was the brainchild of Frank Taylor, an amateur geologist in the United States. Continental geologists might have considered Taylor a distant cousin at the time.

Neither Wegener nor Taylor could say what caused the single landmass to break apart and send the continents traveling in opposite directions. That task fell to British geologist, Arthur Holmes, who in 1944 was wise to the currents of heat and rock being exchanged underground and imaginative enough to speculate that continents move about because heated plates of rock are pushing and shoving against each other below the surface.

Today we’re accustomed to monitoring this pushing and shoving with a seismograph; the familiar instrument that diligently scrawls an uncertain pencil line through the middle of a scroll of paper until some traumatic event prompts its spidery arm to jump and scribble its alarm. The most violent pushing and shoving underground causes an earthquake, which, in movies and television, is often depicted by an equally violent seismograph line. English scientist John Milne developed the seismograph in 1893, well before we understood what caused the shaking it records. Astonishingly, the world had to wait until 1935 for American seismologists Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg to formulate their popular scale for comparing earthquake data.

The Richter Scale assigns a number to the seismograph’s movement to measure the energy released by an earthquake. That number is helpful for comparing earthquakes, but it tells us nothing about the earthquake’s effect on the people who experience it. Only the lesser-known Mercalli Intensity Scale considers the earthquake’s effect on the people involved.

Giuseppe Mercalli was an Italian volcanologist and Catholic priest who proposed his scale to measure the effects of an earthquake on its victims. Before we infer too much about a man of the cloth placing people at the center of his scale, we should know that Mercalli adopted this approach from two men of science, Michele Stefano Conte de Rossi and François-Alphonse Forel.

Adoption is a Monster with a Long Tail

Picture a seismograph and a Mercalli scale attuned to adoption; a sensitive device to monitor adoption’s traumatic consequences and a person-centered scale to quantify its effects.

I offer this image as a way to reify adoption and externalize it; to make the experience and its consequences obvious to others. Scientific instruments and graduated scales produce an observable reality and the seismograph’s shaky line makes adoption’s trajectory visible by tediously illustrating the prolonged consequences of a preverbal memory—adoption’s long tail.

The instrument’s fragile line with its record of unseen tensions, visible eruptions, and scribbled chaos, appears to recount the faults and foibles that I am condemned to live with as an adoptee. I see myself in a line that appears to hesitate before it moves forward on an uncertain path; I feel akin to a line that gushes frantic, confidently drawn peaks and valleys when a hidden tension tries to resolve itself; and I feel especially close to a line that abruptly resumes a more economical and humble posture after such outbursts, as if embarrassed by its assertiveness and now penitent.

The chronicle that materializes in the seismograph’s measured output helps me relate the reach of adoption to non-adoptees, but the handy analogy ends here. Identifying adoption’s effects is a valuable, clinical exercise, but the machine’s protracted and linear narrative fails to articulate how it feels to live with these consequences. The emotionally charged episodes that characterize my adopted life are diluted, and their significance is muted when they appear on a timeline separated by empty space. Isolation diminishes the relatedness of these events and calls their common origin into question, undermining my ability make sense of them, and consequently myself.

The seismograph’s timely march forward also requires that events be assigned to the past, fostering a mistaken belief that events are left behind, when it is more likely they will accompany the adoptee uninvited into the future, creating a cumulative present.

Even grading these experiences on a person-centered scale has a clinical air about it. It’s like explaining that force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration to someone who has just hammered their thumb.

A Dandelion Seed Aloft

The consequences of adoption are compounding and forever concurrent, and I experience them like my reflection in a mirror that has been smashed. Multiple images of me are displayed simultaneously from different and unusual perspectives. The resulting montage is intense and overwhelming, and it forces me to see unfamiliar selves. The fragments may constitute a new composite image, but like adoption, the damage has made an accurate picture of me impossible. The integrity of the mirror has been lost and cannot be restored. Shattered mirrors cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. If they cannot be replaced, they must be lived with.

The montage made from slivers and debris is normalized by necessity. The composite reflection is distorted but fixed, and this imperfect image becomes my only point of self-reference. My consolation is knowing the mirror has been smashed and the image is not accurate, but the price is persistent confusion and self-doubt. I have no confidence in this image that I know isn’t accurate, and no point of comparison to measure its inaccuracy.

Propelled forward by a fear of abandonment, a relentless need for acceptance, or perhaps a ghost in my DNA, I am unable to distinguish a spontaneous impulse from a calculated act of compliance for the sake of survival. I can’t differentiate between a genuine self and a false self. There is no test for self, no criteria to apply, no means to bring it forward from a blurred background. I’ve assumed the habits and words of my adopted family, my friends, and coworkers, uncritically and without regard to fit or comfort. Anything to help me overcome my sense of otherness has been hastily sewn into a busy patchwork self with no discernable pattern.

This peculiar consequence of adoption is experienced in perfect isolation and cannot be shared with the non-adoptees in my life. Similar to the unwelcome dreams I have at night, this is a private encounter, and I am irretrievably alone with it. My spouse sleeps inches away from me in our bed at night, but she does not experience my dreams with me. She cannot. Likewise, my splintered self-image and the uncertainty that results from it are mine alone.

Denied a complete and accurate picture of myself, I examine each fragment in the smashed mirror independently; not in isolation but separate from its siblings and away from their influence. I’m searching for something familiar, hoping it will comfort me with an affirmation, and confirm that a part of me is real. I stand perfectly still before the mirror and try to distinguish the accurate reflections from those distorted by the mirror’s fragmentation. I’m struggling to separate my authentic self from an image altered by the mirror. I stand perfectly still and try to disentangle myself from the consequences of adoption.

Unsuccessful, I begin to question that I have an innate self. Perhaps my self was stillborn or smothered at birth. Perhaps it was never there at all, like the biological child my adoptive parents failed to conceive. As a stand-in for their absent dream child, I am no more than an assortment of adoption’s consequences, with a self no more significant than a dandelion seed aloft.

Heading Title

Andrew Perry is an adoptee who was born in Jacksonville, Florida. A husband and father, he’s grateful for the fellowship of his backyard chickens.

By Bruno Giles

    Many years ago, after a long wait, I received an email from the Swiss Branch of the International Social Service saying that they had important information about my adoption. They’d called earlier in the day but received my answering machine and preferred not to leave phone messages about this type of search. I was asked to call them back, which I did immediately. The woman I was transferred to introduced herself and got right to the point.

    She told me they had contacted both my birth mother and my foster mother, news I had been waiting more than 50 years to hear. It was quite shocking to actually hear those words. I took a deep breath but said nothing, still trying to process the moment.

    Before I could respond, she continued, “Your birth mother doesn’t want any contact with you at this time, but the wonderful news is that your foster mother was thrilled to hear about your search. She is 85 years old and has thought about you all these years.”

    When I heard this news I didn’t know which one to focus on, the good news or the bad news; my heart sank then quickly rose up again. What is sadness mixed with joy? What is hate mixed with love? Rejection mixed with acceptance? Is it possible to cry out of one eye?

    The woman explained that my foster mother still had pictures of me as a toddler and was waiting to share them with me. However, as great as that sounded, my thoughts returned back to my birth mother’s news. In that moment, I finally realized there would likely never be that reunion I both dreamed of and dreaded. A painful thought for that little boy who wanders aimlessly around in my adult body. She had never answered any of my letters that I had agonized over writing to her, and this seems to be the end of the fantasy of a welcoming, tearful, joyful, lost family meeting, with possible future involvement.

    But over the next few months, my foster mother and I connected both over the phone and through the mail. Since she was the cousin of my birth mother, she knew her very well.

    I peppered her with questions about my birth mother, my birth father, what happened, and why. I was focused on one thing only, getting all the information I could on my birth mother before my foster mother disappeared again. She politely answered all the questions I threw at her but unfortunately didn’t know many of the answers to them.

    Then, during the moments of silence over the phone, she would slowly tell me bits and pieces of what she did know, which was the time we spent together, none of which I remembered. Slowly, over the next few months, the missing part of my life began to emerge.

    She explained that after I was left in the maturity ward for six weeks, she and her family took me into their home, even recalling the exact date. She said I became their little sunshine and was able to spend the first period of my life with them, surrounded by lots of love. She said it was a terrible day when the time came and they had to let me go. She compared it to the death of her husband many years later. She said back then, 50 years ago, she felt it would be better for me to be raised by parents of the same color and she felt very concerned about this, and this is how and why I came to my new parents in America.

    I suddenly realized that after all these years of searching for my mother, I was looking in the wrong place and at the wrong person. Just giving birth doesn’t make you the mother.

    My foster mother was exactly the birth mother I had hoped to find. Full of love, a bit of regret that the times hadn’t changed fast enough for us, and admitting that perhaps now it would be different. She told me that I was like one of her own children.

    After all these years, I believe I have found her after all!

/*! elementor - v3.16.0 - 20-09-2023 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

Bruno Giles is a biracial international adoptee, conceived in London, born in Zurich Switzerland, and raised in America. He has only recently found his birth father after 68 years, a Nigerian, through the miracle of DNA.

By Sarah Reinhardt

I was pushing my cart through Whole Foods in a daze, having just come from a yoga class the day after dropping my son—my only child—off at college. I saw—and then, suddenly, felt—someone lunging onto me and latching his teeth into my right bicep, tearing through my denim shirt and breaking the skin.




For the next few seconds I was silent and motionless before I jumped into action, trying to remove my arm from the grip of his mouth. Finally one of the two women with whom he’d been walking was able to get him off and away from me.

 

He was a 12-year-old autistic boy I’d find out, though due to his stature I’d have guessed him to be older. Since no one knew what to do—including the young employees standing around looking shell-shocked—I took the lead.




“Please get me some ice,” I said to the nearest employee. And I told the women, who were also shell-shocked—his mother and aunt—to go outside where the boy would feel safe. His mother told me he was easily over-stimulated, and neon lights and crowds were a couple of his triggers. I’d simply been the unwitting moving target.

 

It didn’t occur to anyone to get their phone number, help them out of the store, or help me. No one on the staff seemed older than 20, and the manager was on break. So it was up to me to find the nearest Urgent Care and get a tetanus shot.

 

After the doctor released me (“human bites can be more dangerous than animal bites!”), I went home and recounted the story to my friends, who’d all been calling to check on me after I’d returned from college drop-off.

 

“I’m fine… but you won’t believe what happened to me today!” I’d respond to everyone who called. It was just the chaos I needed to distract me from what I’d soon discover to be the most painful and grief-stricken time of my life.

 

“You may want to take a look at what’s going on with you—it’s very possible you drew that energy in,” my friend Jainee said, regarding the bite. “Sadness, when not in check, can attract dark entities.”

 

I heard her. The truth was, I was devastated. I’d never known this kind of loss, like a piece of me was missing—my purpose suddenly gone. I had no idea how empty I’d actually feel. I hadn’t prepared myself for what it would mean to send my son off to school.




Sure, intellectually I’d known it was coming. In fact, I’d encouraged him to apply to out-of-state schools because he could “always come home,” but I hadn’t truly emotionally prepared for the actual leaving piece of it. The unslept in bed that took my breath away the morning after I got home. Seeing the lone t-shirt that hadn’t been packed on the floor of his closet. Not hearing Spotify during his long showers or staying up until he was home from a night out with his friends, waiting to start a new show until he had a night free, or any of the myriad things that made up our routine.

 

His going had been, until this moment, just a concept—part of the plan when you have kids, or a kid, in my case. They graduate high school and they go to college—or at least that’s what I understood. And as other parents have throughout the course of history, I wanted better for my son in every area of his life—a better foundation of love and self-worth than I had, better opportunities than I had, better exposure to whatever it was he expressed interest in. 

 

So I drifted through his childhood, showing up in the way I knew how, by being available and loving him and laying the groundwork for him to live out his dreams. But I forgot about me. I forgot to plan for me. 

 

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to connect with another human being, and giving birth was the way in which I was able to do that. I couldn’t get there in any other way—for whatever and a variety of reasons. Having been relinquished (rather, taken away) at birth for adoption, the divorce of my adoptive parents, and other events in childhood that pushed me to shut down. 

 

I’d tried, but I always had a barrier between myself and others. As I write this, I know that I wasn’t aware of how thick the wall was, or maybe even that there was one at all. I simply felt distant and removed from the world and the people in it—until my son was born.

 

Beker was the first person in my life with whom I shared blood. And that might seem like no big deal, but for adoptees it’s a profound experience. You grow up with no mirror, no explanation for why you shot up to 5’10” and have blonde hair and green eyes, a gap in your teeth and long arms and legs, or no reference for why you twirl your hair or dislike certain foods that the family around you loves. And later, when you’re older, you wonder where your penchant for pairing vintage and new clothes, alternative music, and your pursuit of a creative life originated. And on a cellular level, never feeling ‘quite right’ with the people around you. There’s no real way to understand it—you’re just… different. And awkward. And everyone knows it but no one says it. 

 

You don’t ever really get a chance to feel comfortable in your skin, so you spend your life not quite being able to put your finger on just what’s wrong. You adapt to your surroundings and twist yourself into a pretzel to be what you think people want you to be.

 

Beker was born six days past his due date, after an induced almost-24-hour labor. As soon as he was born, I looked at him and felt a bond I hadn’t known could exist. I knew this human. We were family. Finally, there was someone in the world that I could love and would love me in return.

 

That night in the hospital, after everyone had gone home and it was just the two of us in the room, I took him out of his bassinet and put him in bed with me. I had a deep fear that someone might steal him. Later, after I met my biological mother, she’d tell me that I was taken from her, she wasn’t allowed to hold me. 

 

I believe that I knew—that my body had kept that score.

 

From that point on, Beker became my focus. Baby classes, toddler activities, and volunteering at all of his schools as he got older. When he was around seven, he became an avid skateboarder, so I spent my days at the skatepark. And after he discovered basketball the following year, which lasted until he graduated high school, I traveled all throughout Southern California for his varsity and club games. I was team mom, snack mom, and fan mom. 
Throughout his life, my career path was one that would allow me to be available to him. In the early years, I made a living as a writer. Later, I opened a business—an ice cream truck—which I sold the summer he went to college.

 

These choices also allowed me to shift the focus from my unhealed wounds and distract myself with what I thought was the right way to parent—undivided devotion to my child.

 

It’s been nearly six years since that day at Whole Foods. For the first few years after college drop-off, I spent my time unknowingly anticipating when Beker would come home. There was fall break, Thanksgiving, and then finally Christmas and a month of winter break; after that, I’d have to wait until May, when he’d be home for close to three months. Of course, I showed up for work, saw friends, had a life. But underneath all of that, it was just me waiting. Stagnant. Not moving forward.

 

And then it was 2020. Early in January, Beker told me he’d taken an internship that would keep him in Dallas the following summer. I felt gutted, unsure of what that meant for me.

 

Shortly after, as we all know, COVID hit. My salary was reduced, I had to give up my home, and I made—as had often been the case in my life—a reactionary decision; I moved across the country to be closer to family (primarily Beker, who’d be only an hour plane ride away). 

 

I left Los Angeles, my home of nearly 30 years, and the house I shared with Beker. Leaving behind the ghosts of the bounce of a basketball, the trodden path we’d walk with our dog Pearl (whom I’d lose not many months later, another terrible loss in a time of great pain), the beach where Beker dug holes and splashed around as a toddler. My friends, my hikes, all that was familiar.

 

At first, the novelty of living in an only vaguely familiar place—one that I’d visit twice a year but wasn’t quite intimate with—was enough to avoid the deep grief that I’d been pushing down for many years. 

But then it caught up. About six months after I moved, my friend Louise and I started a podcast about adoption and, shockingly, I read my first-ever book about the emotional effects of adoption, The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. Suddenly, my entire life made sense. My attachment to my son made sense. My difficulty attaching to others made sense. My reliance on alcohol made sense (I’ve since quit). Everything started to open up, and I began to heal.

 

I won’t lie—I still anticipate seeing Beker and make sure we don’t go more than a few months without a visit. I still have bouts of melancholy when I return after seeing him, though they don’t last as long and I’m not indulgent about it.

 

But it’s different now…it’s not filling a gaping hole. It’s not the pressure on him that it once was—even if we weren’t both aware of it. The anxiety has lessened.

 

I still have a ways to go, but I trust that time and awareness of the origin of my wound(s) will help, finally, to ease the pain. 

Sarah Reinhardt is a co-host (along with Louise Browne) of Adoption: The Making of Me, a podcast by and for adoptees. She is a writer, empty-nester, OCD dog parent, and works in Public Media. Reinhardt hopes that her voice will help resonate with other adoptees facing similar issues (power in numbers, as it were).

By Marci Purcell

Surely you’ve heard the news. In the spirit of what she embodied, I won’t mince words.  Sinéad is dead. I am not one of those bandwagon fans that decide, now that she’s gone, she was an unparalleled treasure. In my little world, she has always been exalted. When I was escaping my childhood home, then subsequently processing my mother-loss and what had happened to me, Sinéad gave me the permission I needed to be angry—no, not angry—to be outraged at what was perpetrated against me…against us. This was cathartic. Grateful to her, I turned to her music time and again as I embarked on my healing journey and during the decades that moved me from injury to activism. To say that her passing saddens me is seriously inadequate, but I cannot find the words without resorting to clichés.

A few years ago I did an internet dive to check in on her and was distraught to learn she was still unhappy, still grappling with losses, still in an existential crisis…still trying to make sense of it all. I was gutted because she’s been such a propelling force in my life, helping me battle my demons and, as much as anyone can, move on from my childhood trauma.

I hope she found some peace in her expanded identity and new name, Shuhada’ Sadaqat. As an adoptee, her search for something solid and defining resounds within me.

These words, after weeks of media platitudes, tribute concerts, and the like, feel worn and frivolous. Well, then, so be it. I’m resigned to them. I’m going to add my voice to the cacophony and force the world to listen. There are kids stuck in unspeakable realities and survivors, years later, still struggling to make sense of it all. My survivor community, normally just scattered kindling, Shuhada’ lashed us to one another and set us ablaze through her music. Her lyrics and protests gave us a voice. Of course, a quirky-broken-defiant-fragile-angry-strong-stubborn voice. A voice filled with ashy complication. But what other kind of voice could it be? Recalling all the times I shout-sang along to “Fire on Babylon” while driving away from my life, tears emblazoned on my face, running from monsters, I crack a smile and raise a fist to all she gave to me and to all the broken-hearted, stubborn-ass survivors out there who, just like me, are carrying the fire forward.Marci Purcell is an activist and adoptee. She’s a board member at Adoption Knowledge Affiliates and serves on the advisory board of Support Texas Adoptee Rights (STAR). Purcell is committed to advocacy and reform relating to the rights of adult adoptees, foster care alumni and overall truth and transparency in adoption. She’s also passionate about disability rights in the broader community and as they relate to foster care, adoption, and records access. Purcell has had several opinion editorials published related to adoptee rights and is working on her memoir. She resides in Austin, Texas.

By Gwen Lee

Nothing has changed and everything has changed. That’s the refrain often heard from NPEs*  when they talk about their discoveries.

Nothing has changed. My husband still loves me. My children are still my children and they still love me. I haven’t lost my job. In fact, none of my co-workers even knows about my new status.  I still go grocery shopping every Saturday. I haven’t had to skip any meals. I still enjoy the hobbies that I’ve enjoyed for many years. The sun rises every morning and sets in the evening, painting the sky with those beautiful colored sunsets I enjoy so much. The ocean waves still meet the sand at our beautiful beaches. So, how bad can this development be? Why do I find myself dissolving into tears every day?

Learning that you’re an NPE affects everyone differently. However, I’d bet that the vast majority of NPEs find themselves confronted with changes of some sort. What changed for me?

The earth shifted on its axis. Fortunately, this was only a temporary change. It would greatly trouble me to think that I was responsible for a permanent change in the way the world turned. How could I explain that to inquiring minds? However, that was the how I felt initially.  My world turned upside down. There was confusion, which gave way to a realization that loaded me onto my emotional roller coaster, which eventually dropped me off at a place of curiosity.

My feelings about who I was underwent a big change. Suddenly I started asking myself, “Who am I, really?” I could look in the mirror and still see the same hair, the green eyes, the glasses, and the extra pounds I was always trying to lose. So I knew that people who knew me would look at me and think nothing had changed. They, of course, wouldn’t know what I was feeling inside. Maybe they made a trip to the snack bar and missed the curve ball that was pitched to me. (I swung and missed.) It felt as if my whole life had been a lie. I, simply, was not the person I’d always thought I was. I started ticking off my personality traits and physical characteristics on my fingers, examining each one to determine if it might have come from my biological father, whom I had never met.

My sense of my family and my place in it changed. I realized I had a lot to learn about my family history. I also wanted to learn as much as I could about my “new” family—the family of my bio dad.

I started dealing with this change by telling my close family members about my discovery. That meant phone calls to my sister and each of the two brothers I grew up with. It also called for conversations with my two sons and their wives. I left it up to them when and if they chose to tell my grandchildren. I knew I was imparting sensitive information but I felt as if this discovery directly affected them and their children. There was never any doubt in my mind about telling them. My family members all assured me that this news changed nothing about their feelings toward me.

I also knew now that the man that I grew up believing was my father, was not my father. That was another change. My birth certificate father was the only one of the three key players who was still alive. My mother and bio father had both passed. I’m a fairly strong believer that people do have a “right to know.” However, after wrestling with the decision for a bit, I chose not to share what I had learned with my birth certificate father. He and my mother had divorced when I was five years old, and I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with him.  The reason for my decision not to tell him was that he was in the throes of dementia and very near the end of his life. If my mother had still been alive I know I would have had a lot more to grapple with. Was that a bit of luck for me? Maybe, but it also meant I would always have a lot of unanswered questions.

I’d been doing a lot of research since I got my DNA results and made my discovery. I’d also gotten some help from people who’d been doing this kind of research far longer than I had. A big change for me was that I now knew that instead of being the youngest of four siblings I was smack dab in the middle of seven siblings. The siblings that I grew up with were half, even though I’d never thought of them as halves instead of wholes. Now with six siblings, I still didn’t have any whole siblings.

I’d been successful in establishing communication with two cousins on my bio dad’s side. I gave all my contact information to one of these cousins and asked him to pass it along to my three “new” siblings, all half-sisters. He told me he did but he also advised me not to expect anything from them. They could not come to term with their father’s “indiscretion.” One sister did, eventually come around to reaching out to me. We live quite a distance from each other but we’ve become acquainted by texting and talking on the phone. I feel grateful for her kindness and friendship.

I like to think another change I’ve undergone is that I have become more understanding and empathetic toward people who are going through their own personal crises. I have learned a lot, not just about genealogy and DNA, but also about the turbulence of that emotional roller coaster that people find themselves on when they’re faced with this sort of life-changing event.

I’m still working on making my way through all these changes. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as if I have processed all the changes. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the feeling that there was likely no relationship involved in the circumstances of my conception. I still have some work to do.

My NPE status is never far from the forefront of my mind. So, while I’m sitting watching one of those beautiful sunsets or doing some of the crocheting that I have always enjoyed doing, I’m often thinking about the ways my life has changed and working on strategies to avoid stepping onto that roller coaster.

*NPE: not parent expected, or nonparental event

Gwen Lee is a mother and grandmother of four. She and her husband, Don, have been married for 51 years. Lee has lived in Southern California her whole life, and she retired in 2020 from her profession as an administrative assistant. She enjoys reading and crafting, particularly crochet. Her email address is gwenlee84@gmail.com.

By Vanessa Nolan

Welcome to Babyworld. The fun, easy way to start or grow your family, ease your infertility pain, and forget about your worries and insecurities for a while. At the start of the game, you’ll be provided with one or two children to make your own. If you want to splash the cash, you can import additional infants, available in a range of ages and colors at different price points. Or why not go for our premium product endorsed by celebrities—the rainbow family?

Will you take your chances with “potluck”? Your potluck children will be selected by the algorithm, written by our in-house team of experienced social workers. There’s no guarantee that they will pass as your natural children, and they may have additional needs of their own you are unprepared for. Or will you take time to follow the detour and visit the Build-A-Child workshop? There you will get to choose from a variety of physical, intellectual, and temperamental attributes. Your Build-A-Child will then be matched as closely as possible with a child from the pool of those available. Be aware, though, that it may not be possible to find you a match. Plan your strategy. Wait for a product that more closely meets your needs or take the first available child.

In Level 1, you have up to 18 years to play with your new family. If, during that time, you collect enough points you’ll earn bonus years of gratitude and servitude. Points are earned for giving them a “good home” and for loving them so much because you “chose” them. No need to tell them what kind of “choice” it really was; that before you “chose” them you tried for years and failed to have children. This is because you control the release of information and can use this power to your advantage.

If your children do suspect they were not your first choice, you can lie because they are dependent on you and will believe what you tell them. You can even play with their minds and suggest that they “chose” you. Or you can tell them it was “God’s will” which indicates strong game play and all but guarantees compliance and acceptance.

In Babyworld, your children will love you back, but be wary of this love. It can be from fear of losing you, rather than a child’s natural love for their parents. Because they have been torn from their mothers, they will not know that love isn’t supposed to hurt. Once you understand this, you can use it to your advantage in one of two ways. You can make them more dependent on you by telling them how special they are and letting them remain unnaturally attached into adolescence and adulthood (this works particularly well with boys). Or you can treat them badly so they never develop any self-esteem and (bonus!) don’t believe they deserve to have information about themselves.

Your first task is to name—or rather, rename your children. You can give them your surname and even a name that helps them feel part of your family so they will not show interest in their origins. If you wish, you may completely erase their identity by giving them an anglicized name if they are not from an Anglo family. This is known as the “color blind” play. An alternative strategy that’s popular these days if you have taken children from another culture is to allow them to stay connected by learning about the language and culture together. This can be superficial—who doesn’t like dumplings at Chinese New Year?—and makes you look progressive and open-minded.

Some players go all in and choose a high-risk strategy: not telling the children you are playing Babyworld. This is likely to fail sooner or later, and is not recommended, but it is within the rules of the game to do this if you so wish. Remember, the release of information is under your control.

If, during the course of the game, your children present challenging behavior, you have several options. First is the “warrior parent” card. You can go to battle with Social Services and schools in order to obtain the additional resources you need. This will remind you and those around you that both you and your child are different and special. You can also play the “victim” card which has two benefits: it allows you to remain blameless and it draws attention to the sacrifices you are making. All of these strategies keep the attention on you. If you have played these cards and are still not winning, you can play the “rehoming” death card which will take you out of the game but keep you alive. As a reward for taking part, you will be allowed to take the “victim” card with you to use outside the game. So even if you lose, you win!

Indeed, the cards are stacked in your favor. You can earn social capital from having “saved” a child and sympathy for having to deal with their behavior. If your child “thrives” and “succeeds,” then it is down to your parenting; if they “fail,” then blame can be laid at the feet of birth parents, who at this stage are not even permitted to join the game unless you invite them to. You can even invent stories about the birth parents, if you need to make yourselves look better.

Sometimes the game throws you a curveball and you discover you were fertile after all. This is hard because you have entered Babyworld and now you will get to experience what those outside Babyworld already know: that nature means something. All we can say is—good luck.

If you make it to the time your children turn 18, congratulations! You will move up to the next, more challenging level. The aim in Level 2 is to live to old age with your relationships to your children intact, so they will feel obliged to look after you when you need it. You may even want to play for grandchildren!

The obstacles in Level 2 are harder to overcome. As adults, your children may start to think for themselves and may want to know more about their origins. This is a danger point because they may discover that Babyworld is only a game. They can move away from your orbit and control and may meet other people who came from Babyworld and compare their experiences. They may stop blaming themselves for any problems they have and notice that Babyworld has given them a set of lifelong issues to tackle.

If you do have grandchildren, both the stakes and the danger level are raised. More so than for themselves, your children will want the best for their children. They may be upset that their children lack family medical history, do not know their genetic origins, or are divorced from their own culture. They may be seeing a genetic relative for the first time when they have their first child and feel the difference between that and the relationships they had with you. In other words, they are half out of Babyworld already. You may need to use different tactics to maintain their loyalty. Showing that you are, or would be, hurt by them meeting their biological family is one way to play it. The more guilt you can generate, the more you will be able to get them to neglect their own needs and service yours. The risk in this strategy is that the conflicts within them will eventually lead to a crisis. In dealing with the emotional problems they have, the truth may be revealed.

They may eventually awaken from the game, emerge from the fog, understand they were made to play the game without choosing, and know that they were both game piece and reward in this fantasy. They may even try to get play stopped altogether. Which would spoil everyone’s fun, wouldn’t it?

Vanessa Nolan is a UK-born adoptee and a founding member of Adult Adoptee Movement. She edits and publishes blogs for the AAM website. You can follow her on Twitter at @essix_girl.

By Michelle Talsma Everson

On a red eye flight home from visiting my best friend, my 13-year-old son’s sleepy head on my shoulder, I message my aunt to ask if we can visit her beach house this summer. She says yes enthusiastically, and we check on dates. I message my little brothers’ mom to say hi and catch up. I make a note to message my sister. To another aunt, one who helped raise me, I send photos of my sleepy teen. It all feels so normal, and for that I am grateful.

Recently I told a friend about two aunts who helped save me. One, my mother’s sister who took me in when I was 17. Another, my biological dad’s sister, who did very much the same almost 20 years later. In between, I was honored to be mentored and raised by other amazing women. I count my blessings and they are many.

Two years ago, a surprise DNA discovery rocked my world. I was raised knowing my dad had other children out in the world—and more than a decade after his passing, I spit in a tube for two at-home DNA tests in hopes of finding these long list siblings. What I found instead was that my dad, who had passed in 2010, wasn’t my biological father. My biological father was very much alive and living in the city where I was born.

What ensued over the last two years brought me to the brink of insanity and back again. The best way to describe it is to imagine feeling all human emotions possible all at once. Grief, pain, betrayal, curiosity—the works. Overnight, I went from being an only child to having multiple half siblings. My ethic identity changed too—I was raised identifying as a Mexican American, and, it turns out, I’m half Jewish. An identity crisis followed. I’m an NPE (not-parent expected), and I needed to find out where that fits into who I am as a person.

A writer, I published multiple local and national articles about the experience—my own and those of others in my same boat. An explorer who wanted closure of some sort, I met multiple new family members as I and my son darted around the country.

The big question—have I met my bio dad, as I call him? Yes, once, in November 2022 for a few hours when he was in my hometown. It was a surreal experience that’s hard to put into words. He acknowledges me—which is what I needed for my heart to calm down and the shame to fade—and we keep in casual touch.

Gratitude and growth are my mottos these days. Of course, there’s the occasional ache and pain when I see photos of people I’m related to and haven’t met; but overall, these are the days I’ve waited for. I’m finally (mostly) on the other side of the grief associated with this.

There were some dark, dark days though. A recent study about the mental and emotional health impacts of being an NPE shows that I’m not alone in suffering a variety of mental health and emotional issues. Common feelings include everything imaginable—as I’ve stated, it’s like feeling all the spectrum of human emotion at once. Loss. Betrayal. Grief. Anger. Excitement. All the feelings. There were sleepless nights, passive suicidal ideations, gratitude for the kindness of strangers and loved ones, realizations that it was okay to do what was best for me and my son—even if others disagreed.

For those of you at the beginning of a surprise DNA discovery journey, know that you are not alone and that help and support is out there. There are dark days, but there’s also hope. For those supporting loved ones on this journey, remember there’s no timeline to grief and no two journeys are alike. One day your loved one may be on top of the world, the next they may not be able to get out of bed. And both days are okay. Also, if you’ve been recently contacted by someone with a surprise DNA discovery, I implore you to choose empathy. We did not choose this, just as you likely didn’t, so please remember we’re doing our best.

As for myself, while everyone’s journey is different, I’m so grateful for each rainbow after each storm and for those who supported me through this particular storm. I hope to choose empathy always, and to always pay forward what I have learned.

Michelle Talsma Everson is a journalist, editor, public relations pro, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021, and since then has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

By Akara Skye

My mother dropped me off at an empty public playground without a goodbye or a promise to return. I reluctantly and dutifully got out of the car. The playground and I drew a heavy sigh. We were alone together.

I shuffled over to the swing set determined to make the best of it. The hot wind kicked up, covering my face with a dusty film. For a moment, it clouded my vision, and I wondered if it might be better to not see clearly. To not see the truth of the matter; that everyone will leave me. What did I do to deserve this?

If both the mother I knew and the mother who relinquished me at birth could leave me, it would be easy for others to do the same. My birth mother didn’t come back for me, but went on to a brand new, shiny life including children, the ones she kept. Now my other mother has left me. Would she come back?

Hours passed, and the sun began to set. No other children had arrived and neither had my mother. I wondered if this would forever be my landscape. Dusty, dismal, and deserted.

I saw her car coming up the road just before dusk. I couldn’t read her face. Was it full of dread and desperation, or maybe it was full of joy and excitement?  Had she done this with her other daughter, the biological one?

Put on your game face, I told myself. Act grateful. Don’t ask questions. The car rolled up. No honk, no door swinging open. I got in, and we drove off. The forever silence between us.

On the way back home, I was already worrying when, not if, this would happen again. What if she didn’t come back the next time? 

I do remember another place. A happy place. I would ride my purple Schwinn bike with the flower basket and plastic streamers, to a neighbor’s backyard, two miles from my house. I was alone, yet it was my decision, so it didn’t feel like punishment. Their backyard was unfenced and sloped down to a creek. The surroundings were calm and peaceful, shaded and cool, nothing like the dusty dry playground. The breeze rustled through the leaves of the protective trees which bent over the water. The water lightly danced over the gray, brown, and white stones and pebbles. An occasional flower petal gently fell onto the sprays of water.

I was proud that I could sneak in without being detected. Little did I know that the neighbors were watching me, much like they might watch a stray cat who appeared at their back door.

Regardless, I was happy there. The place was the opposite of the playground; even though I was alone at both places. But perhaps I should get used to it. Everyone leaves.

By Michelle Hensley

Sometimes…

She says in her tiny voice

She whimpers, then cries and screams, searching out anyone within earshot, longing for basic human compassion.

But there is no one to hear her.

Sometimes …

She says in her bit bigger voice

The voice that is starting to feel autonomous, the one questioning her place on a much more intimate level, knowing she looks and feels different. This is the voice who suspects, but is not allowed to question, the one who ponders the randomness of it all, but has learned not to rock the boat.

This voice cracks even when she whispers, barely heard or acknowledged.

Sometimes….

She starts again.

This voice is stronger, it has knowledge, experience, willpower. Her curiosity has opened a plethora of feelings, and there is no safe set of ears to hear her words. Things are so confusing that she feels she leads two lives. She carefully weighs her responses, juggles her emotions, learns how to act the role, so as not to alarm or lose the last tangible link of normalcy, between the now and the

What if I…?

A select few listen, but she is still not heard.

SOMETIMES….

She speaks out, and her voice is steady.

The words come quickly now, randomly jumbled as she begins relating to others like her, those who know.

She types these words into her phone for later, an endless bullet point document that should be titled “and another thing!”

This time, she can speak it out loud, she can inflict tone, and add pause, for effect. There are adjectives with fervor, there are adverbs spoken so eloquently that you can almost predict the shiver of visceral effect.

There is eye contact, subtle but steady at first. It switches to more direct pointed gazes at those deemed visually offensive and judgmental.

The harshest glares are saved for those who are especially ignorant and opinionated, and love to flaunt their savior complex.

THIS IS THE VOICE SHE SPEAKS WITH NOW.

It has substance, truth, spirit, faith, and love. This voice is the loudest. It has been boosted by the words, the acts of kindness, acceptance, and genuine support from those who show up to hear her speak. She has found fellow chorus members, allies, and comrades.

The chorus has a unique sound, a melody, a song….

She has never heard such a lovely sound before. These are the voices she longed to hear, the ones who FINALLY LISTENED, the ones who met her where she was, and gave her the bass she needed. This sound, the sound of kinship, could finally drown out the demons, the gaslighters, the ones with closed minds and cold hearts.

This symphony, the music, the lyrics—as only her mother tongue could express, are the exact tone, pitch, staccato, rhythm, and diction her ears need to hear, her heart needs to feel, so she can finally speak her truth.

She soars, giddy with the lift of new flighty high notes and arias. She feels seen, validated, and acknowledged for her voice and her feelings. She is heard.

She is finally heard.

Sometimes

Even after all this time, the tiny voices of her past still try to speak up for attention.

Other times they furiously scurry and hide from delivering an opening line.

Sometimes, without warning, the voices all fall silent, carefully and deliberately choosing not a single form of expression. There is incredible power in their silence.

The voices are not scared, they are tired of speaking to those who cannot or will not hear.

She has learned that she can choose those she wants to give her words, her time, her love, and her spirit. She has found her audience and they will hold her safe, even if she still needs to cry

Sometimes.

By Louise Browne

The world suddenly made sense. Everything was as it should be. My son was born. We named him Jack. It was a strong name we agreed upon and a name that fits his strength today. All paths in life led to this exact moment. The moment he was in my arms. I could no longer hear the whirring of the machines that had been putting the necessary fluids into my body while the surgeon worked. The beeping of the monitors was silenced, and all of the excitement and conversation around us became muted. His father was crying, and I could hear his voice but not make out his words. I looked into those eyes. Chocolate pools my father had later called them. He looked into mine. He no longer cried, and I no longer had a hole in my heart. I somehow knew him before. We knew each other. It wasn’t only the months of being connected through blood, emotion, sound, and touch. It was somehow from another plane, another time, and maybe not of this world. For a brief second, I could grasp what that was but I couldn’t hold on to the thought—it wasn’t really for me to understand. It was a knowledge that will come again. In a future time. A quarter century later and in a blink of an eye, we are still connected. My heart walks around on this beautiful earth having to learn life, to negotiate the ins and outs of love, friendship, heartbreak, joy, sorrow, loss, and success. A moment ago I was doing the same. Life is as it should be. This is what matters. A river with a strong current flows between mothers and their children. The feeling of floating in that river and being gently carried is what we search for throughout our lives. 

Louise Browne is an adoptee and co-host and co-creator of Adoption: The Making of Me Podcast, along with  Sarah Reinhardt. This piece was written for her son, the first blood relative she met. She felt she knew him instantly, as if maybe from another time. It struck her years later when she found out that her birthmother, Linda, had passed when Louise was still a little girl, that maybe there was some symbolism or truth to that. Like many adoptees, she had a hole that was filled with the birth of her son in a way she could never explain at the time and a curiosity that became instantly more clear. Now, after coming out of the fog and discovering more about herself and what that longing and hole meant and means, it takes a new shape, and is more prominent than ever. It captures the feeling that all adoptees want to feel—that moment of connection that even in reunion they may never get to feel and can’t recreate—the search for that current in the river. Find her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

An essay by Shannon Quist

In their defense, all the stories they heard about adoption were fairytales. All they knew was that their bodies could not make a baby together and there was a fairytale option in front of them, a socially acceptable alternative. Adopt a baby. And so, armed with the holy love of God and the righteousness of white privilege, they bought into a story that began with a happily ever after and cost them a pretty penny. Later, they would complain that they didn’t get the benefits of a tax break when adoption tax breaks became a thing. They paid for a human. They invested in a family experience. But investments like this don’t always go as planned, do they?

In their defense, nobody told them anything that would make them question their decision. Not the other adoptive parents. Not the agency. Not the lawyers or social workers. Not the church. Nobody handed them books written specifically for their kind of family with bibliographies in the back, nobody said to them that someday their child would scream, “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL PARENTS.” And so they did as they were told and raised the baby as if she had been born to them. But she wasn’t. And they were missing important pieces of the story.

They didn’t know, until she broke down, that anything was wrong at all. How could they have known? The power dynamic was set, whether they meant to build those walls or not. But those walls get built when you buy a human, there’s no escaping it. And so, when she started screaming, they looked at each other and asked, “Is this adolescence?” But that wasn’t the whole picture.

They could have looked for literature, called a professional, asked for help. And, to an extent, they did. They bought Focus on the Family literature and signed their daughter up for therapy and asked their family doctor to diagnose her. But those fixes were only band-aids to a reaction. What was the girl reacting to that made her act this way, feel this way? They should have read the literature for themselves, called a professional for themselves, asked for help for themselves. And maybe it isn’t all their fault that they didn’t do this. What was the adoption agency doing to support them after they’d brought home their child? What literature were they sending? What resources? What support? What advice? None. So, who could the parents really call anyway? Ghostbusters?

These parents got the short end of the stick, too. They were promised a happily ever after. And when everything turned sour and they didn’t know whom to call or whom to blame, they turned on themselves (“maybe we’re bad parents”) and they turned on their daughter (“maybe there’s something wrong with her”) when they should have turned on all of civilized society that thinks adoption is such a lovely thing to do, brave and wonderful on all fronts. So their flavor of embarrassment went from the grief of being unable to conceive to the shame of being unable to parent. And there was nobody to call for help.

Their pain pales in comparison to giving birth to and relinquishing rights to a child or being taken from your mother right after birth. But it is still pain, it is still unfair, and it is the most dangerous pain of them all because out of the three of them, the adoptive parents have the power to lash out, to use their power for pride and strike down the other two characters in this story with an amplified version of the shame they carry themselves. And if they would have had help, if they would have had resources, that could have been avoidable. But that’s not how this story turned out, is it?

But it isn’t the end, not yet. As long as you’re alive, you have the power to make a change, to turn the story around. Out of all the brave things an adoptive parent could do, this is the bravest option of them all.

Shannon Quist is a Texan adoptee and the author of Rose’s Locket. Her master’s thesis on adoptee-written narratives is available on her website. She volunteers with Adoption Knowledge Affiliates, a non-profit that connects individuals, families, and professionals in their adoption journey through lifelong education and support. Follow her on Instagram @shannonrquist.

An Essay by Caitlin Jiao Alexander

An Essay by Hannah Andrews

“It’s one of the best profiles I’ve ever seen,” she says.

 Well swipe right I think, but it’s not that type of profile.

 I’m Zooming with my super-fancy genetic scientist doctor. I’d think her a total genius, except for the fact that she keeps forgetting I’m adopted. She’s just asked me, for the third time in as many appointments, about my medical history.

“No history,” I remind her, “I’m adopted.”

On my first appointment, (the one before the one where they took seemingly unending vials of fasting bloodwork and finally gave me an anti-anxiety pill so I could get through the claustrophobic MRI), I wrote DOES NOT APPLY on my intake form. All caps. I added (adopted)—lowercase and parenthetically. It’s second nature, though it has evolved. I used to write it in teensy letters as if whispering an apology for myself—adopted. Over the years, my words got bigger and messier. By my thirties, I’d scrawl ADOPTED kitty-cornered across the entire form.

But, I’ve matured.

On my best days, I make polite suggestions: “Perhaps you could add a box to the form—one that says Adopted or Unknown Parentage?”

This is not one of my best days, but I hold my tongue and we Zoom along. “You’re one of my healthiest patients in years,” she says and hits “share screen.” My monitor fills with the data of me–whole genome sequencing, blood-based biomarkers, bone and muscle analyses. She chirps through my results as if she created me—Dr. Frankenstein to my monster—and I must admit, it’s fascinating. I am riveted to the screen as I watch my mystery movie finally unfurl.

“There’s one anomaly,” she continues. “ You’re a carrier for…” and she turns into Charlie Brown’s teacher, wah-wahing her way through a bunch of words I don’t know. The gist of it—I’m a carrier of something, but it’s only dangerous if my reproductive partner is also a carrier.

I tell her, for at least the second time, that I’m 53 and childless.

She continues, “Well, it’s not a concern then but this gene mutation can sometimes increase the risk for liver issues—”

That’s where I cut her off.  “My biological mother died of liver cancer,” and then can’t stop myself, “I just assumed it was from booze, ‘cuz Illinois said I had no inheritable cancers or conditions, so I figured she drank too much—though I did meet her bestie who said she wasn’t a heavy drinker but my bestie would’ve told you that about me back in the day too, cuz, well, she was my bestie—”

Dr. DNA’s face freezes onscreen. Did the internet drop? Did I talk too much?

“I thought you didn’t have any information.” she finally says. Yeah, I talked too much.

“That’s all I know,” I stammer, like a little kid caught in a lie. I also bristle, ready to battle for myself because once I actually found out a smidge of my medical history, I didn’t feel like writing it down. Nobody cared when I had to write “does not apply” for 50 years, so I just kept writing it. The maternity home and adoption agency were content to scribble “mother healthy, part Spanish” on my record. Illinois legally disappeared me—locked up my original name, my mother’s name. Not one update in fifty years. When they changed the law I got my Original Birth Certificate with my name and her name. I dug until I found her. Dead.

Still, thanks to science I can, for a price, find out more. I can fill in some of my blanks.

Commercial DNA analysis replaced their lazy brush-off of “part Spanish” and provided me with a rich ancestral lineage that includes Sicily, Scotland, Mexico, Mali, Ghana, Ireland, and bits and baubles from a number of other regions. One genetic genealogist claimed I had the most diverse ancestry she’d seen.

 I am made of everywhere.

And no one.

 That same DNA company linked me to 6,000 matches on my paternal side, but for the life of me I can’t find my dad.

 But, good genes. Healthy genes. No apparent markers for Alzheimer’s or cancers, and I’m beyond grateful for this information. Yay science! Still, I can’t shake this bitterness. Much of this—I should’ve known years ago. Maybe it would’ve changed nothing. Or maybe everything.

The doctor continues Charlie Brown teaching me, but I’m done with today’s lesson.

“Awesome! Lemme just dust off my time machine, fly back to 1995 and pop out a kid or two.”

She tells me I’m funny, though neither of us laughs.

What I don’t tell her is….

I used to think (and by used to I mean not just when I was a kid, but until pretty recently), that maybe I was from another planet. I had no proof that I wasn’t. I possessed a fully fake birth certificate direct from the government. I mean, come on! So, I thought my spawn might also be alien, might just crawl right out of my belly.

I mean, it wasn’t the only reason I didn’t reproduce, but it was on the list. Near the top.

I know it’s illogical but so is having no history, no identity.

Anyway, I am prove-ably human now.

My super fancy, practically genius genetic scientist doctor says my genes are superior. Okay, maybe not superior. Not super-model or Ensteiny-smart genes, but really healthy. The best she’s seen in years.

And they will die with me.

By Gwen Lee

I settled into the chair, ready for the stylist to begin my long-overdue haircut. I’ve found that there are varying degrees of chattiness among stylists. While I tend to be fairly quiet, if the person who’s going to hold me captive in their chair for the next hour or so starts an interesting conversation, I’ll gladly participate.

Salon chair conversations are usually innocuous enough. On this particular day, the conversation took a different turn. The stylist, Sophia, launched into a story about how she was angry with her ex-husband because he was trying to convince her daughter that she was not his biological daughter. There was a matter of the daughter’s hair coloring (that had to be how we got on this topic) not matching the ex-husband’s color. Sophia was considering having her daughter take a DNA test to prove that her ex-husband was indeed her daughter’s biological father.

I didn’t, and would never, interfere in anyone else’s family drama, especially that of a virtual stranger. Otherwise, I might have been inclined to tell her to tread carefully. Warning bells starting going off and red lights started flashing in my head. It had been about a year since I’d learned I was an NPE (not parent expected).

My discovery that the man whose name was on my birth certificate was not actually my biological father came, like so many others, after I took an Ancestry DNA test in 2017, purely out of curiosity about my ethnicity. When I started looking at DNA matches, I noticed a lot of names I recognized as maternal relatives. I didn’t know a lot about my dad’s family. He and my mother had divorced when I was 5 years old. He moved across country, and I’d only had a handful of visits with him since. But I knew enough to know that I didn’t see anyone from his family on my list of matches. There were also a lot of names I didn’t recognize at all. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what had occurred. It didn’t seem impossible to me. After all, years ago, my sister discovered she was an NPE. That was before Ancestry DNA tests. Someone gave her a hint and she used the services of a private detective, who also happened to be our brother, to find her biological father. After researching, talking to some cousins on my paternal side, and using the services of a search angel, I was able to determine who my bio father was. I then asked one of his daughters to test on Ancestry. The result confirmed she was my half-sister.

By the time I made my discovery, my mother and my bio father had both passed away. Consequently, I’m left with many unanswered questions. I’ve come to accept that there are many details around my conception that I will never know.

I wrestled with the decision about whether I should talk to my birth certificate father about this situation. That brings me to one of the dilemmas faced by many NPEs at some point after the world turns itself back upright again after they make their discoveries. To whom are they going to tell their stories?

We all have to make decisions about whom we can trust with our stories. It’s not really a matter of comfort, because I doubt that many of us feel “comfortable” telling our stories to anyone. It’s not a situation that engenders comfort. But I know from listening to many NPE stories that many of us do tell someone, and often we feel better for having shared.

There is no NPE Discoveries for Dummies manual. We’re left on our own to decide how to handle these matters, and telling or not telling is a decision that we have to make on our own. Even for those NPEs who are lucky enough to have therapists or counselors helping them navigate their journeys, and while there are likely some professional opinions, I believe it has to be the decision of the NPE.

So many circumstances go into the decision about whether NPEs will share their stories with someone else, and they are all very personal. We talk about how there a few basic premises behind NPE discoveries—the things that put us all in the same boat. Yet, everyone’s story has many individual aspects. It’s the same with the tell-or-don’t-tell decision. Everyone has very personal issues that cause them to grapple with this decision.

Decisions range from I’m not telling anyone because it’s no one’s business but mine to I’m very open about it—I even told the grocery store clerk. Many decisions fall somewhere between the two. The vibe I got from Sophia, my stylist, is that she’d be one of the more open story tellers.

Many NPEs tell some, but not all, family members and a few select friends. Some tell most of the family, leaving only a few relatives in the dark. Based on my own decision-making processes and on other NPE stories I have heard, there are a variety of motivations behind some of these decisions.

Some people only tell their stories to the people they think might be interested. I think we all have been in a situation where we start to talk about DNA or NPEs and the eyes of the person we’re talking to glaze over. That’s not someone I’d be likely to get into a deep NPE discussion with. Some people are interested initially, but if we keep bringing the subject up to them a year or two later, we sense they are losing interest. Most of us realize that our stories aren’t as impactful to anyone else as they are to us.

Some NPEs feel they need to tell their stories to those affected by their discoveries. This is especially true if they happen to be on the same branch of the family tree—for example, if the discovery directly affects the NPEs children and grandchildren. I knew right away that I wanted to tell my sons and daughters-in-law. It directly affected them as well. I also told my brothers and my sister, even though they are half-siblings. My discovery didn’t directly affect them, but it may have helped clarify some of the family history as it pertained to our mother. I think I told them more out of a need to share with someone who cared about me—someone who might understand, or at least try to understand, what I was going through. Of course, I also told my husband. He’s been supportive but really has little interest in the whole discovery process, so  I don’t discuss it with him on an ongoing basis.

The people I do continue discussing it with are those in the NPE support group that I attend once a week. This group has been my salvation. I am able to share with others who are all in that same proverbial rocky boat I’m in. We all have stories that differ in ways, some slightly, some considerably, but we understand each other and support each other and take every opportunity to lift each other up. I’m incredibly thankful to have been referred to this group by a fellow NPE.

Some of us who have been open with some of our family members have one or several people we’ve decided not to tell. Again, the reasons for these decisions vary widely. We might feel these people will not understand and will just find the whole issue somewhat shameful; they might  insinuate that we should just “put it away.”

Sometimes, when we choose not to tell certain people, it’s out of an effort to protect our mothers’ reputations. It may have come to light that our NPE status resulted from extra-marital affairs, and we don’t want our moms to be seen in a bad light, so we choose not to tell our more judgmental relatives. And other times we don’t feel that a particular person would be able to handle this complicated information.

There are also instances in which we believe that a person will take our stories, throw them into a mixing bowl, stir it around, and bake up big family dramas. They might invest all of their negative energy into the situation, possibly with no regard to how it will affect the NPEs.

Another scenario involves NPEs wanting to spare certain people the heartbreak that the knowledge would bring them. They may want to spare a mother who didn’t know who the father of her child was and who let the birth certificate father believe the child was his; or a mother who may have conceived after a sexual assault; or a birth certificate father who had no idea he was not the biological father; or one who knew and chose to keep the secret and raise the child lovingly as his own. Suddenly we have the truth in our hands but we want to spare our loving fathers the sadness it would bring them. In these scenarios, the NPEs consider it a gift to keep this information from their parents. Others say the parent has a right to know. Sometimes the parents’ health and age may play part in the decision, for example with an NPE deciding that their parent is too close to the end of their life to needlessly lay this information in their lap.

I believe all of these scenarios in which discovery information is withheld, just like many of the other issues that rise up along the pathways of our NPE journeys, are fluid. It may take months, even years, but an NPE might rethink their decision to not tell a certain person. It’s a personal decision.

As part of my journey, I chose not to tell my birth certificate dad. By the time I made my discovery, he was already near the end of his life and suffering with dementia. I simply couldn’t justify bringing this information to him, if he’d been able to understand it.

I’m hoping that at least one person will see this and know that they are not alone in some of these feelings, doubts, and fears they wrestle with while deciding to tell or not tell. If that’s you, you can take comfort in knowing that many of us are in that same rocky boat. There are no right or wrong decisions for everyone. Ultimately, these choices are yours alone to make.  Give yourself time and some grace and know you will make the right decisions for you.

Gwen Lee is a mother and grandmother of four. She and her husband, Don, have been married for 51 years. Lee has lived in Southern California her whole life, and she retired in 2020 from her profession as an administrative assistant. She enjoys reading and crafting, particularly crochet. Her email address is gwenlee84@gmail.com.