Adoption

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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 asked 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” (played by Calah Lane) 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. 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?

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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.  

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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!

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. 

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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.

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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!

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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? 

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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.

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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. 

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 who to call or who 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.

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By Caitlin Jiao Alexander

She will come to me as a ghost, which is unfortunate, but it is the only way. I will be compelled to glance up and I will see a woman who looks more like me than anyone else I know. She will stand a few yards away, wearing something simple, un-patterned. Her hair will be gray or black, her eyes will be dark and sad. Even if she were to smile (and most ghosts don’t smile), they will still be a little sad. She will have a narrow forehead with a smooth hairline, like mine, and full lips, like mine. If she speaks, she will say a name. I will not recognize her words as a name, but I will recognize her in the same way that one recognizes somebody in a dream: with feeling and certainty, not with logic. She will flicker like a dying lamp and then disappear.

***

When there’s so much you don’t know about yourself, fantasy blooms into your mind like weeds in an empty lot. Harmless, pretty, and just as susceptible to death as they are to growth. The stories, worlds, and characters constructed by young adoptees are called “the ghost kingdom” by Betty Jean Lifton, adoptee activist and psychologist. An adopted person’s imagination stretches to fill infinite unanswered questions. Who was my mother? What did she do? What about my father? What kind of life did they have? How do I fit into that lost legacy? The adoptee creates her own narratives. She uses half-redacted clues, or information passed from agency to adoptive parent, or pure speculation to populate her ghost kingdom.  

As a child, my imagination would place me in the role of an alien, a descendant of royalty, even a clone. I was eleven years old, fantasizing about my figurative letter from Hogwarts, my superhero origin story. I read a children’s book series called Replica about a girl who begins to experience strange abilities, leading her to discover that she is a clone. She has a crescent-shaped birthmark on her shoulder; I have a splotch-shaped birthmark on my back. She was adopted but didn’t know; I am adopted and have always known.

“Isn’t it weird how I have that birthmark?” I asked my mom. “In the book I’m reading, the clone girl has a birthmark, too.”

“That doesn’t make you a clone, sweetie,” she responded in the loving yet dismissive way of a parent.

“It would be cool if I were, though,” I mumbled.

“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”

Why wasn’t it fun for her to imagine that I could be a cloned government experiment? It was fun for me. I didn’t want to be a sad, ordinary adopted person. I wanted to be special. I wanted a more interesting story than the one I was living. 

Orphans and adoptees are tropes as old as storytelling itself: Moses, Superman, Annie, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, etc. Adoptees are living mysteries, quests-waiting-to-happen, puzzles with a heartbeat. The questions of our lives make for good backstory and motivation. The potential for lies and betrayal make for good plot twists. Our journeys from isolation to reunion make classic plots. But, of course, real life is not like the stories. 

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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 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-corner 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 analysis. 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.

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By Kathleen Shea Kirstein

I allowed my son to hijack my homework. Like I have allowed those I love to hijack my desires, needs, and, sometimes, my beliefs over the years. My ugly mug was ceramic with a picture of a Christmas tree. I asked my son and daughter-in-law if anyone had any attachment to it. God forbid I would decide on my own because I might pick out something someone else might like. They said no, and my son asked why? Then he saw the hammer in my hand. “What’s that about?

I told him about my writing class homework. Get an ugly mug, smash it with the hammer, pick a word from an emotional wheel that describes how it felt, and write about the experience.

“Oh, I have this,” he said, producing a small firecracker. He went on to say, “ I think this will work better than your hammer.”

I didn’t want to explore why my 38-year-old son had a firecracker so readily available. It was Valentine’s day. (I hate Valentine’s day.) We went outside. The air was crisp, not a cloud in the sky, and the shining sun made it feel warmer than the actual temperature. I filled the mug with water and put it into a container to keep us safe from exploding shards. My son lit the fuse, stepping away to maintain a safe distance. The anticipation was everything. I knew the blast was coming, yet I jumped a bit when mug exploded. It’s always interesting when I know something is going to happen. I plan for it to happen, even set the steps in motion, yet I’m surprised when it occurs. That was the goal. Blow up the mug. The explosion was small due to the contained space, yet still powerful enough to shatter the mug.

“Wow, that blast was a little more than I expected,” my son said.

I told him I knew what I was going to write and thanked him for helping.

How did it feel to smash the mug? Realizing the ease with which I let others hijack my plans, needs, desires, and, yes, sometimes my beliefs, was an insight I was happy to acknowledge, so happy is the word I chose from the emotion wheel.

Suddenly, I was thinking about my love of target shooting. Due to a shoulder injury, it had been a while since I spent time on the range with my pink-handled Sig Sauer Mosquito. I love the moment when everything is dialed in and all I hear is the sound of my breath as I steady it to take the shot. It’s quick, short-lived, but violent. Could it be I like explosions? It’s quick, short-lived, but violent. I never thought of myself as a violent person. I think of myself as the opposite.

I thought about the mug as a metaphor for my life. My life has exploded four times. Three that I remember in precise flashback available detail.

The first  explosion—the one I don’t remember, the one that happened on the day I was born—lives in my cells. It’s preverbal and developmental. Wendy was my name. My life/Wendy’s life was blown up and shattered moments after birth. And whatever life that infant was destined to live was taken away when I was sent off to the hospital, to the incubator, without so much as a pit stop into my loving mother’s arms. After all, Helena, my loving mother, was headed home to live a life without me. She was leaving Wendy to hang out in the maternity home for 43 days, relying on staff to keep the baby fed, warm, and safe until a family from New Hampshire would come and take her home. Wendy died on April 15, 1958, when the adoption/infant protection agency assigned her a new identity, a new name. With the bang of a judge’s gavel, Kathleen Ann Shea was born. Hers was the life path I would take.
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By Adam E.L. Anthony

All my life, I’ve been told stories about my adoption that include words of gratitude, love, excitement, and pride, with a not-so-subtle Christian overtone from my family, friends, family-friends, and acquaintances. Those are the origin feelings I was supposed to emulate and identify with.

I’m not saying I didn’t genuinely have those emotions. It’s just that the darker and more complex emotions of anger, confusion, frustration, and doubt were “too much” for many that I have grown up with. I put those emotions away in a box without discussing them much, but they were still apparent in my actions and behaviors. Anxiety became a best friend. And how easy it can be to expel those feelings on unsuspecting people I encounter. I then feel hurt.

With the journey I’ve gone on so far, there is so much hurt, accompanied with sadness and some regret. It mostly has to do with those ancestors and biological connections passed that I never got the chance to connect with or those with whom our time together on this earth was much too short. It hurts that the people involved and the system did not consider my possible desires to want to know where I came from and the people who played a part in my existence. The assumption that I would just be okay with living a life that never fully suited me and having a limited backstory because “I’m so blessed and grateful to have the life I’ve been given, so the rest is moot”—well, that’s just incorrect. I feel the pain from the choices other people made for me, and because of my birth and adoption circumstances, there was nothing I could ever do. (Continued)

By Hannah Andrews

My glasses weren’t rose-colored, but they were the wrong prescription. I see adoption more clearly now, and in previously overlooked places–often hiding in plain sight.

I recently rewatched “The Truman Show,” a 1998 film lauded for its artsy take on free will, privacy, and our perception of reality. It both predicted and parodied the reality TV explosion. It also was a subtle, if unintentional, jab at the closed adoption system. The lead character, Truman Burbank (Jim Carey), is an adoptee. Truman was “chosen” pre-birth from a pool of unplanned pregnancies and legally adopted by a corporation (the TV studio). His entire life was fabricated and filmed—fake parents, a fake town, and a fake world that is actually an enormous domed production studio. As cracks work their way into the facade, Truman begins to question, and quest for truth (True Man) ensues.

You see it, right? Chosen. Adopted. Fabricated. Search for truth.

Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades.

In my defense, adoption was not the focus of the movie. I suspect it was just a handy plot device. (Adoption so often is, but that’s another essay. ) Maybe the writer was typing up the tale and thought, “How could this character have zero clue about his real identity his whole life? Ooh—I will make him adopted!” The audience doesn’t learn of the adoption until well into the film. It’s a catch-all explanation.

Like Truman, I’m an adoptee. Mine was never a secret, but other truths eluded me, and I was mostly okay with that.

“I’ve always known I was adopted but never wanted to search.”

 This was my mantra, repeated with an eye roll for nearly fifty years. Mostly, I just wanted control of the narrative. Long before DNA tests were a thing, people—friends, relatives, random strangers—constantly questioned my lack of search, my ethnicity, and sometimes even my lack of questions. I accepted my false reality. The identity quest wasn’t for me, but if other adoptees felt the need to search, I didn’t criticize. At least, not out loud.

Unless you count my older brother, who found his family of origin when we were in our twenties. His green eyes sparkled as he described meeting his biological sister and how she looked like him. “Can you imagine?” he gushed.

I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.

i.
I am sitting on a giant red rock.

All around me as far as I can see are more red rocks and red dirt. The sky is brilliant blue.

There is no one else around, at least not that I can see from where I sit.

All I can hear is the wind. I do not know where I am, but the scenery burns itself into my memory forever.

I am 18 months old.

ii.
There’s a tree growing next to the fence in the far corner of the back yard, next to a swing set and a sandbox which no one in our family uses anymore. One summer day, I haul some scrap lumber, a hammer, and some nails out of my dad’s basement workshop. I’ve cut up five boards that used to be part of a picket fence, and I nail them to the tree to make a ladder that gets me just far enough up to reach a branch that I can use to climb higher into the tree. I tie one end of a rope around a stack of boards and tie the other end around my waist. I put the hammer through a belt loop, fill my pockets with nails, and climb up into the tree to a spot where three large branches come to a fork. I haul the boards up with the rope and use them to build a simple, sturdy tripod. I haul up more boards the same way and build a small platform on that tripod, just big enough to sit on.

My dad comes home from work to find me sitting 30 feet off the ground in a tree. He is not happy that I didn’t ask permission to build the platform—something that I fully anticipated, and also the reason that I didn’t ask him. But he says that it seems sturdy enough and does not make me take it down, although he does insist that I take off the lowest of my ladder boards so that my little brother, who is three years old, can’t reach it.

As a transracial adoptee raised by a white family in a small racist town in Oregon, I’ve always known that being Black meant being different. My Black body was both a cocoon and a womb, working overtime to birth and metamorphosize my self.

I used to long for my father. The one whose seed impregnated the woman I was told I looked like—the woman whose picture I’d never seen.

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

As a child, I fantasized that my Black body was a descendant of African royalty. That one day, a man with skin like the soil would knock on the door of my adopters’ home and tell them he’d come for me. He’d tell them flowers grow best in the soil and most eagerly when they are watered. He’d tell my adopters that he was my soil and he wanted to be my water, too.

Being a Black boy without a Black father is a common experience, but it hits different when the Black child is a transracial adoptee and lives in a town with almost no other Black people. Adoption scholars call this phenomenon “a lack of racial mirrors.”

How was I to imagine who I was? Who I could be? Who I might desire to be—without a robust intimacy with Black people?

My three most enduring and long-standing relationships with Black people are myself, my twin (with whom I was adopted), and Hip-Hop.

I discovered Hip-Hop at 12. Before that, I’d heard friends rave about Eminem, but I was so disconnected that when Eminem was at the height of his career between ’05 and ‘10 and I heard people talking about him, I thought they meant the M&M’s from the candy commercials were putting out albums. I couldn’t fathom why anybody would be interested in music made by animated candy. I mean, really!

Eventually I’d discover that Eminem was, in fact, a real human. I never connected with his music but it inspired me to probe Hip-Hop. As a West Coast kid, that meant I discovered folks like Snoop Dogg, NWA, and Tupac. Coming into contact with their music was the first time I was experiencing Blackness or Black cultural productions. Even though I couldn’t relate to their stories of gangbanging, drug dealing, partying, and hood life, the kinds of pressure the music placed on me was immediate and life altering. These gangsta rappers became my stand-ins for the Black father I longed for.