By Monica Stoffal

My mother once told me: If you think someone is going to be your friend, tell them the worst thing about you; a true friend must know your worst thing. 

In December 1971, I was twelve-years-old and pregnant from the incest I’d experienced since I was five. On April 16, 1972, labor started with its vice-grip of contractions, bringing me to my knees just outside the hospital, where I pulled my mother to the ground as she tried in vain to hold me up. A kind stranger helped us to the hospital door. While the on-call doctor considered whether to give me an epidural, he said, “If this baby even lives, it will be small.” Eight hours later, a seven-pound boy was born—a boy I never saw or held. The adoptive parents and older brother were overjoyed. 

I followed my mother’s advice for a while, believing that a true friend had to know my worst story.  

I considered Robin to be that true friend and, when she shared her hardship story about growing up with an alcoholic mother, I told her my incest story. I was nineteen at the time, and Robin, who was eight years older, seemed trustworthy. I was naive about how hard my story truly was. Unbeknownst to me, Robin gossiped, telling her long-time friend, Colleen, about my childhood sexual abuse. I happened to be renting a room from Colleen, and when we had a disagreement, she accused me of sleeping with my stepfather. I was stunned. Not only by her calloused, out-of-nowhere comment, but by the shocking realization that Robin told someone else my hard story, something I rarely shared. After that, I kept my story all inside, hidden by my Cheshire Cat grin, my cool, aloof self.  

Marriage, two children, college, a teaching job, gave me many years to stuff the story down deep enough that I realized I could live my entire life without ever telling it again. 

When reproductive rights came up in conversations, I’d hold my breath and wait for the conversation to end. But once, I was in the staff workroom with a colleague—a man I respected for his kindness and skill in helping freshmen love Steinbeck—when he said “I really am against abortion. I think it’s wrong.” 

Breathing slowly, I asked, “But what about incest? What about rape?”

“Even then,” Jim said. “Adoption is a really good choice.” 

It took me years to even know the next question: “Have you ever given a baby up for adoption, ever done what you are asking a victim of incest to do?” I asked this question of a protester outside of Planned Parenthood.

“No, I haven’t,” she relented. “But…”

I kept my voice calm. “Well, let me introduce myself. My name is Monica, and I gave a baby up for adoption in 1972, just after I turned thirteen. I just want you to know—the loss is permanent, visceral, and at times, all-consuming. Please keep that in mind when you tell a girl, a survivor of incest, that adoption is a really good choice.”

Adoption was my only choice in 1972, but it was not the worst thing that happened to me. The worst thing came later, after I had my own children, held and loved them, when I realized what I’d done—that I’d given away a baby. 

I should not have kept him. But…I had that baby, gave him to another family to raise. The empty place he once occupied, that has been my worst thing. Surviving that empty place has been the challenge of my life.

Hearing Hadley Duvall speak on stage at the Democratic National Convention gave me my next, next breath. Hadley was brave. Her courage was a signal to me that the other choice, the only choice I had in 1972 pre-Roe, the one Jim did not understand, comes at a price he could never pay. I paid that tab, and I would never ask the same of any female, regardless of age or reason. 

My hope is to share something true about one person who was not crushed by incest. Surviving our deep and early wounds takes time, and we need one another, just like I needed Hadley to take the next breath, the next step forward. 

As Kamala Harris said, “A twelve- or thirteen-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.” 

Indeed, we do not. We want freedom from our worst story, and the support that comes from hearing powerful people say: “They don’t want that.” 

As Hadley and I both know, we never did.

Monica Stoffal is a retired educator and a mother, wife, sister, and daughter. She’s writing a memoir about her journey as an incest survivor. Find her on Facebook at MonicaLeigh@Facebook.com and on Instagram @MissyLeigh59.

 

By Maelyn Schramm

My Dearest Biological Mother,

You don’t know me. Well actually, I suppose you do. You grew me in your belly for nine months. You held me in your arms when I was born. You cradled me likely with tears streaming down your face as you left me on the doorstep now 29 years ago.

You don’t know me, but I am your now thirty-year-old biological daughter, Alexia Maelyn Schramm. I write you to share my half of the story. I write to tell you I’m OK. I write because I love you.

***

Firstly, my story: a Caucasian, middle class American family adopted me. I grew up in North Texas, where I still live today. My parents—Tim & Denise—are still married. My older brother still pokes fun at me, my younger brother still annoys me at times. But I love them.

In fact, my family has grown! The oldest of us siblings married and has two sons—“The Boys,” as I lovingly refer to them. The Boys are sweet and wild and rambunctious. They make me laugh and give me hugs. They usually remind me of my brother, but sometimes I see a little of me in them too. I consider their childhood, and at times compare it to mine. I consider how the current me can love the version of themselves now, Little Them, to make up for the pain and hurt and longing Little Mae felt.

A little more of my story: my childhood was simple, yet sweet. I had friends—mostly Caucasian. I played sports (basketball, ultimate frisbee, volleyball, swim, track, and softball). I took art lessons. Water color was my favorite followed closely by sculpture. My dad’s mom taught me piano until I was seventeen-years-old, and I taught myself a touch of guitar and ukulele. I accepted Christ as a young age and plugged into our Baptist church’s youth ministry.

The latest of my story: I studied public relations at Baylor University in Central Texas, and minored in poverty studies and social justice. (I’ve always considered myself a social justice warrior). After graduating, I moved back to Dallas, where I nannied, then worked for several law firms, then worked front desk at climbing gym, then studied law, then stopped studying law, and then wound up managing full-time in the climbing industry—where I am today.

The last 10 years of my life have truly been a whirlwind, though I’m thankful for all of it.

***

Secondly, I’m OK.

As mentioned before, my childhood was simple and sweet. Outside of my adoption, there really isn’t much to report. That being said, my adoption and its impacts on me are a bit to report, but I will try to keep it short and sweet.

Tim and Denise, my dad and mom, love me well, deeply, and with dedication. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted all three of us. My brothers were domestically adopted: from Oklahoma and California. I am the only girl and only international adoption—I like to consider myself special in these ways.

While my childhood was not all too complicated and rather quite ordinary, I spent a majority of it feeling mostly lonely and perhaps even a little lost or misplaced.

Though I had a sufficient amount of friends, I learned and constantly re-learn you can be surrounded by a sea of people and still feel lost and alone. While I did not know it at the time, I suffered from major depression and even suicidal ideation in 7th grade. It’s hard to be an awkward adolescent these days. For reasons I cannot explain, I felt ugly and unwanted.

I felt a little lost and misplaced. I was not conscious of it at the time, but I did everything I could to shove my biological culture and ethnic background under the rug. I quit Chinese school (where they taught me of the culture and language). I befriended mostly white kids. I refused to join orchestra. I did not want to be the weird Asian girl. I dreamt to be a popular, cute, skinny, blonde, white cheerleader. In reality, I was only two of those things (cute and skinny).

The only place I truly felt a sense of belonging was when I was with my “Chinese sisters.” My sisters were adopted by their respective families from Holt International at the same time as I was. Our brilliant, compassionate parents intentionally reunited us every couple of years throughout our childhoods. These reunions took place all over the US, as we were spread across the nation as well.

My Chinese sisters, our families, and I returned to China when I was sixteen-years-old, the summer of my junior year. We first started at an American-led, special needs orphanage outside of Beijing. Together we all served there for a few days, then bopped around the country and visited four or so other major cities. We even returned to Fuzhou, where all of us are from. Two of my sisters and I went back to our orphanage, though it was not the same building, which I can only describe as a surreal experience. Never have I ever felt more humbled, more small, more special than when I walked up and down the halls of my orphanage, 15 years post-adoption.

I didn’t look for you. I’m sorry, but I didn’t. Maybe you were still in Fuzhou, maybe you were long gone by then. Maybe you still reside where you did when I was born. Maybe you’ve passed. But whoever you are, wherever you are, I didn’t look for you. Denise has always been my mom and I never had that sense of longing to know you. At least, not until I started writing this letter at thirty-years-old.

Anyway, back to the moral of my second point: I’m OK, really.

Now that I am older and wiser, I wish I could tell Little Mae she did not need to be anyone but herself. And that herself was her whole self: her long black hair, her tan skin, her almond-shaped eyes. Her whole self included her Chinese culture, language, and background, and her biological mother and family. I would like to say, “Little Mae, you are beautiful as you are—you do not need to be any less Asian or any more white. You are adopted. You are loved.”

This year I attended a Taiwanese-hosted banquet honoring the Lunar New Year. My Taiwanese friend Jen invited me. There were so many Asians! It was amazing. I fed one of the dancing dragons a red envelope for luck. I wish you could have seen me, Mom! You would have been so proud.

Yes, I miss you. Yes, I missed out on my origin story. I missed out on embracing my bio culture as a child, missed out on embracing you. But yes, I’m OK. I promise you I am. And a large part of that is thanks to you.

***

Mom, I love you.

I love you for abandoning me on that doorstep 29 years ago. I love you for considering me, my future during a tumultuous time for our country.

With China’s One Child Policy threatening you, I love you for making the hardest decision of your life. It was the right one.

I love you for who you are, your whole self: a Chinese woman, a friend, a daughter, and most importantly to me, a biological mother to an adopted child you may never meet.

I did not expect to feel so much emotion—hurt, pain, sadness, longing, anger—writing this letter to you. I feel these emotions because I cannot be with you today, tomorrow, or maybe ever. Admittedly, I do not think about you often, but when I do, I only feel fondly. Perhaps the reason I do not consider you much is the same reason I pushed aside my culture during my upbringing: it’s too real, too uncomfortable, too challenging.

I did not know I could love or miss or feel for someone I never knew. I did not know how connected I felt to you until now, this invisible string tying us together with a strength that will never be torn apart. This string ties the devastated mother and the lost daughter together.

I love you. I forgive you for walking away. I forgive you for choosing to leave me. I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.

***

Well Mom, that is really all I have to say right now, but I have plenty more thoughts and feelings and words and silences for you. I love you. I miss you. I’ll do everything I can to come home to you.

Love,

Jin Fang

Maelyn Schramm is a transracial adoptee from Fuzhou, China. In her free time, she writes a wellness and intentional living blog, Words By Mae. She works full-time in the rock climbing industry, but considers herself a part-time creative. Schramm lives in Dallas, Texas with her beloved dog, Jack. Find her on Instagram @wordsbymae and at her website. 

Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

@maelyn-schramm

 

By Louella Dalpymple

I, Louella Dalpymple, am an avid learner, so when I became an adoptive mom, I immediately labored to read a wide array of adoption agency websites so I’d be fully armed to endear myself to my children for all eternity. Now that my adoptees are adults, I feel obligated to share “lessons learned” with the rest of you.

While it was a blow to my self-esteem to not contribute my genes to the gene pool, adoption provided me multiple ways to repair the damage from that blow, thanks to my two darling children. When I set out to learn everything necessary to be the best mom ever, I was surprised to discover that there wasn’t much to learn that I didn’t already know. I spent three whole hours (honest!) scrolling the feeds of several adoptive parent influencers to make sure I was up to speed. Adoption is one of those wonderful things that everyone already knows and loves because in adoption, everyone wins. The Republicans and the Democrats love it. The churches and the heathens love it. White people, Black people, Brown people, Yellow people—the whole rainbow of humanity loves adoption! (Maybe not the Red people). What’s not to love? When drug epidemics and earthquakes and wars and one-child policies hit, all the poor babies can make their way to better homes, American homes.

With my children successfully out in the world, living their own lives, I want to share with you eight proven strategies (not yet patented, but I’m working on that) for what adoptees need from their parents. You might want to hang these on your fridge.

1. Share your story—liberally!

Whether or not you were denied your own baby, you went through a lot to get your adoptee. You had to endure prying social workers, expensive lawyers, long waits during which you were powerless (you!), and, most humiliating, that awful part of the process that required you to impress a birth mom. Horrors!

So once you achieve your goal of being a mother, of course you are going to want to share the news with everyone. And not just the main news, but all the details! For example, why your child was put up for adoption, what sordid circumstances the birth mother found herself in, just how much of a loser the good-for-nothing birth father is (pro tip: “sperm donor” is a catchy term), what drugs were in your baby’s system, and later on down your road, any problem behaviors you’ve had to deal with. All these things make you look superior AND like a hero. Sure to earn you points in the court of public opinion. Claim your awesomeness!

Share far and wide: at your church, with the other moms, and especially share all the juicy details online. After all, you deserve to be seen for the wonderful person you are for taking on such—in the words of one of the influencers I follow—”a beautiful mess 🦋🙃🧸.”

Sharing without limits is also a favor to your adoptee. Their future friends, paramours, employers, and everyone else will already know so much about them from a simple google search. In all their relationships, your adoptee can skip the getting-to-know-you stage! At least their side of it.

2. Mold your adoptee to become what you know they can and should be. Resist the urge to see them as they are.

Why is it even a question of nature vs nurture? “Nature” is just a wee spark of DNA. “Nurture,” though, is an ongoing, day-after-day and year-after-year affair. Your part is so much weightier! Besides, everyone knows that babies are blank slates. Get ‘em early enough and you’re all set, I always say. You can mold them into anything you want. You’re a family of macrame enthusiasts? With persistence and dedication (and maybe a little choicelessness in the matter), your adoptee will soon also become a macrame enthusiast.

If you start to see glimmers of personality traits or interests that aren’t to your liking, just prune them with my proven strategies of ignoring or shaming. That should do it.

3. Revel in validation people give you when they notice similarities between you and your adoptee. Sameness is good!

So what if your hair is blond and straight and your adoptee’s is brown and curly. When people tell you that you look alike, play it up! As you should. You endured a lot to bring this person into your life as your accessory, and it’s only right you should enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Your adoptee is fortunate to be seen the same as you. You are awesome, and they are lucky to bask in the glow of your awesomeness. Besides, different is bad and discussion of it should be avoided at any cost. This deserves its own bullet!

4. Try not to see or talk about the differences between you (and your culture) and your adoptee. Differences might make them feel bad.

Be very, very careful not to notice or bring attention to the ways your child is different from you and those around you. For example, if you have a transracial adoptee (which I don’t, full disclosure), focus on helping them fit into our culture rather than focusing on “Black” or “Asian” or “Hispanic” things. It’s best for your adoptee if you don’t see color. When you can achieve that, it means that color doesn’t matter. How wonderful to do your part in easing race relations across the board!

5. Elevate yourself over your child’s dreadful birth family. Thank goodness they ended up with you instead of them.

Not much needs to be said about this, but don’t let your adoptee forget that you provided them an upgrade in life. Remind them often to feel grateful to you for so selflessly providing them a better life. It’s so important for children to learn to express gratitude!

Pat yourself on the back, girlfriend.

6. If Grandpa disses your adoptee, let your adoptee figure it out on their own.

Again, I’m not a transracial parent, but I know a thing or two. You can’t expect everyone in your extended family to keep up the way you have and be “modern” when it comes to all things adoption and race and such. So when Grandpa makes racist comments in front of, or even about your adoptee, don’t rush to defend! When Aunt Mabel chides your adoptee for not showing you the gratitude you deserve for adopting them, just be happy that Auntie has your back. When Cousin Jack leaves your adoptee out of the game because they’re not really part of the family, go with “boys will be boys” and don’t allow your adoptee to get too worked up about it.

All this will toughen up your adoptee. And endear you to them for helping them build character.

7. When it’s necessary to apologize, there is a right way to do so.

It didn’t happen often, but on rare occasion I got it wrong and needed to apologize to my adoptees. It’s important for them to always see you as the authority figure, all-powerful, so you must never go overboard on apologies. It might shatter their image of you.

Rather than saying “I’m sorry I hurt you,” go with, instead, “I’m sorry you were hurt.” They won’t have to grapple with you being less than perfect.

On a related note, I am also a fan of “I statements.” Such as “I feel sad when you bring up your birth mom” and “I feel angry when you tell me I’m not your real mom. I most certainly am!”

8. Remember always that as the parent, you are accountable only to yourself.

Don’t worry at all about your adoptee questioning your stance around birth parents or all things adoption. You are the grown up and you get to decide what’s in their best interest with your superior perspective. No need to worry that any of this will ever come back to you because you will forever be the parent and your adoptee will forever be your child. All little boys and girls remain their mother’s babies throughout their lives, amiright?

I am proof. My children have never questioned me. They are so full of respect for me, it’s humbling.

***

So those are my 8 tips, free for you to use (and put on your fridge). Now that my work is done, so painstakingly molding my children into my heart’s desire, my weekends and holidays are quite open. Feel free to contact me about implementing these strategies with your own adoptees. My very successful kids are so busy that they haven’t had the time to return my calls in the last few years #proudmom. Which means I have time to help you achieve neverending devotion from your adoptee, too. For a free consultation, call 1-800-ADTPN-RX.

Louella Dalpymple is a figment of the imagination of Lori Holden. There is not a single piece of Louella’s advice that Holden agrees with. In fact, Holden cautions readers not to follow any of it and not to call the toll-free number, which is also a figment of her imagination. Holden translates Luella’s adoptive parent-centric advice to more adoptee-centered advice at LavenderLuz.com.

By Dawn Packard

Have your clothes already laid out. Get up early before your family does. Make a cup of strong coffee, but you won’t really need it. You may never be more awake.

A little light makeup. No mascara. Some tissues in your pocket against need. Calculate again the time and distance from your hotel to the restaurant. Run a cloth over the boots you’ll walk in. Stand in front of a full-length mirror and know that this is how she will see you.

Discard any notions of eating. Don’t take anything to take the edge off. Fifty-three years is a long time to wait; you won’t want to miss any of it.

Swallow one last slug of the coffee you don’t need. Kiss your sleeping son and close the door softly as you leave. You will not return as the same person.

Walk to the restaurant and breathe deeply of the sharp winter morning air. Firmly tether your mind to your body. Stay present.

As you walk, gather all the selves you’ve ever been who’ve dreamed about this moment. The child who didn’t understand. The teenager lashing out at not-my-mother. The graduate, the bride, the new mom. You’re all going to breakfast together.

Take a moment to compose yourself before you grasp the handle of the door and pull it open. Run a hand through your hair. Arrange your scarf. Do your best to not look nervous.

Scan the dining room and push away tendrils of panic when you don’t see her. Remind yourself that you would’ve never come if she didn’t seem trustworthy. Believe that she’ll be there and try not to sag with relief when you spot her at a corner table. Maintain your composure.

Walk to the table projecting a confidence you do not feel and watch as she unfolds herself from the booth and rises to embrace you. Clench your jaw and swallow as you hug. She will smell warm and nice, like a baby blanket.  Breathe her in. Calm your galloping heartbeat and savor this moment. You will never have another like it.

Order more coffee and some food you’ll barely touch. Pick at your toast as you will yourself not to stare at the woman who gave birth to you. Try to adjust to seeing your own eyes looking out at you from someone else’s face. It’s a weird feeling. Remind yourself to breathe.

Know that when you hear her voice, it will hit like an electrical current deep in your gut and at the base of your brain. Collect yourself. Organize your shattered thoughts and ask the questions you most need answers to. Understand that this could be your only chance. Hope that it isn’t.

Allow her to reach for the check. Absorb the feeling that she wants to do something for you. Accept her offer of a ride back to your hotel and try not to cry in her car when she hands you a small gift bag. It will contain three oranges, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and a handkerchief embroidered by your grandmother. Try harder not to cry.

Smile politely and thank her for breakfast as you slide from the smooth leather seats of her car onto the sidewalk in front of your hotel.  Watch her drive away and wonder what she is feeling. Take a few minutes for yourself in the lobby before you go back to your suite.

Hug your family. Tell them, it went well, I think as you walk into the bedroom and close the door. Put on your softest t-shirt. Step out onto the balcony, you’ll need the cool air.  Peel an orange as you gaze at the snow-covered city. You’ve just met your mother.

Now, you can cry.

Dawn Packard is a 55-year old domestic Baby Scoop Era relinquishee and adoptee living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was adopted at two weeks old in a closed adoption. 

Author photo by Jackie Flynn Batista. 

Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

Venmo: @Dawn-Packard-1

By Lori Black

I am still searching. I have been for quite a while. It’s tiring, this never ending need I’ve always had to prove my existence, but the need has not and will not leave me alone. My parents adopted me as an infant in the 1950s, when secrecy was an art form nigh unto gospel. My lack-of-information-wound has always festered at whim. In the year 2000, that wound split wide open when I acquired a life-changing piece of paper— my pre-adoption birth certificate, courtesy of a new law passed that year in my home state of Oregon. Since that day, I’ve met a few maternal birth family members, including an aunt. Aunt Mary knew of my existence and delighted in meeting and getting to know me, as long as I asked no questions about my beginnings. Believe me, I tried, eventually coming to realize that, of all the secret keepers surrounding my origins, she had to be in first place. Mary remained tight-lipped even after all the important players had passed away.  Then she passed away.

So did my birth mother, after having declined to meet me. Through what she had shared with the adoption agency, I knew my father had been middle-aged at the time of my conception so he had likely passed away. Despite all of this (or perhaps because of it), the legacy of secrecy still churned within. Quietly, I demanded more. The year my birth mother died was the year I turned my attention to the pristine blank space on my pre-adoption birth certificate just above the word father.

***

The date is summertime. It is 2006, the year my birth mom dies.

Between the information on the pre-adoption birth certificate listing my birth mom’s home state as Nebraska and the information I’d gathered from the adoption agency years earlier saying both my birth parents came from a small town in the Midwest, I had a strong suspicion that I hail from Nebraska, at least conceptually speaking. But I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and the closest I’d ever been to a farm is a Christmas tree lot. Rural happens only on vacations, and I’ve killed marigolds with a single glare. Nebraska seems as alien and as far away as the moon to me. Yet such a confluence of rural biology and urban adopted upbringing has whetted the moth-to-a-flame instincts that I’m convinced I inherited. It compels me to journey to the heartland, privately hoping there will be clues about father.

Landing at the Omaha airport, I meet the wonders of rural-ality when a car rental guy hands me a set of keys, points to a car lot, doesn’t “offer” me insurance and says, “Uh, take the white one over there.” I do, quickly, before urban commerce appears.

By seven o’clock that evening, I arrive at a nondescript building called “The Child Saving Institute” where I am to meet my fellow adopted e-mail pals during their monthly meeting, while idly wondering how one might save children, institutionally speaking. This I will never know. I do know that members of this group consisting of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, the “Adoption Triad of the Midwest” will always be my friends. All five of them.

One is my hero: Puffy and bent, well over eighty years old, Lillian could barely make it up the stairs for this informal meeting to which I’ve invited myself. She is the beautiful woman who persuaded me to make this trek in the first place. An adoptee herself, she has listened, searched, and helped others with various adoption afflictions over the years. Tirelessly she’s found pieces of the past for everyone she has helped. Except herself.

 Everything Lillian ever uncovered about her own heritage is a legacy of hand-me-down lies. I’d give anything to help relieve the emptiness of a little baby born in the 1920s who just wants to know something of her beginnings before she meets her end. But instead, I thank her and all my kindred spirits for the gift of my own sacred trek.

Morning comes. I drive, heading for Lillian’s suggested destinations: A couple of small towns I call Anywhere and Everywhere. I do this while fighting off a caffeine headache spawned by the absence of Starbucks and fueled by little orange packets that I’ve not seen since 1974. Sanka. They are definitely not up to the task of assuaging my industrial strength Pacific Northwest caffeine addiction.

The drive through simple, unthreatening landscape lulls away the pain. The unbending ruler line known as Interstate 80 soothes. Crops, random grain silos, and scattered trees punctuate an otherwise flat land offering little artifice to mar the horizon. The sparse little towns that pop up are unexpected. To one coming from a place where urban sprawl lays like carpet, these towns seemed rolled upon the earth like a handful of dice tossed on a board game, tumbling at random upon the grassy heartland. I am heading to various cemeteries, looking for men with a particular birth year in a particular part of the state, but suddenly the entirety of Nebraska feels like his final resting place. I’d brought a bunch of Wal-Mart-purchased fresh daisies, one of which I donate out my car window. A fresh flower onto everyday existence. So far, my only disappointment is The Platte River. I expected a rampage but get a trickle between sandbars.

The sun is out, my windows are down and the unimpeded wind blows steady through my mind along with the fleeting memory of Nebraska’s state motto. “Equality Before the Law.” I forget what sign I saw this on, or where it was, but I will believe this motto nonetheless and lay a few demons to rest in Middle America. The white car takes me west, to a town with at least one flower shop, still no Starbucks, and two and a half cemeteries (half because the Veterans’ cemetery is more of a drive-through event.)  At my first stop, I’m greeted by a willow-branch shaped woman who comes out of a trailer, crunching gravel with lengthy, deliberate steps like those of a praying mantis.

 “May I help you?”

Adoptee guilt is a very real thing. She knows I’m grave hopping for my dead dad. My heart tries to throw itself onto the crushed rock beneath us. Caught. I have no right to be here, invading the secret.

“Are you looking for a relative?”

Yes. No. “Well, I’m actually traveling around trying to find something—someone—for a friend.” I hand her a list of names, culled from past sketchy Internet searches and past excursions of white-gloved museum page turning and microfiching. Praying mantis gives it a glance, hands back the paper, and says, “Those people aren’t here. I know every name of every grave in this cemetery.”

“Oh.” She does? There must be a thousand graves here. “Do you mind if I look around anyway?”

“That’s fine, dearie, but you won’t find what you’re looking for.”  

I walk among the names, treading upon the driest grass I’ve ever heard or felt. He could be here. He could be anywhere. But the best thing would be if his spirit knew I was here. He: My birth father, perhaps noticing someone with some similarities to him. A short person with rapid thoughts and quick moves. Dry wit. Hatred of mathematics. Allergy to codeine. Something. Anything I can call a connection.

I drop a daisy into the parched grass.

 The next cemetery produces a generic caretaker in a nondescript suit. He smells of eau de embalming but gets extra marks for not memorizing every inhabitant in his backyard. His card catalogue holds no contenders. I take the sacred walk, feel nothing, keep my daisies, and realize that preying-mantis-woman is right. I will not find father on this particular day.

Remembering Lillian’s strength in the face of her fruitless search buoys my resolve as the white car takes me away from Anywhere and toward Everywhere. I found Everywhere just outside a town, between dust and wind-battled grass, the best place I’ve ever found to sit down next to existence and write to an illusion.

Dear Dad,

This is my first letter to you. Forgive my being less than articulate. It’s hard to talk to a dead man I’ve never met whose identity remains deliberately out of reach. In reality, if not law, I am your daughter, writing to get to know you through the only thing I know about you. Me.

 There’s so little of you in my mind, so much of you in my genes. Few details to steal. The rest, implied: I believe you were a hard worker all of your life, a life that could not have been easy in rural America so long ago. Tell me about your childhood, your life, whatever war you may have fought in. Your affair with my mother, the one you wish you’d never had.

I’ve conjured you from a handful of words—the only things the adoption agency would relinquish. Stout of build, blond, driven to the point of a hardened heart, grey-blue-eyed with simple dreams. Did you ever try to imagine me? Small of build, more or less blonde, driven to the point of nervous fatigue, brown-eyed with dreams that slip away like sand.

We are strangers who will never meet. Father and daughter and nothing at all. If you get this letter, write back. I’d love to hear from you.

Yours truly,

Me

I leave the letter and my Wal-Mart daisies on a bench in Nebraska, knowing there is more to come on this journey.

For today, I exist a little more.

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Lori Black is the mother of a wonderfully complicated blended family and an adult adoptee still on her journey. She sees that journey as a need to connect, listen, and share with all aspects of the adoption community. Shortly after her adopted mother’s death in 1998, and as a direct result of those experiences, she began learning the craft of writing. Lori has taken professional writing courses for many years at the college level, focusing on non-fiction pieces. Her recipe with anecdotal story was published in Voices for Adoption: Memories and Stories (11/2005.)

Though now retired, Lori practiced as a registered nurse in the Pacific Northwest for 40 years in just about every field of women’s health. The majority of her career was working with women who have high risk pregnancies. She also worked for seven years in infertility care. She’s witnessed, lived through, helped with, and survived many aspects of birth, life, and death and the need for family. 

Follow her on TikTok @lori3965.

By S. D. Kilmer, BPS

Long is this pain, The grief, And the unbelief.The sorrow,Without a yesterday     difficult is a tomorrow.The impossible longingFor a place I have never known. A place never seen. A place I know I’ve been.And yet, it was once home.

S.D. Kilmer, BPS, is a retired pastoral/existential counselor and family mediator. His poems have appeared in several literary anthologies and online literary magazines. Much of what he has written can be found on his website. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

By Ari Spectorman

March 23, 2022 was our final day for the winter season at our home in Key West. The SUV was fully packed for the long ride home to New Hope, PA. My husband, Tony, and I biked over for one last dinner at El Siboney, a favorite Cuban joint a few blocks away. During dinner I went to the rest room and urinated nothing but blood. “This can’t be good,” I thought.

We quickly biked back home. Perhaps it was a kidney stone? There were no previous symptoms of any kind. But soon there was intense, painful pressure and I could not urinate at all. We rushed to urgent care in Key West. A quick CT scan revealed a mass in my left kidney. I needed a catheter inserted right away to release the pressure and was sent to South Miami by ambulance, a 3-½ hour slog. Tony followed soon after in the already packed SUV. I was frightened and worried Tony would be overwhelmed.

I spent a week in a South Miami hospital trying to clear all the blood clots through my catheter, while undergoing various tests and scans. The devastating news was not only a most likely kidney cancer diagnosis, but also the appearance of a suspicious nodule on my pancreas. We flew back home and arranged for a transport company to collect and ship the loaded SUV to us. We would pursue further diagnostic testing and a course of action once we were settled in our New Hope home.

An endoscopic needle biopsy at the pancreas confirmed our worst fears, metastatic kidney cancer. (Stage four, advanced, and metastatic all mean the same thing: a cancer that has spread beyond the original location.) I had a suspicious nodule in my lungs, two more in my peritoneum (a membrane in the abdominal cavity), and two on the pancreas. Three weeks later, on April 21, my left kidney was surgically removed at Doylestown Hospital.

I’ve always known I was adopted; it was not a secret. My adoptive mother, who only recently passed at age 90, always encouraged me to find information regarding my biological parents. Many years ago, I contacted the Louise Wise adoption agency and was told my young Jewish mother gave no information regarding the father, only that it was a single encounter. At the time of my birth, in September 1961, she had asked not to be contacted, so my records were sealed. I was not particularly motivated to look for my birth parents for most of my life. Unlike many other adoptees, I never felt incomplete, and it just never felt terribly important to me. I had a full life. Married when legally permitted in 2013, Tony and I first met in 1979 as freshmen at our university. We owned a Greenwich Village restaurant together, bought a home in Bucks County, PA, and later, I grew a successful financial advisory business over a 26-year period.

Eventually I did get around to thinking about my origins. I always thought my birth father was not Jewish—I have a tiny button nose and a somewhat darker complexion—maybe my father was from some exotic background? That would be interesting. In 2019, I joined 23andMe on a lark. 99.9% Ashkenazi Jew— boring! But no immediate relatives. Some months later suddenly a half-sister appeared using only the initials NF, from Morristown, NJ. She was born in 1958 and was also adopted via the Louise Wise Agency. She was looking for information about her family. I immediately wrote to her introducing myself. “I assume we share the same mother! I’m Ari Spectorman, from New Hope PA, who are you?” Within a week, not only had she not replied, but she removed all traces of herself from the 23anMe site.  I scared her away, I guess. Perhaps because I’m gay and she is very religious? Being ghosted like this invites much speculation.

In the post-surgery recovery room, I checked my email. A first cousin newly discovered via 23andMe wrote me to reveal one of her two living uncles is my biological father. A complete shock, and the timing was beyond belief.

While recovering from surgery, I awaited more news on my suddenly new biological family. A few cousins joined the 23andMe site to find out which family had a new half-brother. Meanwhile, I had to decide a treatment plan and I was busy getting my financial affairs in order. We decided to sell our Key West home. It sold in one day to buyers who wanted all our furnishings, down to every sheet, towel, dish and all décor. A friend removed a few personal items and some of Tony’s favorites of his own artwork. We closed on the sale without ever returning there. Tony and I are able to make important decisions quickly and we tend not to second guess ourselves. I sold my asset management and financial advice firm to my junior partner, executing a previously drawn buy/sell agreement. I would now be retired, and able to focus my energy full time on my health.

My local oncologist recommended a standard immunotherapy and chemo regimen, but I wanted to find other options. I read 75 kidney cancer trial summaries looking for one that fit me, and after an exhausting search I found one at UPenn in Philadelphia willing to enroll me pending brain and bone scans. Tony and I would need to drive the hour to the hospital every 14 days for an investigational infusion during a 2-year trial period. I would also begin the standard treatment at the same time. During the week of my additional scans, on May 8, I received the news from one of my new cousins—my father is Larry Bell, retired Cleveland corporate lawyer, age 86. I have three new half-sisters, Jessica, Liz, and Sarah. We saw some resemblance in their photos. Excited and overwhelmed, I didn’t know what to think beyond a feeling of “how nice this is.”

I was cleared for participation, my clinical trial got underway, and our new routine began. Whenever possible, Tony and I would travel to interesting places in the 14-day period between treatments. My side effects were best described as annoying but manageable, until October, when I developed permanent type 1 autoimmune diabetes, which occurs in 1% to 2% of immunotherapy patients. We flew to Cleveland to meet Larry and his family.

Larry, Jessica, Sarah, and Liz

Larry has mild to moderate cognitive impairment, so I did not get to know him when he was most vital and literate. He has no memory of a “date” in January of 1961—and why would he? We assumed he never found out the young woman was pregnant; she probably hid her pregnancy until she had to be sent away for the duration. The month I was born, September 1961, Larry met his future wife, Nancy. They raised their three daughters in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent, bucolic suburb of Cleveland. By all accounts Larry was a brilliant attorney and read voraciously, a habit which, apparently, I inherited from him. All three Bell daughters are intelligent, warm, and empathetic. It’s a delight to get to know them. The eldest daughter, Jessica, also has three daughters, and I’m getting to know my new nieces as well. It feels like I’ve found my tribe, after a lifetime detour.

Meanwhile, periodic scans showed no growth in my tumors since the start of treatment, with some mild shrinkage. Shortly after the Cleveland visit, however, an unrelated spinal stenosis issue led to an MRI that inadvertently turned up a suspicious area in my prostate. Sure enough, I had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that required surgical removal. By all accounts totally unrelated to my kidney cancer, just dumb luck. I even had extensive DNA testing performed to see if I had any known genetic predisposition for cancer—and no, I do not. So now I was dealing with managing my ongoing treatments, learning how to live with type 1 diabetes, and the bladder incontinence and erectile dysfunction that accompanies most all prostate surgeries.

As the months went by, my new family wanted more details about my birth mother. They wanted the whole story, and their hunger for information finally prompted me to try again to find out who my birth mother was. I had a vague memory that New York had changed a law regarding adoption, but I never pursued it. Now I was prepared to follow the leads. Louise Wise Adoption Services, which was the premier Jewish adoption agency for decades, folded in 2004. It is indeed the same agency that in 1961 placed three identical triplets in separate households as part of an infamous “scientific study.” A widely seen documentary was made about this titled Three Identical Strangers (2018.) I had an older adopted brother, who had been abandoned as an infant before placement by Louise Wise with my parents. After three months he clearly had developmental difficulties. The agency offered to take him back and replace him with a perfect baby, as if he were defective merchandise. My parents said no and kept him.

After a bit of online sleuthing, I found out I could get a copy of my sealed pre-adoption birth certificate for $15 plus a shipping fee from the NYC department of Health, just like that. (The new “equal rights for adoptees” law in New York went into effect in 2020.) The website said it could take up to ten weeks to receive the overnight UPS envelope. It arrived in four days.

The birth certificate listed my mother as Miriam G Katz, age 23, residence at 77 Chicago Avenue, Staten Island, New York. No father listed as expected. My name was given as (Male) Katz. A common Jewish name, what next? A smart friend looked at that Staten Island address using Google Maps in terrain view. “77 Chicago Avenue looks too large a building to be a single-family home; it looks more like an office building.” A few clicks later we found it:

The Staten Island Home for Unwed Jewish Mothers.

So, it wasn’t her actual home; she gave the address where she was sent to live for during her pregnancy.  I called Jewish Services, the surviving parent organization, but their legal department said they have no records going back that far.

Ari

The photo that popped up

On the online front, social media and other searches turned up a dozen or so Miriam Katzs, but none age 85. Somewhat desperate, I tried a seemingly shady website for amateur sleuths looking for dirt. For $26 I could get a report on an 85-year-old Miriam Katz. As soon as they processed my credit card, up popped the report with a photo: She looked like me in a wig. My husband Tony walked in just as I opened the report and he said, “Oh my God, that’s your mother!” But was she still alive?

There were seven phone numbers that may have been associated with her. Two were cell phones. I texted both.

My heart was racing and couldn’t believe this was happening. I can only imagine how stunned she was.  Much more texting ensued, exchanging photos, asking and answering questions. We set up and had a video chat. She has always been known as Mimi. She was an undergrad at Boston University and went to Pittsburgh as the maid of honor for her college roommate’s wedding in January of 1960. On the evening of January 13, at the wedding, she met Larry Bell, and after several cocktails, they “hooked up” as we might say today.  Indeed, as we had guessed, she never told Larry she was pregnant. I was born exactly nine months later, on September 13. 1961.

Larry may have been the last man Mimi was with. She was attracted to women, and, in fact, never felt quite right as female herself. She felt more like a man but had no vocabulary to express these feelings. Today she describes herself as lesbian and non-binary.

She said she never had other children, but later I referred to my mysterious half-sister who ghosted me. Mimi was visibly uncomfortable and went on to reveal that yes, I have a half-sister, but she isn’t ready to talk about it.

We agreed I would travel to Brookline, MA on October 21,to meet in person and spend an afternoon together.

The big day came, and Mimi arranged for us to be hosted by Cheryl, a former lover and longtime friend with a home in Brookline. I didn’t know what to expect or how I would feel—would it all be too much? I was calm but trepidatious.

We embraced at the door and sat down in Cheryl’s living room to talk.

Ari and Mimi at their first meeting

I learned about her emotionally unavailable but highly intelligent parents. Her mom was a communist party member until the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and was a schoolteacher, and her father was a dentist. The only emotional warmth and connection she remembers was with her grandmother, who emigrated from Ukraine in 1904. Her grandmother lived in the same home with Mimi’s family and she often did her Russian Jewish cooking with Mimi at her side, much as my own mom did with me when I was young.

Mimi’s only sibling, a sister five years older, was sexually abusive toward Mimi during her childhood. She thinks this partially explains her difficulty feeling her own emotions throughout her lifetime. Eerily, I feel the same way, because my older adopted brother was also sexually and physically abusive toward me. I too struggle with feeling or connecting to my emotions. We both have difficulty recalling details as, apparently, we’ve both sealed ourselves off from the trauma.

As for my half sister born three years before me, this too was an exceedingly difficult episode that I will not detail here. Mimi had no agency and did as she was told by her family; she did not know this baby was placed through the Louise Wise agency until I told her.

When it came to the drunken night of her college roommate’s wedding in Pittsburgh three years later, when Mimi was age 23, her encounter with Larry, my birth father, was a positive experience, to the extent she remembers it. She has always thought she made the right decision giving me up for adoption, as she knew she was not equipped to raise a child properly.

Young Larry

In the early 1970s Mimi founded the Northampton Common Womyn’s Collective with 10 lesbian friends. Many of these friends and former lovers are part of Mimi’s family today in the greater Boston area; they raised children together and now have many grandchildren, and Mimi is always part of every family celebration and milestone.

In the 70s, Mimi was drawn to meditation and various Hindu practices, and became attached to Andrew Cohen, a spiritual leader at the time. Mimi was his personal assistant. She travelled the world with him for many years, until financial and psychological abuse allegations surfaced, and Mimi eventually left his cult in 2003. A documentary, How I Created a Cult, was made for television in 2016, and Mimi is featured in it. It was surreal watching it after having just discovered and met her.

After our visit, I feel certain we will remain in contact and hopefully visit each other from time to time. I continue to enjoy the relationship with my new family, and I feel a new sense of completeness, now knowing so much of my “self” is informed by my genetics. It’s such an odd but pleasant feeling—being connected to my birth family now, after 62 years; I feel like these are my people.

My cancer remains stable, and I intend to make whatever time I have left rich with new experiences and meaningful human connections.

December 2023

Ari at 16

Young Mimi

Mimi’s mother, Mimi, Mimi’s grandmother

Ari Spectorman, age 62, recently sold his financial advisory firm and lives in New Hope, PA with his husband of 45 years. Follow him on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. 

 

Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer. Venmo: @Ari-Spectorman

By Radhika Eicher

For the longest time, I never thought I’d have a baby or even be able to have one. But in the summer of 2023, my life changed when I discovered I was pregnant. So many emotions ran through my mind as I took numerous pregnancy tests to confirm I was actually going to have a baby. Finally, after six tests, I was able to say okay, this is really happening. My husband and I couldn’t have been more excited that we would be bringing a bundle of joy into this world. My baby girl wasn’t even here yet, and already I loved her more than life itself.

I was adopted at 17 months old from India to a family in South Dakota. My adoptive family is great, but I still experienced adoption trauma concerning the loss of my birth mother, abandonment issues, and looking different from my adoptive family because of my brown skin. That trauma resulted in self-hate over the color of my skin. I also suffer from mental illness— bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety—which I believe came from my birth parents and only worsened as I grew older. Now, I’m 27 years old and I still struggle with trauma.

I know many people believe blood shouldn’t matter but, being adopted, I believe it really does. I love my adopted family, but they didn’t look like me and we don’t share blood, and that affected me more than many people understand. I couldn’t wait for my daughter to be born because she’s a part of me. It’s so important to me that she’s my blood. As an adoptee, becoming a mother is such a surreal thing. I get to give my baby the love I didn’t get to have when I was a baby being put up for adoption. When my daughter, Harriett, was born by C-section, the feeling I had when I first saw her is indescribable. When the doctors showed her to me, I instantly felt immense love in my heart. I couldn’t imagine how my birth mother had given me up because I couldn’t imagine doing that to my baby girl. She’s absolutely perfect. I can’t imagine her not being in my life. She’s changed me in so many ways and has helped heal aspects of my adoption trauma. I no longer have a desire to find my birth mother because she’s everything I need and more. Still, having been a mother now for more than a month, I can say my separation anxiety has kicked in. I hate leaving my daughter. That anxiety is another aspect of trauma I’ve faced for years. I’ve experienced it with my husband and now with my baby. The connection I have with my daughter is so true, wholesome, and fulfilling. It’s grounded me to be the mother I am today because I want to be her pillar so she knows she’ll never have to doubt my love for her. She will know her mom will always sacrifice for her so she can be whoever she wants to be and go wherever she wants to go. I will make sure my daughter never has to question her identity and that she knows she is always loved and can count on me. I want to teach her so many things but most importantly for her to have self-love and self-worth. I don’t want her to struggle with that as I did growing up. I love that she’ll know where she came from and who is her mom and dad. I will never make her feel like she isn’t loved, as I felt growing up. Having been adopted at such a young age made me feel that my birth mother didn’t want me. As Harriett is getting older, she’s starting to develop her skin tone, and it’s beautiful. She truly looks like me, makes me feel special. All I’ve ever wanted is for my child to have my blood line and some resemblance to me. When people say she looks like me, they don’t know how much it means to me. I marvel at certain features of me I see in her—her big brown eyes, her beautiful skin color, and her dimples. Being a mother is challenging but so rewarding, especially for me as an adoptee, because I finally have the piece I my heart that was missing—my daughter. That missing piece was so hard to live without, and now that I have it I can’t explain how happy it makes me. All I want is to be the best mother I can be for her. She is my everything and she deserves the absolute world. My love for my child is unconditional and irreplaceable. Becoming a mother has changed me for the better, given me a new purpose in life, and eased some of the effects of trauma.

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Radhika Eicher is a loving mother and wife. Her family means the world to her, and she hopes someday to inspire other with her story. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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 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 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.