Essays, Fiction, Poetry

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

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

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

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

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By Bruno Giles

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

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

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

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

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

But over the next few months, my foster mother and I connected both over the phone and through the mail. Since she was the cousin of my birth mother, she knew her very well. I peppered her with questions about my birth mother, my birth father, what happened, and why. I was focused on one thing only, getting all the information I could on my birth mother before my foster mother disappeared again. She politely answered all the questions I threw at her but unfortunately didn’t know many of the answers to them.

Then, during the moments of silence over the phone, she would slowly tell me bits and pieces of what she did know, which was the time we spent together, none of which I remembered. Slowly, over the next few months, the missing part of my life began to emerge. She explained that after I was left in the maturity ward for six weeks, she and her family took me into their home, even recalling the exact date. She said I became their little sunshine and was able to spend the first period of my life with them, surrounded by lots of love. She said it was a terrible day when the time came and they had to let me go. She compared it to the death of her husband many years later. She said back then, 50 years ago, she felt it would be better for me to be raised by parents of the same color and she felt very concerned about this, and this is how and why I came to my new parents in America.

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

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

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

By Sarah Reinhardt

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


For the next few seconds I was silent and motionless before I jumped into action, trying to remove my arm from the grip of his mouth. Finally one of the two women with whom he’d been walking was able to get him off and away from me.
 
He was a 12-year-old autistic boy I’d find out, though due to his stature I’d have guessed him to be older. Since no one knew what to do—including the young employees standing around looking shell-shocked—I took the lead.


“Please get me some ice,” I said to the nearest employee. And I told the women, who were also shell-shocked—his mother and aunt—to go outside where the boy would feel safe. His mother told me he was easily over-stimulated, and neon lights and crowds were a couple of his triggers. I’d simply been the unwitting moving target.
 
It didn’t occur to anyone to get their phone number, help them out of the store, or help me. No one on the staff seemed older than 20, and the manager was on break. So it was up to me to find the nearest Urgent Care and get a tetanus shot.
 
After the doctor released me (“human bites can be more dangerous than animal bites!”), I went home and recounted the story to my friends, who’d all been calling to check on me after I’d returned from college drop-off.
 
“I’m fine… but you won’t believe what happened to me today!” I’d respond to everyone who called. It was just the chaos I needed to distract me from what I’d soon discover to be the most painful and grief-stricken time of my life.
 
“You may want to take a look at what’s going on with you—it’s very possible you drew that energy in,” my friend Jainee said, regarding the bite. “Sadness, when not in check, can attract dark entities.”
 
I heard her. The truth was, I was devastated. I’d never known this kind of loss, like a piece of me was missing—my purpose suddenly gone. I had no idea how empty I’d actually feel. I hadn’t prepared myself for what it would mean to send my son off to school.


Sure, intellectually I’d known it was coming. In fact, I’d encouraged him to apply to out-of-state schools because he could “always come home,” but I hadn’t truly emotionally prepared for the actual leaving piece of it. The unslept in bed that took my breath away the morning after I got home. Seeing the lone t-shirt that hadn’t been packed on the floor of his closet. Not hearing Spotify during his long showers or staying up until he was home from a night out with his friends, waiting to start a new show until he had a night free, or any of the myriad things that made up our routine.
 
His going had been, until this moment, just a concept—part of the plan when you have kids, or a kid, in my case. They graduate high school and they go to college—or at least that’s what I understood. And as other parents have throughout the course of history, I wanted better for my son in every area of his life—a better foundation of love and self-worth than I had, better opportunities than I had, better exposure to whatever it was he expressed interest in. 

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By Marci Purcell

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

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

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

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By Gwen Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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By Vanessa Nolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Michelle Talsma Everson

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

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

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

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

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By Akara Skye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Michelle Hensley

Sometimes…

She says in her tiny voice

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

But there is no one to hear her.

Sometimes …

She says in her bit bigger voice

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

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

Sometimes….

She starts again.

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

What if I…?

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

SOMETIMES….

She speaks out, and her voice is steady.

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

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

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

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

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

THIS IS THE VOICE SHE SPEAKS WITH NOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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By Louise Browne

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

By Shannon Quist

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

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

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

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

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

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By Caitlin Jiao Alexander

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”

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

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

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By Hannah Andrews

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

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

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

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

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

But, I’ve matured.

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

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

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

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

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By Gwen Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Mary O’Reilly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Michelle Tullier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kathleen Shea Kirstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda knew it was her only chance. If it didn’t work, she’d have to face something she feared more than anything else. Her daddy.

It was June 1963. She was 16 years old and had found out two weeks earlier she was pregnant. But tonight she was on a first date with an Iowa hayseed stationed at the Air Force base in her hometown, Blytheville, Arkansas. Dave was 19 and had his own car. A bright red 1960 Plymouth Fury that had a goddamn record player in it. She couldn’t believe it.

He wasn’t driving his own car. Instead, his best friend, Joe, drove them on their double date. Linda and Dave were in the back seat, Joe and his date, Peggy, Linda’s cousin, were in the front.

Later in the evening, Joe and Peggy were making out. But then again, so were Linda and Dave. But Linda couldn’t get over the fact that they were in the back seat of his own car.

“I just don’t get it,” she whispered as she pulled her face away from his. “If it’s your car, why’s he driving?”

“Heck, I don’t know. He asked me if he could drive and I let him. What’s the big deal? There’s more room in the back seat.” He laughed and kissed her and guided her back onto the red leather seats with white trim.

It really bothered Linda. Why would a man let another man drive his bad ass car? She looked at him as Joe put another record on—“Baby It’s You” by The Shirelles. She settled back into his arms. Then things really got hot and heavy. He tried to unbutton her soft white blouse but he couldn’t quite manage with one hand, so she helped, slightly exasperated. When his hand slid up her skirt, up to her thigh, she didn’t stop him. Just for a second.

“Dave, honey, we need to go for a walk.”

“But, what?”

“Listen to me, I need to tell you something.”

When she opened the door, the light came on, blinding everyone.

“What the hell you guys doing back there?” Joe hollered.

“Don’t look,” Peggy yelled.

Of course that made everyone look as she covered her bare breasts with both arms.

“Y’all just go back to doing whatever y’all was doing. We’re just going for a walk.”

“At a drive-in?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, at a drive-in. Come on Dave,” Linda said, yanking his arm and pulling him out of the back seat of his own damn car.

“I just gotta tell you something before we go any further,” Linda said as they sat on the bench underneath the projector beam just outside the concession stand. They’d been making out again but she pushed him away.

“Alright, tell me already.”

“Well, I ain’t told no one this yet. No one knows. Well except for—uh never mind.” She started crying.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“I can’t. I just can’t. You’ll hate me.”

“How could I hate you, we just met yesterday?”

“You promise you won’t hate me? Or think I’m horrible?”

“Promise.”

“Well, I’m pregnant.”

“Whoa, really? Are you married?”

“No, I ain’t married. I’m only 16. See, I knew you’d hate me.” And she cried some more.

Eventually, she told him the whole story. This older man down the street invited her over when his wife was out of town. He didn’t tell her about the wife being out of town until after she arrived and after she drank her first beer. One thing led to another, and now she was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Her dad was going to kill her. And probably the neighbor too.

“Well, he’s gonna have to marry you.” Dave said.

By Lisa Franklin

Maybe she was at the stove, stewing plums in a pot, the sweet fruit scenting the kitchen, Mason jars lined up on the table awaiting the warm jam. The boys were at school, her husband at work, the only peace she ever got. They weren’t home to hear the shriek of metal, to see her lift her head or watch her pull back the curtain or answer the door to the stranger.

Maybe the accident had already happened, maybe she was still shaken when she saw him standing there as if he already owned her. His dark skin, his suit, his tie. So different from her husband with his hard hat and coveralls. What was he selling? Someone was always knocking to offer something: vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias. No, it was nothing she could touch or hold.

They sat, he on the couch, the middle cushion, she in the chair across from him. She remembers this now, months later, as her hand cups her belly. She was aware then of her thighs beneath her skirt and the angle of her legs, of how her feet rested in her high heels. But, no, she was merely a woman in pedal pushers and sneakers. It was how he looked at her that made her feel as if she wore a strand of pearls at her neck, perfume in the soft spot pulsing at the base of her throat.

She watched his smooth hands as he set the briefcase on his knees, heard the latches snap open. She felt herself sinking beneath the soft brown puddle of his gaze, into the tight embrace of her chair. She had never seen anyone with such beautiful skin, the color of polished burl.

“Can I get you something? Water? Coffee?”

He did not look up from his papers. He did not smile. Or maybe he did, but only with one corner of his mouth. “No. Thank you. I have what I need.”

His voice, deep and unfamiliar, vibrated through her bones.

She had taken him away from his spiel, he was annoyed. She felt scolded. He cleared his throat, adjusted the knot in his tie, started again, his words like waves pounding, pouring over her, one and then the next. She heard the sound but not the meaning. She understood he wanted something from her.

He made a motion toward her, toward the rug.