By Michelle Hensley

Sometimes…

She says in her tiny voice

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

But there is no one to hear her.

Sometimes …

She says in her bit bigger voice

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

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

Sometimes….

She starts again.

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

What if I…?

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

SOMETIMES….

She speaks out, and her voice is steady.

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

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

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

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

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

THIS IS THE VOICE SHE SPEAKS WITH NOW.

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

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

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

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

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

She is finally heard.

Sometimes

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes.

By Louise Browne

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

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

An essay by Shannon Quist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Essay by Caitlin Jiao Alexander

An Essay by Hannah Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

But, I’ve matured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 I am made of everywhere.

And no one.

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

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

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

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

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

What I don’t tell her is….

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

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

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

Anyway, I am prove-ably human now.

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

And they will die with me.

By Kathleen Shea Kirstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second explosion happened in August 2005, when my parents confirmed my adoption. I was 49 years old. The following year, after working with the adoption coordinator from The Elizabeth Lund Maternity home in Burlington, Vermont, I would reunite with my biological mother Helena. Her son, George, was home on vacation the day of our visit. The gift of our reunion was the moment Helena shared with us that George and I were full siblings, that Peter was our father.

The third was in May 2014. As I was wheeled down the hall into surgery, I realized that my marriage of 34 years was over. I would subsequently learn the reason: my husband had a boyfriend.

When I think about being lied to, my parents and the husband come as a matched set. I wish I could articulate the gravity of knowing the three people I loved the most lied. Why didn’t they love or trust me enough to share their secrets? For my parents, it was my origin story. For my husband, it was his authentic life story. Had I known early on, I could have figured out a way to support his need for a family and a different lifestyle. I may be just kidding myself on that one.

The fourth explosion was in December 2019, when my brother’s DNA test results came in, showing that Peter was no longer my father, and I no longer had any full siblings.

I thought about Wendy (no middle name) Dudley’s obituary. Based on the non-identifying information, Wendy was a preemie. Oxygen was needed as her color at birth was poor, and she spent a couple of days in the hospital in an incubator. At the time of adoption/death, she was described as being small-boned like her mother and having delicate, well-formed features—lovely blue eyes and a sparse light brown hair. The Elizabeth Lund Maternity Home nursery notes state that she “received extra attention while there.” The people providing her DNA—the biological parents—were George William Reynolds and Helena Ruth Brownell. Wendy never got to meet her grandparents, aunts, and uncles and would never play with her many cousins on the porch of her grandparent’s farmhouse on 4 Grant St in Essex Junction, Vermont. I am struck with sadness that Wendy even lost her eye color. The blue wasn’t permanent. Her eyes turned brown. That feels significant and symbolic. All outward traces of Wendy vanished.

George was undoubtedly out of the picture as he was married with a wife and two kids. He surely was unaware that a third kid was in the world. The adoption/infant relocation program was the only choice this loving mother could make. Helena had no support and no resources. A loving mother who went home empty-handed. A loving mother experiencing her grief alone. A loving mother enduring the shame and the stigma society placed on a pregnant unwed woman in 1957.

How do I know she was a loving mother?

Because 50 years later, I would see how she cared for her son, my brother George. I would bear witness to their closeness and the way she nurtured him. Her little boy. Her pride and joy. Occasionally she would refer to him in my presence as her little boy. I would watch the lighthearted teasing between George, his wife Jennifer, and Helena as they joked and poked a bit of fun at how, now, even though they were all adults, Helena would use those words. Even through the mask her dementia provided, I could experience Helena’s child-like playfulness.

  George was the baby she got to keep because she did things with this child in the order society dictated. Marriage took all of society’s stigma away. George and I are only 22 months apart in age. I took a moment to consult a calendar. I was 12 months old when my brother was conceived. Relinquishing a baby in February 1957 and getting pregnant with the next child in February 1958 has to be significant. He was the brother I longed for all through my childhood and into early adulthood. All my life, my favorite brother had been only three hours north of my childhood home.

Since my adoption discovery, I wonder if my strong desire, my wishing to have a brother, was an “unthought known,” a cosmic DNA episode. An example of how my cells remember the explosion my brain couldn’t.

I look at the mug’s fragmented pieces as I clean up from the explosion. My thoughts drift to what Wendy’s life would be today if she hadn’t been sacrificed for Kathleen. I know we share this vessel, this one body. I am curious, as Kathleen, what fragments of Wendy I have developed and what she would think of the life we have lived.

Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a retired registered nurse.

By Adam E.L. Anthony

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

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

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

But where is the space for me to say the feelings about what’s really going on here? I know it makes people uncomfortable because they are not used to me being so verbal and clear with my emotions on all this, but it is time. Of course, I know the gaslighting and persuasion comes from unsolicited opinions—either from those who know my adoptive parents and are ready to defend and support them or those who know my biological parents and are ready to do the same. No one in my family consistently cares in the way I need them to without inserting their own biases or opinions.

That reality makes me angry. I didn’t choose to be hidden or relinquished. Not that I feel self-righteous or indignant, but purposeful and overwhelmed, in this wildly complicated yet enlightening journey.

When it comes to healing and telling my story, it truly is up to me. No one else can do this journey for me, nor would I wish anyone else to go on it. This journey is not for the weak. It’s for those who have the capacity to endure as well as heal.

Adam Anthony is a native of Knoxville, TN but calls his true home in Cincinnati, OH. He currently resides in Murfreesboro, TN. Adam is a personal development blogger and speaker. He has a Master of Organizational Leadership degree, Bachelor of Science in Communications, and is a Doctoral of Education in Leadership candidate. Adam has a passion for volunteering with engagement organizations that focus on improving systems for people of color in the community, genealogy, and helping those in need.  He is an Eagle Scout from the Boy Scouts of America. Adam is also a member of the Association for Talent Development, the National Association for Adoptees and Parents, R.I.S.E Coalition, and other organizations and committees. During his free time, Adam participates in the following hobbies: volunteering, writing, public speaking, acting, singing, hiking, nature, binge-watching tv show series, and spending quality time with friends and family.

By Hannah Andrews

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

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

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

Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades.

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

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

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

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

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

I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.

“I’m your sister, not her,” I hissed, and watched him deflate. I cringe at the memory.

I’d grown up with two older brothers, also adopted––related by paper and proximity, but not blood. We were the living, breathing products of the “Baby Scoop” era, that not-so-sweet spot between WWII and Roe, when upwards of 1.5 million unwed women, some still girls, were secretly shipped off to maternity homes. Coerced, shamed, and sometimes forced by their families and society to surrender their babies to strangers that “deserved” them.

Original birth certificates (OBCs) were sealed. New records erased maternity hospitals and replaced the names of birth parents with the names of adoptive  parents. As if we’d been born to them. As if our original mothers and our original names had never existed. That secrecy was all-encompassing.

Birth mothers rarely knew where their babies ended up, and adoptive families often knew little of their children’s origins. We adoptees knew only what our new parents told us. Some weren’t even told of their adoption. Others were told “too young” and “loved you so much she gave you away” stories, equating supreme love with abandonment. Some of us internalized that message. I did.

 Adoption didn’t guarantee a better life, just a different one, and mine was pretty decent. My new brothers and I clung tightly to each other and our invented family. Our parents were loving and kind. They encouraged questions and conversation, but we three generally opted out of both. I imagine our parents sighed secret relief and told themselves all was well.

The thing is, we didn’t even speak to each other about “it.” Toddler through teen, I cannot recall one sibling chat about adoption. No one told us not to speak of it, yet somehow we’d internalized that message. Maybe we’d digested the poison directed at our first mothers. Had their maternity homes sprinkled shame salt on their dinners? Perhaps we were just afraid to rock the boat, of losing another home. In any case, not a word until my brother’s real sister materialized. I hadn’t even known he was searching. My anger at his perceived betrayal was another consequence of secrets and severance.

 I’d caught snippets of similar reunions a few years earlier. Birthmothers and adoptees had begun speaking out by my teen years, the 1980s, but I ignored them. I changed the channel when Donahue and subsequent shows dared speak of adoption, or worse, reunion.

 If Donahue and Oprah couldn’t win me over, my brother didn’t stand a chance.

 I see the parallel now. It’s as if the world was trying to clue me in, the same way random people would sneak onto the set (the set within the storyline, not the actual movie set) of the Truman show. Characters that screamed, “Truman, you’re on TV,” were whisked away by plainclothes security. My brain had its own built-in security force, ready to deflect all things adoption. Like Truman, though, I finally wised up.

(Spoiler alert for a twenty-five-year-old movie: Truman defies his unreal reality and sneaks away. The TV producer, enraged, screams, “Cue the sun!” not to show Truman the way, as the metaphor would suggest, but to find and capture him. Truman eludes everyone and sails off through a massive storm to the end of the world, but since his world is a TV studio, he crashes into a literal wall. Deflated, but not defeated, he wanders about until he finds the exit, smirks at the camera, takes a final bow, and leaves. )

In 2018, I smashed into my own sunset.

A writer’s’ convention I almost skipped and a snippet of memoir read by a 1960s-era birthmother. I couldn’t change the channel. I didn’t tune out. She was a beacon. I listened, then began furiously searching for everything I’d ignored, including my own beginnings.

I wanted every answer to every question I ever buried inside myself. After a lifetime of avoiding the truth, it is all I crave. I have some new questions too.

Why should I have to SEARCH for my own information?

Why are our birth certificates sealed and falsified with new ones? Still! Why can I now have my real record of birth, but other adoptees can’t? Why are adoptees still at the mercy of archaic laws that erase our identities? How is this legal? How is this still a thing?

I don’t know.

What I do know is:

Mother-child separation is undeniably traumatic.

NICU units have special incubators with little holes for parents to safely touch their preemie babies. I call them mommy sleeves. The babies have just spent nine months hearing their mothers’ voices, sharing nutrients. Infants recognize their mothers. I wasn’t a preemie, but I’d have benefitted from a mommy sleeve. Instead, I got a heaping dose of pre-verbal trauma.

 Identity erasure compounded that trauma. The state legally disappeared me, then created a whole new identity and origin in the form of a new, official, fake birth certificate. More than 50 years later, this is still the norm, not the exception. Open adoption is more theory than practice, and not legally enforceable.

Searching, which was my decision, both broke and healed me.

It was rife with rabbit holes and red herrings and led to painful discoveries. My biological mother died three months before Illinois changed its OBC access law. It was another decade before I knew the law changed and before I searched, but that fact still stings. I also found out she looked for me, which brings both comfort and pain. Worse, for a time, we unknowingly lived exactly two blocks from each other. This haunts me every single day.

 I met my half-brother and my mother’s long-time best friend. They’re wonderful. Despite numerous DNA tests and partial records, my birth father remains a mystery. My maternal biological grandmother will not speak of or to me. My adoptive parents are deceased, so I can’t even tell them that I finally found some answers, that I finally asked some questions, and that I finally have some peace.

I wish I’d looked years earlier when both of my mothers were still living. I long to visit the parallel universe where my birth mother never had to surrender me, or maybe one where I met her during my teens or twenties. I love the family in which I was dropped, and fate dealt me a better hand than many adoptees. Still, I long for all the scenes that adoption deleted from my life’s movie, the songs erased from my playlist. Most of all, I wish if adoption had to be, that at least my identity hadn’t been stolen.

I believe in every human’s right to their identity. Adoptees are the only Americans legally denied their original records of birth in the United States. I believe this information should be ours from breath one, and restricting access is developmentally harmful. At the very least, we should have unfettered access to the entirety of our birth and medical records as adults. This is available for adoptees in only 11 states.

I also understand that as difficult as it was for me to obtain information, it’s more complex, sometimes impossible, for others, especially transnational adoptees. I respect that some adoptees have zero interest in their origins. Were records readily available, that percentage might increase. There are many things wrong with adoption, but the loss of identity is one of the most glaring and overlooked. Identity is a basic human right.

Don’t make us beg for it.

Don’t make us hide in the dark searching for ourselves.

Cue the sun.

Hannah Andrews was relinquished and adopted as an infant during the Baby Scoop Era. She began defogging, searching, and immersing herself in the adoptee community in 2019. Her writing has been featured onstage in LaJolla, CA for the San Diego Memoir Showcase and has been selected for publication in “Shaking The Tree: Short Memoir” Anthologies. And she recently joined the board of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates. Find her on Facebook and Twitter. 

By Charles K. Youeli.
I am sitting on a giant red rock. All around me as far as I can see are more red rocks and red dirt. The sky is brilliant blue. There is no one else around, at least not that I can see from where I sit. All I can hear is the wind. I do not know where I am, but the scenery burns itself into my memory forever. I am 18 months old.

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

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

That summer and the summer that follows, I will spend hours sitting on that platform, high above a world that I don’t feel like I belong in, can’t make any sense of, and don’t have much interest in fitting into. Mostly, I read science fiction paperbacks: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, and other authors I’ve long since forgotten.

I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I am 10 years old.

iii.
I wake up on the floor of a small church in a reservation town called Towoac in Colorado. Everyone else in the church youth group I’m here with is still asleep. We arrived the night before after two straight days on a bus and basically slept where we fell. I rub my eyes and tiptoe around sleeping bodies until I find the stairs, and, ultimately, a door that leads outside.

I step through it and look out across 40-some miles of desert at Shiprock. It’s hard to miss, because it’s incredibly huge and also because it’s literally the only thing to see. The Navajo call it Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or “winged rock,” hearkening back to the legend of the great bird that brought them from the north to the desert.

I am overcome by my smallness and insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe and history. And this feeling is surprisingly comforting and reassuring because everything else about my life seems uncertain and unnerving and one bad day away from falling apart completely. I am 18 years old.

iv.
Later that same year, my parents and I make the 500-mile trip from St. Louis, Missouri to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I’m going to college. We arrive at my dorm and carry my suitcases to my room, along with my most important possessions. These consist of my bass guitar, my stereo, and boxes of records, cassette tapes, and CDs.

I am supposed to have a roommate, but he hasn’t arrived yet. We talk for a few minutes, but they are as anxious to be on their way as I am for them to be gone. The door closes behind them, and I sit down on the bed closest to the door, which I’ve chosen to be mine. It feels like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of me, as if I’ve been holding breath for a very long time, as long as I can stand. It feels like I’ve been waiting my entire life for this moment, the moment when I’m finally on my own.

v.
I am standing on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the vast, barren, and seemingly endless expanse of the Badlands in South Dakota. There’s so much to see that it’s impossible to take it in all at once. It’s early in the morning, and I am the only person in this part of the park.

In a few days, I will pull into the driveway of a small house on the Missouri River in the town of Craig, Montana. The driveway leads down a short, steep and uneven hill, and I will drive down it at what must look like a comically slow speed to Jeff, who is waiting for me at the bottom. Jeff and his twin brother, Jerry, are my older brothers. Well, two of them. As it turns out, it’s a long, complicated story.

We were born five years apart to the same mother, but we have different fathers, and we are meeting in person for the first time. I will get out of the car, we’ll give each other a long hug, and I will say, “Sorry it took me so long,” which is not a great joke but in this instance works on a number of levels. And we will walk inside to start a conversation that somehow feels like the continuation of one that we’ve been having for years, maybe even all of our lives.

But none of that has happened yet, and I am standing on what feels like another planet, a beautiful alien landscape that somehow also feels like home. All I can hear is the wind. And for a few perfect moments, I am the only person in the world.Youel is a writer and creative director. Born, adopted, and raised in St. Louis, he lives and works in Minneapolis with his wife, two dogs, and a frequently fluctuating number of bicycles. He regularly shares words, ideas, photos, and questionable advice on Instagram and Twitter. In what used to be his spare time, he also manages ARTCRANK, a pop-art show and online shop dedicated to bike-inspired poster art.

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

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

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I let myself be fathered by them, I changed the way I dressed, talked, and behaved to be more like them. To be more like the only image of Blackness I was presented with.

I call this my first identity crisis. I was 12. And I had no one to talk to about what I was going through—the invasive and ever crippling doubt that I wasn’t and could never be “Black” enough. This was reinforced in the schools I attended by white classmates who would chastise me for my intelligence by saying, “you’re so white” and who would reward me for performing the kinds of Blackness I learned from Gangsta Rap by remarking, “you’re the Blackest person I know,” even though they only knew a handful of us.

None of us knew what Blackness was except for what mass media and music told us.

Back in the day, I used to use LimeWire to pirate music, and somehow in that journey I discovered Lupe Fiasco. He presented a different kind of Blackness. One that, sometimes, I could relate to. Nowhere was this more evident than in his song “He Say She Say,” about a single mother and a fatherless child. For the first time, I was seen.

And then I discovered B.o.B.

Mixtape era B.o.B was different. He was a trailblazer. A genius. A Black man who was actively trying to be different, a breath of fresh air in a stagnant industry—an Andre 3k throwback.

When I started rapping at 12 the first thing I did was try to remake “I’ll Be In The Sky” myself, exchanging words and phrases so that B.o.B’s story would be mine as well.

As my Hip-Hop tastes evolved, so too did my ideas of Blackness. And as my perceptions of what Black people could be expanded, like our universe did when the Creator big-banged us into existence, I began to fathom that I might have permission to be different, too.

But I was still isolated. Marooned in a sea of Whiteness. I still had to contend daily with how Whiteness policed my body and behavior. At the end of the day, for survival’s sake, I could only be as “Black” as Whiteness and my adoptive family permitted me—and their permission was filtered through their own (mis)understandings of what Blackness might be.

I was told the reason there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison than white people is because Black people are a more criminal race.

How can a Black body that is both womb and cocoon birth and metamorphosize a self that is not criminally malformed when it is laden with expectations like that?

I was pimping myself before I ever heard of Kendrick Lamar. Tryna figure out how to sell myself to a people who were in the market for a pre-prescribed Blackness that was self-destructive. And as a transracial adoptee raised in racial isolation, this pimping was a survival skill, and a violence inflicted on myself.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.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.

On Venmo, @matthewcharlespoet

By Kristen SteinhilberI had just moved, with only a couple weeks in my new apartment under my belt. I had very recently begun to emerge from the fog, so as you might imagine, this particular moving process was my most hectic yet. Reunion with my biological mother had fallen through about five years prior, and she hadn’t spoken to me since. But I knew, with the new insight I’d gained about the impact adoption has had on me, that I had to write her a letter.

First, with every muscle in my body clenched so hard it hurt, I wrote to push her away; to tell her every horrible thing that had ever happened to me, and to vehemently convey that it was all her fault. I finished a few interpretations of that letter, each time with my finger hovering above the send button, unable to press down. I didn’t understand; I’d thought about the closure sending it would bring me for a while. But then I remembered the time The Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces came on the radio and we sang along together and how her embrace felt like home. And I realized I didn’t want to push her away. I finally admitted to myself that not only did I need her, but I also wanted her in my life. I finally admitted to myself that she is my mother.

I went back to the drawing board; this time with hope and a sense of relaxation in my shoulders. I started to write the letter that I just knew would fix everything and get me my mother back.

Dear Ava,*

I don’t know how to let you know about a lifetime’s worth of feelings without bombarding you. So I’m resorting to doing just that. Please try to keep in mind that I only intend to help you hear, acknowledge, and understand me, and that I entirely lack the intention to attack, shame, or berate you.

I don’t know if you think that I’m the same as a peer or another family member with whom you have a more conventional and grounded relationship. Or that disagreements followed by years of radio silence is fine. But I’m not a peer or a family member who always knew you. I’m the daughter who was raised in a family that wasn’t my own because of bad timing and circumstance.

I acknowledge all of what you had to weigh and that the decision you made was pure, out of love, and made in order to give me the best chance at the best life possible. I’ve had admiration and respect in multitudes for it. But I had no choice other than to accept and forgive since the day I was born. As I got old enough to decide for myself, I still chose to accept and forgive. The moment I was given a chance to meet you, I chose to accept your presence in my life. Eventually, I chose to give you pieces of myself, and finally, I even chose to give you my trust. Acceptance and forgiveness regenerate with ease, but when your life starts the way mine did with a broken bond and no choice in the matter, it also starts with a massive deficit of trust. I actually never got out of the negative space; something always happens to keep me there. The amount I gave you, I got it on loan.

I have given more to you throughout the course of my life than I realized until all I got was your disregarding absence. That absence continues to further break something in me, and I don’t deserve it. Candidly, I’m running out of tape and glue.

I know you suffered an unimaginable loss when I was born and that a part of you died when you couldn’t take me home to raise in your family. I know that the very subject of me causes you pain and grief. I also know the world doesn’t make room for the particular kind of pain you’ve felt and that opportunities to talk about it freely and without filtering are rare. I know that causes the pain and grief to turn into anger, guilt, shame, and numbness.

I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end, but I do understand that’s what it is. A landmine of 33 years’ worth of explosive affliction underfoot.

I know this because unimaginable loss was my birthright.

Again, I respect it. You were mature and capable beyond your years. You didn’t leave me on a doorstep with a note and an extra bottle. You placed me responsibly into the hands of professionals whom you knew had found me a home and fit parents. I think I remember hearing that I was physically healthy, so at some point you must even have started intaking more nutrients than the average teenager. You left your friends, your pom poms, the boyfriend who knocked you up, your home, your family, and everything else about your adolescent life behind to take care of me. You were up north at your aunt’s house preparing to give birth to a child you knew you might never meet while you should have been having senioritis.

You did good, Ava. Maybe it’s weird to say that I am proud of you, but I can’t think of a better way to say it. You did everything you could have. You didn’t just become a mother that day; you outdid yourself in your role as my mother.

The moment your role was to relinquish regimentation and have faith, I inherited a massive role and responsibility—to adapt. The world’s lack of acknowledgement that I experienced that unimaginable loss as well was what dismally became my inheritance.

Science shows that infants have instinctual awareness and memory. The loss of you was a trauma my brain doesn’t recall, but my body does. Apparently, I wasn’t knitting a sweater in there; I was bonding with you.

Fighting my biological awareness and memory of that broken bond as if it were natural was expected of me from the start. I was told losing everything with my first breath was something to be grateful for. I was saved. That never clicked with me as quite right, because it wasn’t. Now I know that attachment disruption is acknowledged as relinquishment trauma, and not being given a chance to grieve is acknowledged as adoption trauma. How well I adapted to surroundings that didn’t reflect me became how I understood my value and place in the world.

When I was in 3rd grade, my best friend who lived down the street was at my house and we were playing with sidewalk chalk. We were arguing about who gets to choose what game to draw and play. I went with the typical nine-year old’s stance: My house, my sidewalk chalk, my choice. Keep in mind that she was a sweet kid, just thoughtless in the moment (yet impressively calculated) with her rebuttal, “Yeah but your parents aren’t really your parents, so it’s not really your house or your sidewalk chalk.”

“What a relief, thank you for saying that out loud,” I remember thinking. “Now please do me a solid and go ask my mom to explain like, all of it and then come back and tell me what she said. Word for word. Do. Not. Paraphrase.”

Instead, I stormed away angry on behalf of my mother. On behalf of myself, I felt nothing but numb and confused. I knew that I was supposed to be mad, so I was. I stayed fake mad because it made my mom happy, and I thought maybe I would be mad mad if I tried hard enough. I couldn’t, which I felt guilty for. So much that I almost confessed to my mom so she could punish me appropriately. But I didn’t think telling her how I really felt was worth hurting her feelings, so I just made myself sick with shame. And to punish myself, I didn’t talk to my best friend for almost the entire school year. I caved on the last day of school. Self-sacrifice is a very strange instinct for a third-grader.

My whole life I’ve been consumed by trying and failing to maintain a sense of self because I’ve been trying to exist in two worlds; one that doesn’t accommodate my longing for the other, which is filled with mystery and ghosts. It’s relentless discomfort, anxiety, phantom pain, and hiding.

I was listening to a TED Talk by a social worker whose work focuses on adoption. It was about the unnecessary obstacle course along the path to reuniting with birth family and the need for change in this process. She said something that seemed to stop my heart for more than a few beats: my original birth certificate is state property, and I have no legal access to it. But if I were able to see it, I would see on the side of the document that it had been stamped with one of those ink stamps used to save time. Like the original birth certificates of adoptees in many states in the country, the document was stamped with the word “Void.”

What I have instead is an “amended birth certificate.”

I have always relied on the language of symbolic comparison as a way to explain and relate, and a stamp that invalidates my original identity is the most perfect symbol to explain why. I rely on anecdotal relatability because my access to a real sense of belonging is void. It’s never been tangible.

I am an amended version of myself, and that’s a very hard way to live. I am defined by the loss of you I didn’t grieve for, and the rest of me is made up of dissonance.

I have lived my whole life in fear of the fact that I could lose my seat at the table in an instant. I come by it honestly. I know you feel many of the things I feel and that the very subject of me causes you pain. But I finally am able to have compassion for myself after 33 years of thinking I’m not worth the trouble. Only now can I definitively say that your pain is not a good enough reason for you to treat me as if I’m unlovable. Your fears are not a good enough reason for me to let them amplify mine.

I thought reunion was supposed to fix me, but I’ve learned that isn’t how it works. I always enjoyed spending time with you all, but I think I just went through the motions and ended up feeling more alone. I know now reunion could never be that simple. Meeting you would not have repaired my traumatized brain, and it wouldn’t fix yours either. There’s absolutely no way you don’t have PTSD in some form as well. Giving up control over everything that will happen to a child that you gave birth to is unnatural and goes against every instinct a mother has. It’s not something you just move on from with only faith to hold you up.

As for me, I’ve blamed everyone and no one at the same time for the wreckage. I’ve gone down the list and been angry with pretty much everyone I know for at least a little while. Doctors who throughout my childhood attributed clear cut signs of manifested trauma to stress, but shrugged them off and said I was “just a little tightly wound.” The therapists and psychiatrists who misdiagnosed me after I spent countless hours on their couches. My parents, of course, for not helping me find my own truth, which would have helped me obtain a proper diagnosis a long time ago. I landed on “everything” for the most amount of time. The ignorant, narrow, and damaging speak surrounding the whole topic of adoption. A reductive narrative that takes a process where most everyone involved is either nobly intended or an innocent newborn, all of whom have lost something so significant that they will never be the same, and wrings it out until it’s a shitty, low-budget Hallmark film. I blamed the fucking thing it’s called. “Adopted.” If that was intended as some form of shorthand, they should not have been in charge of naming things. It’s too fucking short. It’s a denial of enormous grief, and erases everything except what goes on some legal documents that end up sitting in a file cabinet. It takes away the story and, more importantly, the voice of everyone involved in one way another.

As I said before, I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end. But in the midst of all the anger I felt when trying to figure out who was to blame, it occurred to me that whoever named it the thing it’s called—“adopted”— it seems like it had to be a birth mother.

The whole thing about the adopted child being chosen by the loving adoptive family and saved by them to go live a happily ever after life—it sounds like a hopeful birth mother who felt she should keep herself out of it just in case it would cause her child pain. Or she was made to go away because of stigma, but requested that her child be told they are the main character in a real-life fairytale.

That got me thinking about what happened to you. The fact that you were expected to leave your home and move to a strange place to endure one of the most traumatic experiences a person could have, at 18 years old, because others might shame and stigmatize you instead of supporting you. I always recognized that as a load of fucking horseshit, but you had told me about those circumstances so casually that it never sunk in how horrible that really was. There is nothing about that you deserved, and it never should have happened. You never should have had to go through that. You never should have been burdened with shame and rejection on top of loss. You were a child.

I’m not convinced that the situation would be a whole lot different today. Definitely not as different as it should be. So that’s my answer. The only thing to blame is “the way things are.” I have never had goals or very much direction in life until now, but I know I want to help change this garbage version of “the way things are” for as many adoption triads as I can. I don’t know what that means yet, and I have a lot of work to do on myself before I can start to figure it out.

I don’t know who I am, but I do know what I stand for. I wholeheartedly believe everyone deserves to heal and that they should. Especially from the things they went through as kids. And I know there is no way that you have. Adoption-competent mental health professionals are like unicorns even today, so there is no way in your situation that you got the support you needed. The fact that we don’t speak is proof of that. And you have to stop pretending that the problem is me. I don’t deserve it at all.

I’m a good kid. I have a larger than life capacity to provide a safe space for people to feel their pain, especially the kind the world does not make room for. I have been through enough. I lost you before I could ever know you at the beginning of my life. I lost my mom before I could ever know her at the beginning of my coming of age story. All of that was so hard on me that I tried to die. Then immediately after that, as I was trying to want to live, I lost you again. Give me a damn break, man. Stop treating me as if I am the problem. I can help, and you can have some time, but this is the last time I will be reaching out.

I don’t trust easily, but I sure as shit don’t scare easily either. We are not a conventional mother and daughter. Our shit is very extra by nature. Trust me, I had a much different letter written just last week. I had a right to every teenage angst-influenced word, too. It’s natural to idealize your mother and be disappointed and furious and crushed by her when she doesn’t live up to that ideal. I have gone through a lifetime of emotions, naturally childlike, when it comes to you on a very strange and inconvenient timeline, and I have had to parent myself through every bit of it. I have reached an adult resolve without even writing emo song lyrics on my Converse with a Sharpie. I am a proud-ass mama.

You have a right to all your feelings too. I am hurt by open-ended silence, but I don’t think there’s anything you could say that I wouldn’t understand to some degree. I’m a subject that’s caused you 33 years’ worth of pain. You don’t need to slap a pink bow on that shit. You could have wished I was never born, and I would understand that.

Try me. I will absolutely surprise you. Just don’t deflect and avoid and leave me alone in the process. I can’t even act tough and stand up to it. I have never had the luxury of not knowing exactly how fragile I am every moment of my life. So, please. I deserve persistent acceptance and kindness.

Anyway, about everything else, I am a bit of a psychological breakdown junkie, and I have read a ton lately about the adoption triad in general. I am happy to send links and resources. And to listen.

Btw, seeking community has helped me a lot. There are plenty of online adoptee support groups, and I would imagine that there are also birth mother support groups out there. Hearing other people’s stories is healing, even if you don’t have the desire to interact with the group.

Xoxo, Kristen

It’s been 9 months, and she hasn’t sent any sort of response. I imagine this is still sitting there, swarming in on her, perceived at a glance to be the indictment of the ages. Misunderstood and avoided like bad news. My unsung apocalyptic longing weighing down her inbox.

*Name changed for privacy reasons Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance 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.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

By Kristen SteinhilberMy whole life, when everyone told me that biology doesn’t matter, I did everything I could to believe that they were right. I learned to ignore my gut and tirelessly struggled to silence my insides that grievously screamed otherwise. It took me more than three decades of fairytale-oriented platitudes and assumptions thrown like bombs my way about adoption to piece together one very relevant thread: everyone who told me that biology doesn’t matter—including both sides of my own adoptive family—had intact bloodlines and genetic histories. And that what they were really saying, whether they meant to or not, was that my biology doesn’t matter.

Before I finally understood this, my takeaway was hardly stretch, considering the message I was sent: if my biology doesn’t matter, then I do not really matter. That’s what I believed above all else.

After my adoptive mother died, I found out she knew exactly who and where my biological family was and had kept it a secret from me. She had even allowed certain biological family members to attend my gymnastics practices without my knowledge. These kinds of things—withholding and secrecy—are encouraged in the world of adoption when it comes to the biology of adoptees. In fact, withholding and secrecy are legally enforced through sealed birth records. So when I found out, I assumed this was normal, understandable, or even maybe for my own good. My adoptive mother may have even believed that herself. Still, to know that there was nothing but a glass wall that separated me from the family I’d only daydreamed about as they watched me, or that maybe I’d accidentally brushed up against one of them on my way to get a drink from the water fountain, was a a mind fuck, even at the time. It just didn’t equate to anger the way it should have.

That’s what a person feels and should feel when they find out they have been lied to their entire lives by the person that raised them and who insisted that honesty is paramount. Anger. But since I’d always been told that adoption was such a gift, I didn’t feel I had the right to it. I pushed my own feelings away and suppressed what was in my gut. Of course, the lesson I took away from this is that my truth (or the truth in general) doesn’t hold much value. I’m not worthy or deserving of the truth; betrayals are to be immediately forgiven, no matter how all-encompassing. I applied this lesson to every aspect of my life without realizing, allowing others to manipulate me and believing them when they told me it was for my own good, telling lies myself and dismissing the feelings of those I’d wronged.

When I met my biological mother, I also found I had two sisters, one who is just four years younger than I am. Four years. So, my mother wasn’t an unfit parent, yet, through adoption, I was still legally severed from all ties having to do with her. My sisters got to grow up together, and I, an inherently and dangerously lonely only child without even the knowledge that they existed.

There is no way I at 18 (or anyone at any age for that matter) could possibly wrap my head around that thought all at once without exploding. That my mother gave me away and then had two more children, and that they all built a life that went on without me, and that the only thing that separated me from them and that life was four measly years. So I pushed it away and again, suppressed what was in my gut; the same method of self-protection I’d used my whole life. Your feelings don’t matter. Don’t have them. Biology doesn’t matter, and therefore all of the years you missed out on don’t matter either. Yes, you were the one who was given away but it doesn’t matter. You had a “better life.” Believe that, not yourself.

I had a beautiful reunion with them for years and “fit” naturally. Not in the same way that they fit with each other; that’s simply not possible when you miss out on all those years. I was also still under the thumb of the responsibility placed upon me to believe and feel they didn’t really matter. Not like the adoptive family who “saved” me. So I kept the feelings of everyone else protected and them at a distance.

Then one day they were gone. One fight was all it took. This is extremely common in biological reunion; many of our birth mothers have been both pressured to relinquish as well as shamed from every angle for relinquishing their children, not to mention having rarely been supported through their grieving process. So by the time we meet again, the combination of intense desire and fear of authentic connection often backfires, as do the reunions themselves.

During all of those years that I was included among them, I could never allow myself to be present with them. I never let myself dwell too much on the fact that my mannerisms and sense of humor are exactly like theirs and that I grew up without that. I didn’t dare admit to myself how good it felt to lay in the arms of my mother and sisters while we talked about everything under the sun and laughed in sync. I certainly never allowed myself to ask questions about my birth or the before and aftermath. I felt that would only cause upset and come across as ungrateful for the “gift” I’d always been told she had given me by giving me away. Like, “Did you ever regret your decision? Did anyone in the family want or try to keep me? Did anyone hold me or comfort me during the five days I spent in hospital nursery before I went home with my adoptive family? Did you name me? Can you tell me more about my father?”

And now, it’s too late.

After a lifetime of searching like Nancy Drew on the case of “Why am I like this?” Only now can I see my adoption trauma and maladaptive coping qualities through a lens of clarity. Because of the fairytale narrative that is everywhere and enforced by seemingly everyone who has ever seen a movie about adoption, my clarity has been systematically hidden from me. What I was conditioned to believe was self-preservation was actually self-abandonment.

The spiritual and psychological isolation of having two families but not belonging to either has ripped me from limb to limb, over and over, my entire life. My humanity has never once been seen by the adoption industry and the laws that bind, through which family ties and preservation are rendered unimportant. My voice and dignity have been robbed. Every memory of family I have is tainted either by lies or painstaking regret.

My story is not any other adoptee’s story. But the gist of it is not uncommon. These themes of diabolical dishonesty, betrayal, unbearable rejection, and hopelessness run through countless adoptees’ stories, and are begging not to be ignored.

Adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom made a film titled Reckoning with The Primal Wound that captures the complexities, forsaken years, and mirror smashing pain of adoption better than any other I’ve seen. My favorite part is the “Adoptee Army” featured in the credits. There’s a massive number of names listed, all those of adoptees who stand in solidarity for adoption reform. After a lifetime of feeling utterly alone, I was moved to tears seeing my name included with all of the rest.

We are the adoptee army, and our biology matters. It did all along. Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance 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.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

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

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

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

Neighborhood kid: Where are you from?

Me: Here.

Kid: No, I mean where are you from?

Me: Here. Queens. Jackson Heights.

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

Me: Oh. Well. I don’t really know.

Kid: Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By A.D. HerzelThe return flight was most memorable. A six-month-old boy slept in my lap for 18 hours, never crying once. He was not my baby and legally no longer belonged to the woman who gave birth to him. On many papers signed by governments and agencies on opposite sides of the world, he belonged to a family in the United States. I was 19, and my thoughts and memories reeled back and forth through time. I reflected upon the experiences and challenges I had encountered as an Asian adoptee in America, and I wondered about the known and unknown possibilities his future would hold. As I thought about his journey to the other side of the world, I silently cried. Did anyone notice? No one said a word. My tears fell on and off through the course of the long night. We were flying together in limbo, he and I leaving one home on the way to another, though I felt neither place was truly ours to claim. Was this only my story? Would it be his too?

In the summer of 1987, after I completed my first year of college, my adoptive parents generously sent me on the Holt Motherland tour. Holt international was an Evangelical Christian adoption agency founded by Harry Holt and his wife, Bertha, in 1953. Harry Holt is credited with creating the logistic and legal pathway for the intercountry adoption of Korean children to families in the United States. The Motherland tour was an effort by the Holt organization to create an opportunity for adult Korean adoptees to learn about their Korean heritage and visit their “homeland.”

I did not ask to go on the tour, but when it was offered, I readily accepted. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn’t have much access to Korean culture. My parents were not the kind who celebrated or shared the beauty and culture of the country I and my two adopted siblings had come from. I recall meeting Bertha Holt on two occasions at large gatherings when I was very young. The evangelical church community my adoptive parents belonged to recruited new members throughout the suburbs of Long Island, New York. The church members adopted roughly 100 Korean children. I have a picture in my mind of us all posed in a hall with Bertha wearing a hanbok. Somewhere on Long Island, in a box of my now-deceased parents’ photos, it may be hidden.

Unlike most Korean adoptees dispersed into the white American population, I was raised among many other Korean adoptees and their families. When my parents’ church devolved into a conservative, Sephardic, Kabbalistic, messianic cult, I was in first grade. I was told we do not pray to Jesus anymore. Two of my brothers and I were put in its private religious school until sixth grade, where half of the children in my class were Korean adoptees.

Yet we never talked about being adopted. My best friend was a Korean adoptee, as was her sister. My adopted siblings and I talked quietly, privately, about many things, but never about our lives before adoption or our families on the other side of the world. We, according to my adoptive mother, were God’s will in her life, her mission. Thus, I was named Amy Doreen—beloved “gift of God.” Amy is a common name among Korean adoptees. When I was a child, I imagined it made me special. As a teenager, I held on to the name of “love,” hoping if I embodied it, it would come to me.

As I grew up, I came to find the name silly and ill-fitting. Amys were pretty, sweet, and bubbly. Cherished, they were something that was not me. Inside, and occasionally outside, I was mean, cutting with words, hungry, lonely, awkward, uncomfortable in my skin, angry, and always afraid. I cursed myself, as I was cursed at, and felt cursed. Being “God’s gift” was always a chain.

In a recent interview with an adoptee, she reminded me of my past self. I had forgotten the feeling of my anger, my self-hate. Though I spent my elementary school years in a religious bubble where I did not think about my race, when I was in my home, my neighborhood, and when I finally went to public school in seventh grade, I was harassed, afraid, and I hated being Asian. I cringed at the sight of another Asian in public or on tv. I was ashamed of being part of the denigrated class. I was taught at home that Asians were stupid and ugly and weak. Was I made fun of? Of course, this was the 70s.

After learning the breakdown of my DNA, I was reminded of having been taunted with “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” I used to say, “I am Korean, stupid,” with fury and fear bubbling inside. The kids never knew what or where Korea was.  But now I know. I am Chinese and Japanese and Korean. I knew it never really mattered. The truth was always clear. I was more interested in being invisible or at least visible on my own terms. It would take me decades before I even knew what my own terms were. This was never possible within my adoptive family or within the upper-middle-class Long Island suburbs where I grew up. I escaped Long Island and my adoptive parents’ home at the end of college and returned only for major family events.

My Motherland Tour shifted many things. The American spell of my “minority self”—”ugly, powerless, and unworthy”—broke when I saw the beauty of the landscape and the masses of people and witnessed the culture. It was an awakening that some Korean adoptees have, but not all. The tour helped create a space for “Korean pride”—a long well-guarded taboo. It was also the first time I actually spoke about the nature of my adoptive family struggles with fellow adoptees. How many tears were shed? How many cheap Korean cigarettes were smoked at Il San Orphanage, sitting around Harry Holt’s gravestone? No one understood. Counselors might have been helpful. Alcohol, cigarettes, tears, and late-night confidences carried us through the two-week tour—“orphans” once more figuring things out on our own. Seven of us were close in age and created an odd “Breakfast Club.” It was a strange brief enlightenment and a respite for those of us not wanting to return to the families that sent us. We would all return to our respective states—Tennessee, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, California, Kansas, New Jersey, and New York—after sorely straining the nerves of the late Dr. David Kim, the former director of Holt International Children’s services.

The most profound stop for me on our tour was Holt’s unwed mother’s home. I do not remember the inside or anything I saw. I only remember being doubled over outside the building bawling my eyes out, finally having a complete emotional breakdown. I do not have memories of any words from the moment. A geyser of sorrow had broken free and I no longer had the will to fight it. The unwed mother’s home was considered progress—something Holt International was proud of. Dr. Kim always told us his dream was that adoptees would end up running Holt. I wonder how he interpreted all the tears and wailing sobs elicited by these annual tours.

As our tour bus obliviously rode through the South Korean peninsula, the June 1987 Democratic uprising was occurring. The demonstrations led to a democratic election and other reforms as well as the Great Workers’ Struggle, which was marked by the largest and most effective union organizing and walkouts in South Korean history. One night, our bus was stuck in the demonstration traffic, and several people were sickened by the tear gas that floated through the windows. The political struggle for Korean democracy was not on the Holt Motherland Tour cultural menu, so context was never given.

At 19 and older, had we grown up on the peninsula with or without our unknown birth parents, we likely would have been part of, or greatly invested in, the outcomes of the crowds on the streets.

Instead, we were buying tourist trinkets in Itaewon. “Eol meyeyoh? How much?” and “Kamsa hamneda, thank you,” were the pillars of our Korean language acquisition. My American freedom had already been bought by the war, by my adoption. I had not grown enough to truly protest with my fellow Koreans. In Korea, I was an “orphan” in an American wrapper, envied and looked down upon. In America, I was an American in a Korean wrapper, a dirty import.

Time has passed. The first experiments have grown up. The adoptee outcomes from the first wave of Korean adoptees and my subsequent generation resulted from prescriptions of assimilation and religious charity. Though research is scant and belated, it showed what many of us have privately known. A study by the Evan B Donaldson institute I participated in, reported by the New York Times in 2009, showed that 78% of Korean adoptees identified as white or wanting to be white. It also documented that, “as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.” This shows us; the majority of adoptees assimilate and displace their identity with that of their foreign families, and that their innate identity is still almost equally important. Intercountry adoption and many forms of adoption demand the “erasure” of a life and identity prior to placement in the foreign environment, but identity can only be controlled by external forces for so long.

Revolution and a way to culture, identity, and citizenship reclamation is still being paved by adoptees born after me. According to data culled from US State Department reports by William Robert Johnston and the Johnston archives, only 4,400 Korean children were adopted the US in the 1960s. During the 70s, 25,247 Korean children were recorded as adopted to the US, and during the 80s, the number rose to 46,254. A small fraction of these younger and older adoptees would move back to Korea, search for birth families, and demand accountability from adoption agencies, the government, and their birth families. With the rise of the Internet and DNA technology, these numbers appear to be increasing, though they have yet to be measured.

Unceasingly, these same demands have been and will be replayed by every adoptee who understands what it means to ask for their rights as defined by the UN Rights of the Child Agreement. (The United States is one of the few countries that has not ratified, and does not subscribe to, the Rights of the Child Agreement.) Thus, our work continues: supporting Korean adoptees, making community, creating birth search and reunion resources, and sharing our stories in writing and through the arts. Today, adoptees are fortunate to find a varied handful of Korean adoptee-centered organizations, podcasts, and magazines online among them: ICAV, IKAA, AKA, KAMRA325, GOA’L, Adoptee Hub, the Adapted Podcast, and The Universal Asian.

When my return flight landed at JFK airport with the other HOLT 1987 Motherland Tour members, I was brought to meet the family waiting for the baby I carried. My service as an escort paid for my plane trip back to the US. I do not remember the name they gave him. I recall the family—white, with perhaps two older daughters. I may have intentionally not wanted to remember them. I had not wanted to give him up. I had not wanted to give him to them. I gave him up knowing, whether they were kind or not, the road could be difficult. America was uniquely hard on Asian boys. He would have questions they could not answer, desires for self-knowledge they could not fulfill, and my heart was inadequate and broken. I was still inadequate and broken.

I hope he was fine, was loved, was fairly treated, found pride, self-acceptance, friends, and self-love. He should be 34 now and still on the journey that never ends, reconciling the before and after, the with and without. My best hope is that he was one of those adoptees who was able to be proud and have an easy knowledge of his Korean cultural heritage and identity. What I could not do for him then is what I do now—share as much as I can and show what I am able.

And to him I say, “If you are out there looking for a friend on the road or the mule that carried you to America, here I am.”

미안해  Biahnay

I am sorry.

A.D.A.D. Herzel was “found” in 1968 in Hari, Yeouju eup, South Korea, and brought to the U.S. in 1970. She is a Korean American adoptee, visual artist, writer, and educator who has exhibited work nationally for the past 20 years. Trained as a painter and printmaker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she also earned her M.Ed. in art education from the Tyler School of Art. Her current project, titled Seeds from the East: The Korean Adoptee Portrait Project, will be shown in multiple venues in 2022-2023. These exhibits are scheduled for the Philip Jaisohn Memorial House in Media, PA, and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. She’s working with Adoptee Hub for an exhibit in Minnesota, and plans are in the works for shows in Oregon and, possibly, Boston. She is also a regular arts contributor to The Universal Asian, which describes itself as an open and safe online database platform in a magazine-style to provide inspiration to Asian adoptees (#importedAsians) and immigrated Asians (#hyphenatedAsians) around the world. Learn more about her work here. Find her on Instagram @pseudopompous.Severance 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.

On Venmo: @pseudopompousBEFORE YOU GO…

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By Meredith KellerWhen a letter arrived in my mailbox saying, “I think you might be my grandma,” it dredged up shattering memories of a campus rape 52 years earlier. I threw the letter on the floor of my car and drove erratically in a state of high anxiety and angst. My body went rigid at the thought of reviving that story from my past. All would be revealed.

Would I want to go down that path? To relive scenes and open sores from episodes long buried, the chilling details of an incident that began with rape on a college campus in 1962?

How would this grandchild ever understand that repressive period I lived through after WW II and before the birth control pill? Society then held single unmarried pregnant women in their grip. Rape or unplanned sex led to blistering consequences as unplanned pregnancies made women face the scourge of what was labeled illegitimacy, undergo illegal and dangerous abortions, or carry a child to term only to sever that extraordinary bond between mother and child with separation. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption between 1940 and 1970.* I had had no choice but to carry my child to term.

At the time, thoughts of motherhood were tearing at my moral senses. After all, I’d been raised with the idea that motherhood within marriage was the shibboleth in our society. I was facing the dilemma of my life. Would I dare keep a child under these circumstances and bring shame on me and my family or allow the baby to be adopted?

Opting for adoption, I faced the deep sadness of that very moment you hand over your own child. That final act of severance between mother and child caused a quake deep in my soul. I can recall that moment with crystal clarity but mostly I keep it compartmentalized, forever afraid to revisit that devastating moment. The deep shame I felt should not have been mine but the rapist’s who drugged me and took me to his fraternity for his pleasure. After that sorrow of an unplanned pregnancy and what I had put my family through, the anger and resentment were knotted together and locked deep inside.

Returning to that letter in my hands, my emotions were jumbled thinking about the conflict of remembered pain and the promise of closure. I knew this letter was reopening wounds, but it was also exciting to think of learning what happened to my child after that sorrowful moment deeply etched in my soul.

Should I answer the letter?

How would I respond? I started to formulate a letter. What could I possibly say that would adequately explain my lifetime of secrecy and shame? They hadn’t lived through my restrictive times, that conservative era just before the bra-burning sixties and the new sexual freedoms.

What evolved from this request to be acknowledged was that I wrote a memoir. Through tear stained pages, I re-lived for my granddaughters and all young women every aspect of my journey when my self-esteem, ambition, certainty, and reputation were instantly erased and replaced by shame. I explained the hurdles I had to jump to restore my dignity.

So I well understand that not everyone wants to immediately meet their lost child. The pain of remembrance can be deep. The personal stories are wrenching. The reasons for relinquishing them can be quite complicated.

I did eventually meet my daughter and granddaughters in an awesome moment of pure joy, but it was writing the memoir and addressing that long journey that healed the pain.

Keller is reviewing her book, The Unraveling: The Price of Silence, in Zoom format conversation with her daughter Ann at the following Napa Bookmine event November 11. All are invited and it is free. Register here.

*The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative.Meredith Keller honed her writing skills in a career as food editor of a leading restaurant magazine, copy writer for top advertising agencies, and publicist and marketing executive. All helped her articulate trauma and the emotional topography of rape and the blistering consequences. The Unraveling is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Find her on Instagram @theunraveling_9162.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Ande StanleyAll you had

To do

Instead of saying

I love you

Was to tell me

The truth

Trust is essential in relationships. Honesty is one of the foundations of ethical behavior. When we grow up with lies, when we are denied the ability to make informed decisions, when we are taught that our senses are untrustworthy, when our identities are erased and we are made invisible, the ability to be in true authentic relationship with others is greatly hindered or made impossible. This inability for intimacy to exist within a context of deception is true for everyone, not just for people like myself. Trust is the engine of society. We need to be able to trust ourselves and others in order to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy. We need to trust to be successful socially and economically. What happens to a person whose trust is betrayed at a deep and foundational level?

The last thing my adoptive mom said to me was that I must believe how greatly I was loved. I want so very much to believe in what she was saying. I long for that connection. My chest hurts and my eyes burn just sitting here and thinking about what that would mean. To be seen. To be heard. To be real, in a deeply intimate relationship with my adoptive family. The problem is that I don’t believe her. I believe she loved what she needed me to be, what she needed to fill the void in her own ego, to assuage the pain of her own failures and rejections. She never loved me because she never knew me. She knew the fiction that she created when she insisted that I not know that I was adopted.

I grew up thinking there was something incredibly wrong with me. I had no other explanation for the sudden silences and the awkward responses. I tried and I tried but never seemed to be enough. My older sister and our dad had an ease of communication and a closeness that, no matter how much I desired to live in that space, was beyond my reach. My youngest brother and our mom existed in a give and take where his protection and nurturing seemed to take precedence over that of mine and my other younger brother. He and I were the odd ones. We looked different, sounded different, acted different. To look at pictures of the six of us together now, I can immediately see what strangers saw—that we did not belong.

I had no mirror. I still have no ability to conceive of how I appear to others. When I asked why I didn’t look like anyone else in the family, I was told that of course I did. A child needs to believe their parents. By insisting that I did look like people I did not resemble, my mother set in motion a mental process that required me to deny the evidence of my own eyes. What I perceived to be real was in doubt. I could not trust what my eyes could see.

My mental health suffered because of the lies. Because I was told that my senses were unreliable. I was over-imaginative, being dramatic, making up stories. Better that I be the crazy one, the identified patient, than to simply tell me the truth. I looked and acted and was different because we weren’t related. Funny how liars felt comfortable accusing me of lying when they set in motion a family system that constantly had to be reinforced with more lies. It’s no wonder I never felt close to my adoptive parents or to their children. When lying is the basis of a relationship, you live in fear of being caught out in your lies. The more lies you tell, the more lies you must remember. I can only imagine how exhausting and anxiety producing that must have been and how much easier that made keeping me at a distance. Keeping me Other.

My physical health suffered due to the lies. My mom was more comfortable accusing me of hypochondria than willing to be honest with me and say we were not genetically related. I was warned of health problems that ran in my adoptive parents’ families, went so far as to have tests done to rule out some of those possibilities, even considered mastectomy—all based on false health information. I went wrongly diagnosed for genetically heritable conditions because there was no history of them in “my” family.

Being lied to has emotional consequences as well. If you systematically deceive and manipulate a person for decades, and when they discover the truth they are devastated and enraged, do you have a right to accuse them of being unbalanced? When they begin to learn to name their emotions and establish necessary boundaries that change the family dynamics, is it okay for you to command them to stop being disruptive and upsetting the people who created the trauma? Do you have any business telling them that they are responsible for the mental health of the people who hurt them?

When the people who you are supposed to be able to trust most are the ones who betray you? I was taught to not trust myself. Then I was taught to not trust anyone else.

My mom said she would have told me about my adoption at some point. She was hurt when I said that I had no reason to think she actually would have done so. Even 20 years after I found out by accident about being adopted, she was still telling me lies. I think the habit was too ingrained by that point for her to do otherwise.

And then she died.

I wasn’t the only one who was the victim of my adoptive parents lies. Their natural children were also. I can’t imagine what it does to a child to be told that they must always be on guard around a sibling. They must always lie to that person and never let on what they know. The habit is ingrained in them as well. They cannot hear or see me. So we do not talk. I was tired of being invisible.

My own children have also been victims of the lies. They were already in school by the time I found out. Their identities changed as well, along with their ability to trust other people. They endured the years of watching their mom falling apart and trying to put herself together again. They suffered loss also, and it is hard to forgive my mom for that.

The lies robbed me of family—adoptive and my own. Robbed me through the process of making intimacy impossible with the people I grew up with and whose name I legally carry. Robbed me of the opportunity to reach out and connect with my first families because so much time had gone by before I was able to find them. Robbed my children and grandchildren of opportunity. Time that none of us can recover.

All they had to do was tell me the truth. Grant me my power, my autonomy, my ability to know and be myself. If they had done that, been honest, then they could have been themselves as well. We could have established relationships based on choice and openness and understanding. But that didn’t happen. It is too late for the majority of the relationships. Thankfully it is not too late for me and for my kids and for my grandkids to learn how to be in authentic relationship with ourselves and with others. I am not sure I will ever be able to fully trust anyone, but I hope to learn to trust myself. I want to know what it is to say I love you and know that I truly grasp what that means. I want to hear someone else say I love you to me and know that it is said by someone who knows me.

You taught me to hide

So I stayed hidden

You concealed me from myself

Called me a

Dreamer, a

Fabulist

I lived in paper towers

A broken

Rapunzel

You fed me on

Fairy tales

You created a

Fiction

Pressed hard

With your pencil

Wrote over the lines

You erased

With your lies

But,

Everything comes out

When the paper

Is held up

To the lightAnde Stanley—an international, stranger, closed adoption adoptee—discovered her adoptee status by accident when she was in her early thirties. A writer from an early age, in recent years she is learning to use her voice to speak out about the trauma caused by denying adoptees their identities and autonomy. She spends her days painting, writing, and harassing her husband of more than 30 years. Visit her blog The Adoption Files. Find her on Twitter @AndeStanley1.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Lorah GeraldMy hand strokes the smooth white fur of the rug I am lying on. I move my hand slowly along it. It’s soft and soothing. I rub my face into the fur. My fingers dig into it and pull it close. It calms me and triggers Oxytocin—a hormone associated with pleasurable feelings—to be released by the pituitary gland. My breathing becomes slow and regular. The pain I’m feeling slowly subsides. I start regulating the mental turmoil in my mind. I draw on a memory of when I was happy. The sensation of the fur on my skin reminds me of the love I felt for my dog Brizzie. She was my everything. I spent as much time as I could with her, and I’d miss her when I was working or on vacation. I loved that dog with all of my heart. When she passed, my world crumbled.

I bought this rug to remember how I felt when I’d stroke her fur. She was unconditional love. I could feel it when I looked into her blue eyes. She’d look up at me, the world would fall away, and it would be just us. Our walks together were my happy place. Our connection was pure and uncomplicated. I felt she understood me; she could sense my pain and would come to my side. The love she gave flowed from her heart without pause. When she passed, I could still feel her beside me. Blump, blump, blump she would run up the stairs. I can still hear it. Her movement, her fur, her breath were all still alive in my thoughts but I could no longer reach out to touch her. I wanted to feel her again. I felt like a part of me died when she did.

As an adoptee, I’ve always felt closer to animals than humans. My childhood home was a farmhouse that was more than 100 hundred years old. My backyard had a barbed wire fence separating us from the farm behind it. The cows, horses, and ponies would lean their heads over the fence to eat grass out of the yard. Sometimes I’d gather vegetable scraps or handfuls of grass and hold out my hand to feed them. Their noses moved back and forth in my hand as they chewed the treat I held. They felt soft, like a rabbit’s ear. For a special treat, I asked my adoptive parents to buy sugar cubes for me to give to the horses. I’d slowly walk over to them and touch them, my hand softly stroking their hair. I looked into their gaze. Once I felt trust between us, I’d go to their side of the fence and play in their field. After years, I felt like we were friends. One day, I was told not to go into their field anymore. I understand then that the adults wanted to keep me safe, but it was devastating. I felt as if my friends had been taken away. I agreed to the rules but went into the field anyway when no one was looking. I’d already been taken away from my family, and I wasn’t going to let anyone take away my friends.

Being adopted, it was easier for me to have animals as friends. I loved the feeling of their fur, and I understand now that I was self-regulating my emotions when I petted them. I felt they loved me without complications. They helped heal my hidden pain. I loved all the animals and wanted to take care of them. Growing up, my menagerie consisted of cats, dogs, parakeets, fish, and turtles. My adoptive parents allowed one of my cats to have kittens so I could watch how birth happens. I thought it was gross but I loved those three kittens so much. One was white with a couple of gray spots. The others were tabby cats, one grey and one orange-striped. I was sad that we had to find them homes when they were old enough to be given away. It confused me. I knew my adoptive parents didn’t wait that long to get me. Was I given away too soon? I didn’t want to give them away. I felt heartbroken. It made me think about how I was given away. I knew my adoptive parents never talked to my birth mother. I wanted to know where the kittens were going. Why did my birth mother not ask who was taking me? I cared what was going to happen to my kittens. Why didn’t my birth mother care what happened to me?

Now I sit with my white fur rug, petting it and soothing myself. I remind myself that I am loved and I am worthy. The pain of being given away doesn’t go away. We learn to adapt to it.Lorah Gerald—adoptee, writer, intuitive, Kundalini yoga Instructor, reiki master and ordained minister—writes memoir, inspirational, educational, and opinion pieces and blogs on her website, LorahGerald.com, and as @theadoptedchameleon on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. She hopes to help others, adopted or not, heal their trauma by sharing her lived experiences as an adoptee, educating about breath work and energy healing, and using her natural intuitive abilities.

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By David Sanchez BrownI was not the dream son my adoptive parents envisioned I’d be. I was a clumsy, overweight kid with Coke-bottle thick glasses and learning disabilities who couldn’t seem to do anything right—couldn’t even throw a ball. Father-son relationships can be challenging enough in biological families, but I learned early that they’re even more complex for an adopted son.

I was adopted in 1956, but my adoption was a lifelong event. It was a closed adoption, meaning that all genetic connections were severed when a new birth certificate was issued. This separation from my birthmother was the first trauma I experienced, and it influenced every aspect of my life. It diminished my self-esteem, disrupted my identity, and left me unable to form secure and satisfactory attachments.

My adoptive parents made a crucial mistake in waiting until I was eight to tell me I was adopted. I have no idea why they waited so long. I had already established a strong bond with my them, and it confused and shattered me. When I said, “You’re not my real mother, then,” my mother’s face contorted. She looked possessed when she came at me and screamed in my face, “How dare you to question my motherhood, you selfish boy.” My father just stood there and let her rage. It took a moment, but the damage was permanent. I never trusted her after that. Not only had I lost my mother at birth, but now I had a mother who didn’t love or like me.

I’d bonded with my dad early on, but after the adoption talk, my relationship with him, too, changed. I had a younger brother, also adopted, and a younger sister—my parent’s biological child—but since I was the oldest son, there was more pressure on me. I was expected to be of blue-ribbon caliber. He forced me to play catch with him and he had no patience. “Pay attention and keep your eye on the ball,” he’d holler. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate, I always dropped the ball. When he and the kids on the block called me Charlie Brown, it stung.

My efforts to understand geometry were equally dismal. Late nights at the kitchen table with my dad doing homework, we were both stressed. He’d throw back another shot of Cutty Sark whiskey, yelling “pay attention” and cuffing my ears. I’d get debilitating stomach aches. I still hold those memories in my body, especially in my hunched shoulders. I felt broken and internalized the shame of not being enough for my dad.

An alcoholic with a violent temper, my dad was as unsafe as my mother was hot and cold emotionally. He would often say that how I turned out would reflect on him; I had to be perfect, and he was an unrelenting perfectionist. He needed me to be an extension of him, but  I couldn’t. I was the antithesis of him. Perhaps he felt I would become like him as if by osmosis.

It pained me that I couldn’t be more like my dad, but I couldn’t; I was another dad’s son. The more he pushed me, the more I shut down and retreated into my inner world of remote islands.

I didn’t look or act like anyone else in the family. I stuck out like a sore thumb and I became the family scapegoat. The more withdrawn I grew, the more my father would verbally and physically abuse me, especially after he’d been drinking. I reacted by dissociating, which only accelerated in my mid-teens. Alcohol became a way to numb my feelings, and later I’d rely on prescription drugs like Xanax. I stayed that hurt kid most of my life, and it prevented me from being an adult. Now I know dissociation was a trauma response.

When I finally left home, I was an empty shell—no identity, no personality. I didn’t know how to take care of myself and I drifted. My life up until then had been all about surviving from one day to the next. I believed I only deserved dysfunctional, toxic relationships, including those in work environments. But I never connected my feelings about myself with having been adopted. I thought I was a failure and unworthy of unconditional love.

In September 2006, while I was visiting my mother, she casually handed me my adoption documents. The first page contained the court decree. It stated that David Lee Carroll would now be known as David Raymond Brown. The shock of that news was a gut punch, and I threw up. I joined an adoption registry at adoption.com, but received no response. I didn’t aggressively search for my birth parents, and although DNA testing became available in 2012, I didn’t test. I was afraid to find birth family. I was afraid I wouldn’t be enough and that they, too, would be disappointed in me or might reject me—a secondary rejection.

But then I read Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love”—in which she discovers after taking a DNA test that her dad wasn’t her biological father and she searches for and finds the man who was. I’d always felt incomplete, so I put aside my fears of rejection and took a risk. I took an AncestryDNA test, but I didn’t consider the emotional impact of what I might find.

On July 27, 2019, while I was on the treadmill at the gym, I got a text from Ancestry DNA. My results were ready to view online. I got dizzy and almost fell; I hit the emergency stop cord and sat down. I had a first cousin match and I messaged her immediately. A couple of minutes later, she responded. There would be many phone calls and trading of pictures before I realized I’d struck gold. I was in a state of shock, and seeing pictures of my bio father I got the whole meaning of genetic mirroring for the first time. I could see myself in him, a genetic connection. But I didn’t know for sure if he was my father. My paternal first cousin put me in touch with someone I’d later learn is my half-sister, who agreed to take a DNA test. And five weeks later, Ancestry confirmed that we shared the same father. I also learned I have two other sisters. It was overwhelming; I had to walk away for a few weeks. I felt like I was coming apart at the seams.

So, who was this man? Who was my bio father, and was I like him? Did I have his traits?

As I came to know more about my paternal family, I discovered a history of addiction and mental health issues. Learning about this medical history gave me insight into my struggles. Knowing about it sooner might have saved me a lot of wear and tear.

I also learned my biological father was a fraternity party boy with a reputation for being a jokester in front of an audience. But he often was the butt of the jokes, which was painful to learn because I, too, had been laughed at when I thought I was the life of the party. My sister gave me a photograph of him wearing fluorescent orange shorts and holding a beach umbrella; I couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t what I wanted to remember and it was an unpleasant reminder of all the embarrassing pictures of me.

I also learned my biological father had been physically abusive toward one of my sisters, which made me physically sick. It hit a nerve because it reminded me of my painful past. I don’t think any of my sisters fully recovered, and I am only now able to live free of the traumatic memories of growing up.

Over the past two years, learning about my origins and my genetic inheritance has helped ground me. It’s been painful finding the truth, but I am no longer that hurt boy. I am the cycle breaker. I’m grateful I didn’t have children. I might have passed down the generational trauma. I couldn’t risk anyone else’s life. Honestly, I was hoping my bio father would be more, and maybe that’s like my adoptive dad wanting me to be more. I think all these desires were unrealistic.

I carry my ancestors inside me. I bear my biological father’s genes and the imprint of my adoptive father’s abuse and disappointment. But I am not either of my fathers. I am my own man.David Sanchez Brown is retired and living in San Jose, CA, with his partner. In 2019, he created a blog, My Refocused Life Adopted, to document his adoptee journey to find his lost identity. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to read about his journey.Severance 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.

On Venmo: @David-Brown-0516BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Cindy FlemingGrowing up as an adoptee, I frequently fielded questions from friends and strangers alike. “Do you know who your real mother is?” “Do you think you look like your parents?” “What [ethnicity] are you?” The first two questions were easy to answer: My mother is my real mother. No, I don’t look like either of them. But the third question hounded me my whole life. It speaks to a universal quest to identify with a group. And it speaks to the need of others to figure out who we are. For an adoptee, another question swirls around in the mix: Are we valid?

On one hand, our identity is who we believe we are, and on the other it’s who others believe us to be. In essence, the identity question is two-part: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who do you think I am?’ Adopted or not, we work to reconcile our personal vision of who we are versus who others believe we are. Yet when you’re adopted, there’s an added layer. For me, and I imagine for many adoptees, there’s a struggle to answer the question ‘Who are you?’ When others challenge our identity because of our adoption status, it’s difficult enough; but it’s further complicated by the fact that we have incomplete information about our genetic roots and, therefore, we can’t answer. And even when we get that information, we’re still left wondering how others view us.

I was adopted at birth and didn’t know my birth ethnicity until I was an adult. Of course, I had the ethnicity of my adoptive family, but even that was muddled. Muddled, in part, because my parents were somewhat non-traditional in the way they raised me—without strong traditions, based on ethnicity or religion. My parents were raised Jewish, but did not consider themselves religiously Jewish. My mother explained that while we were not religiously Jewish, we were “ethnically Jewish.” What does that mean exactly? I love brisket and knishes. I know what a seder is (a Baptist friend corrected me on a few details). I picked up some Yiddish words listening to conversations between my grandmother and her friends. But does that make me Jewish? From a religious standpoint, it does not. In fact, according to Jewish law, adoption alone doesn’t make you the religion of your adoptive mother. As an adult I learned that my birth mother is Protestant, and children born to non-Jews and adopted by Jewish parents must go through rituals of conversion before they are considered Jewish. I did not.

Inasmuch as being Jewish could be part of my identity—religious or ethnic, I didn’t need to wait until adulthood to know I wasn’t a real Jew. This was established by some of my relatives. Jewish preteens typically prepare for a bar- or bat-mitzvah to be welcomed into the adult Jewish world. When I was about 11, I overheard a relative question another as to why I wasn’t preparing. The answer dismissed me—and my entry into the Jewish adult world—with but one sentence, “She’s not a real Jew.” I remember feeling like an imposter. From then on, despite my mother telling us that we were “ethnically” Jewish, I felt increasingly detached, especially around holiday gatherings. Years later, my non-Jewish status was confirmed by my own mother! I had received a threatening letter from an anti-Semitic group, and before forwarding it to the Southern Poverty Law Center, I showed it to my mother. She waved it away, saying what I’d already heard—“but you’re not really Jewish.”

So, if I can’t claim a Jewish identity— ethnic or religious—then by the same logic, I can’t claim my grandparents’ Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Austrian ethnic backgrounds either. Back to the drawing board.

No doubt, adoptees have all sorts of reasons for discovering their birth or genetic backgrounds. I actually don’t know what compelled me to seek my birth certificate or to make contact with my birth mother. Even though I’d struggled as a kid to fit in as Jewish, it didn’t occur to me at the time to search for any other ethnic identity. It wasn’t until I was a new mom that I started giving real thought to my birth story. When I requested my records from Maine, I spent several years contemplating whether to write to the woman who brought me into this world. Eventually I did. I projected her need to know about the baby she’d given up, basing that assumption only on my own feelings toward my children—trying to imagine how a woman could part with her child. I thought perhaps she might want to know that I’d had a good life. Or perhaps wondered if she’d want a relationship with me. She did not. But another motivation for my search was to learn of an ethnic identity that I could claim as part of my own. When my birth mother declined contact, I felt like she had denied me a bit of that ethnic identity.

My need to discover more details about my genetic identity waxed and waned after the initial contact with my birth family. Then something clicked. I’m not sure whether it was because the Census questioned my response to the ethnicity question (it changed my response ‘American’ to ‘refused to answer’) or if curiosity finally got the better of me. I ordered a kit from AncestryDNA and within weeks had a breakdown of my genetic heritage.

So what have I done with these results? Besides connecting with half-siblings I never knew I had (that’s another story), I’ve had fun exploring the traditions and places where my DNA originated. At Christmas, I baked and cooked my way through the traditional foods of my genetic ancestors. And I’m hoping to visit or re-visit the countries represented by my DNA. And yet, despite doing these things, I’m still left wondering, does any of it give me a true ethnic identity? Does baking beautiful lussekatter make me Swedish? Does mulling a warm glühwein make me German? When I step off the plane in Scotland, will they recognize their native daughter? Will I feel a part of these places or these people? Or will I still be an imposter?

In our melting pot country, we place so much emphasis on our ethnic heritage: We’re not American, but Irish-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American. Even the Census forces you to record some ethnicity other than American. When you’re adopted, however, it’s complicated. I sometimes wonder why it’s important, but I know that it is. We want to belong. We want to know where we came from. No matter how grounded we are, we yearn to have connections to others. But when you’re adopted these connections can feel tenuous. And I, for one, am still left asking, “Who am I?” and “Who do you think I am?”Fleming lives in New Hampshire, where she’s a writer. She’s known all her life that she’s an adoptee, but only recently embarked on a journey of discovery. Through searching and genetic testing, she’s connected with new family members, and in joining the adoption conversation has found new opportunities for personal growth and reflection. You can connect with her via Twitter @cidkfleming.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Candace CahillFor years I kept his blue baby blanket in the bottom right-hand drawer of my dresser.

I stole it from the hospital.

I remember lifting it to my face and noting the sharp odor of sour milk mingled with the intoxicating scent of baby. Without a thought, I slipped the soft, waffle-like material into my brown paper sack.

When I got home, alone and hollowed out, I curled into a fetal position with the blanket bunched up like a pillow and cried.

I refused to wash it, hoping to hold on to what little remained.

In fragile moments, those times I couldn’t pretend anymore, I’d pull it out to hide my face and collect my tears. When the storm passed, I’d fold and tuck it away, careful to nestle his first pacifier and hospital identification bracelet, the one with the name I gave him on it, into the center, like eggs in a nest.

Now, thirty years later, that blanket cradles the other keepsakes I have of him. Pages of handwritten updates from his early life. A collection of school pictures and snapshots from vacations and holiday parties with his adopted family. A construction paper daisy chain. And now, his funeral program and a favorite stuffed animal, Scrappy, handed over by his adopted dad as an offering of solidarity.

Over the years, the blanket faded from baby-blue to the color of glacial ice, and my tears washed away his scent.

All that remains is the stale smell of sadness.

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