Essays, Fiction, Poetry

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.

Click on image to read more.

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.
Click image to read more.

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.
Click image to continue reading.

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.

By Adam E.L. Anthony

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

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

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

By Michelle Talsma Everson

“It has been an honor to raise you…”

She met me when I was 21 and broken. Now, a lifetime later, I’m 36, and she’s sitting across from me at Disneyland, pausing to make sure I understood that.

Also a mom, I understand the honor that comes with motherhood. Still very much broken but actively seeking healing now, I don’t comprehend how that honor can be applied to me. It’s like I understand it theoretically, but my heart is working on accepting it. One day at a time.

I am an NPE (non-parent expected). The dad who raised me isn’t my biological dad, and the man who is isn’t interested in taking up space in that realm. It’s like someone being raised from the dead and dying again. Not many people mourn the same relationship twice.

Even before I knew I was an NPE, I was the daughter of alcoholics, addicts, two people battling undiagnosed mental illnesses. They died when I was 22 and 24. I had their grandson in between. I was never loved how a child should be loved. Love is conditional, of course, dependent on how you act, who you pretend to be, and the moment itself. My parents tried—likely doing the best they could with the tools they had—but betrayal, abuse, and diagnoses of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more tell a story that’s not pleasant to hear. “Sometimes we are the casualty in someone else’s battles against themselves” is my favorite quote from the internet.

“It has been an honor to raise you…”

She met me when I was 21 and broken. Now, a lifetime later, I’m 36, and she’s sitting across from me at Disneyland, pausing to make sure I understood that.

I refer to her as my bonus mom in my narratives. Mother-in-law no longer fits, and the guilt from that is something I battle. I want to apologize to her that her son and I couldn’t make a marriage work. I want to ask her forgiveness for me being so much. So much trauma. So much talking. So much anxiety. So. Much. Everything.

Instead, she simply says, “I love you for you, unconditionally.”

The thought floors me.

I love my own son unconditionally. There’s nothing he could do that would change that. So, in theory I understand, but my heart has a hard time believing that could be applied to me.

I often think of my own parents, dead now nearly 14 and 12 years, and I wonder if they’d still love me knowing that I found out about a long-held secret and—to heal—I share it with the world. I know they wouldn’t approve of how I live my life in that aspect and so many others. I hope they’d still be honored to have raised me. I’m not so sure.

But my bonus mom shows it through action, not just words. We have boundaries, but she knows my secrets, she includes me, she stands in the grey between being my ex’s mom but also being my friend, advocate, and bonus mom. She encourages us to be the best people we can be and to do what’s best for her grandson. Beyond that, she simply holds space and is there when we need her. She doesn’t play favorites between her son and me. It’s a balance not many manage.

By Dawn Post
Aiden’s* father pushes him to the attorney representing NYC’s governing child protective services agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (“ACS”), and a caseworker for the agency that’s been assigned the care and responsibility of Aiden and his siblings. “Fine, if you aren’t going to let me have him then you take him,” he yells and storms out of the courtroom. When I reach 7-year-old Aiden, he’s huddled in a corner crying and screaming. Hand in hand, we desperately search the courthouse for Aiden’s father, as this was not, in fact, a case where Aiden has been removed from his father due to allegations of abuse or neglect. Rather, his father has the misfortune of simply being a parent who no longer lives in NYC, and ACS refuses to let Aiden cross state lines to live with him. So, Aiden remains in stranger foster care, and his father travels from South Carolina for visits and court appearances when he is financially able to do so.

Since the early 1960s, the process of transferring children who are involved in the child welfare system has been governed by the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), a uniform state law adopted by each state. The ICPC has been subject to much criticism. Any family law practitioner can tell you that the ICPC can take months and even years. I worked on another case which involved a custodial parent in Florida. Her children were placed in foster care in NYC after their grandmother was charged with abuse while they were on vacation with her. Despite getting an order for a Regulation 7 ICPC, which should take 30 days to completion, it took nine months because it had to be reinitiated each time one step in the process and timeline was missed. As soon as the word ICPC is voiced in a conference or courtroom, everyone has a visceral reaction, frequently one of trepidation. Because while the ICPC creeps along, children languish in foster care, usually with strangers, even when there are family members, and even when they have parents like Aiden’s, who are eager and able to care for them. And the state that stirs the most dread because of lengthy inexplicable delays, ironically, is one that New York shares a bridge and tunnel with, New Jersey. (Continues)

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 saw a baby bird on my walk recently: long legs, tiny body, fluffy feathers, and barely moving. It had fallen from its nest on the sidewalk, frantically chirping for its mother. I watched it for some time. As I bent down to pick it up and put it to safety, it hopped closer to the tree’s edge, hiding in the monkey grass. The mother bird finally chirped back, calling out to her baby. I left it alone since she knew where it was, safe in the monkey grass, camouflaged from predators.

My oldest child, Noah, just started sixth grade, which is middle school where we live. At the prospect of this occasion, I have had myriad of emotions since the beginning of this year. I could not name what it was, but now I know: it is fear. I am scared for Noah, much like the mama bird who was chirping for her baby, hoping it was close by and away from danger. Noah’s strong, extroverted personality will not allow him to stay hidden.

Middle school scarred me, as it does with most. The taunts and ridicule for being an adopted Korean made my middle school experience hell with no fire. I stuck out in my mostly White middle school in Alabama with no chance to blend in, although that is what I desperately wanted.

Noah and I approach life in the same way. However, whereas I was completely unprepared for middle school,  Noah was ready for sixth grade and has been for the past couple of years. Even through the COVID-19 pandemic school years, he showed signs that he was prepared academically and mentally for whatever challenges middle school would bring. For instance, Noah reads on a Lexile Level for college and career readiness and is also learning Spanish and Korean. In 1996, I was not ready for middle school, and I am the one who is not

ready now.

With many of my parental moments, there is a mix of joy and sorrow. Joy because Noah has made it to 11 in one piece, and sorrow because my circle of influence is much smaller than it used to be. I am losing him bit by bit with each passing day as he forms his own sense of self and the person he is growing to be.

Parenting in general is a challenging adventure. Parenting as an adoptee brings another layer of complexity that I did not foresee as a newlywed dreaming of the prospect of motherhood. I did not realize that many of the struggles I faced as a child, such as identity and belonging, would be issues my own children would face too but in different ways.

I am not one of those mothers who cries with each achievement: cutting teeth, crawling, toddling, walking, talking, potty training, starting preschool or elementary school. I was happy to put each of these occasions behind me because I knew once achieved, something new would take its place. But Noah starting middle school has made me cry multiple times, which has surprised me.

Sadly, I do not have a mother, birth or adoptive, to call and ask, Is this reaction normal? To feel this scared? To feel this ill equipped? Melancholy mixed with a side of bittersweet makes me wonder if my birth mother ever longed to see what I have accomplished. Or does she view me as a forever baby trapped in 1985? Was there a “before” time, before I was a problem or a burden, and an “after” time when I was no longer there that chronicles her life and keeps her trapped too?

I think about you almost daily, but it doesn’t sting as much anymore. I am so grateful for that because I don’t think that people are meant to hold onto that much pain for too long.

“You are your father’s daughter…” the Disney song played on my radio. Yes—yes, I am. The man who raised me will always be my dad. I cling to my maiden name like it’s made out of gold. Pictures. Stories. Tattoos. I cling to them all.

“You can sit in the suck while still looking forward to the future.” My therapist chirps and I wrote it on my phone notes. For once we’re not talking just about you. The passing of time does help.

Still, those same phone notes have a list of things I want from you—bare minimum bullet points that I hold close to my chest. When I mention them—those closest to me re-affirming, “No, it’s not stupid to want that.”—that helps. Each small acknowledgment helps.

You’re the part of my story that almost broke me. The part only those closest to me know. However I came into this world, half of my genes are yours. Still, I only whisper your name to those I trust wouldn’t “out” you. (I am so scared to out you.)

I apparently have your nose and your hustle. I, too, can work a room and make strangers into friends. I’m hurt. I’m embarrassed and self-conscious (though I did nothing wrong). I’d never expect anyone to replace my dad, but to know you exist and that your life won’t change because I also exist is a pain I cannot explain. A friend put into words what I couldn’t: “You expected his life to change too.” Yes, unmet expectations perhaps hurt the most.

I could corner you, rant and rave and ask about my list. Or calmly “make” you admit X, Y and Z. But I will not force myself into your life (no matter how much I want to). The person who is coming to rescue me is me. (Which is so hard to tell my inner child who apparently was still waiting for someone to come.)

And everyone, all well-meaning, have their opinions on what I should do or how I should act.

But they’re not the ones whose world crashed, and they weren’t left putting the pieces back together. They’re not the ones whose hearts break at nearly 1 a.m. in the bathroom, tears falling, wanting to scream into the ether that, “It’s not fucking fair.”

 Some days I’m glad it happened. Other days I wish it never did. Always I don’t understand how you could see photos of my growing boy (genetically, your grandson) and not want to rush to know him. If roles were reversed, I’d have been on the first flight.

As time goes on though, so many wonderful people restore my faith in humanity.

NPE: Non-Paternal Event 

(noun) A genealogical term used to describe the disconnect that occurs in familial lineage when a person, as an adult, discovers at least one parent is not biologically related.

(noun) a qualifying term used by people who have experienced the unexpected discovery of a genealogical disconnect between themselves and at least one parent.As in: “When I found out my parents used a sperm donor, I realized I am an NPE.” 

MPE: Misattributed Parentage Event 

A social term used to describe the myriad DNA-discoveries that can occur, including Late-Disocvery Adoption, Donor Conception, and Non-Paternal Event. As in: “I found out that as a teenagerI had fathered a childr; when this person reached out to me, I realized I am a part of the MPE community.” 

Genetic Mirroring

A term or phrase used to describe the powerful experience of seeing similar physical traits in a relative. “Without genetic mirroring, I’ll never understand where my green eyes came from.” 

Facebook: 

(noun) Modern society’s downfall. See also ‘social media,” “Twitter,” “Instagram,” “Discord.”

It was a lovely photo, an innocuous post. A group of dark-haired adults sitting around a table, smiling at the camera, golden hour sunset glowing from a side door. Colorful Fiesta pottery suggests a delicious meal is imminent. Wood side-paneling screams “Montana cabin,” and I swear there are golden-retriever puppies asleep on the floor. 

“It’s a truly amazing feeling when I can see all my siblings at one time again. The nostalgia hits hard and the old and new memories made are truly a blessing.” 

For a split-second, it is no big deal. I scroll social media quickly these days, tired of its mundanity, confused by the chaos, embarrassed to be addicted to it anyway. I stop at this one, caught off guard by the golden hues. My heart leaps into my throat, and my breath quickens. I feel angry and sad at the same time. I think I am being ridiculous and try to move along to more important posts like parenting memes and Tik-Tok tips. But my thumb is out of my control, bringing the handsome family back to me again and again. 

They are my handsome family; I was not invited to dinner. 

At the end of each Wednesday evening writing class, the instructor gives us a prompt to write on for the following week. She instructs us to write for 20 minutes and limit editing. We need to have the piece ready to read at the next class gathering. The last prompt was to write about “a lie I told.” I’ve never been good at telling a lie, so this was a hard assignment. When I was a kid, I got caught whenever I told even a little white lie. There wasn’t any point in lying, so I stopped. It took me a few days after getting the assignment to remember a lie I had told.

I needed a passport because I was planning to go to Cancun, Mexico in September 2005.  I applied and later received a letter in the mail saying my application was denied because I hadn’t submitted documentation to explain why my birth certificate was filed 14 months after my birth. The first call I made was to my mother to tell her my passport had been denied and ask if she knew why my birth certificate was filed so long after my birth. She said it must have been a clerical error and hung up. I called the town clerk’s office in the state where I’d been born. The person who took my call couldn’t help and advised me to contact the probate court. I called the court and was told to write a letter to the judge stating dates of the trip to Mexico, including the passport application denial and the reason for the denial. I was hoping the court could actually find the documentation explaining that reason. I wrote and mailed the letter the next day

After this experience, I began to wonder if I was adopted, so I left some messages on adoption reunion boards with basic information, such as the year and location of my birth, hoping to connect with someone who might have some information about me. At that point, I was willing to try anything. I just wanted an answer to this mystery. I’d mentioned to my family that I might take a day off from work and go sit at the Probate court to see if I could get an answer to my letter.

Then I had an idea. I’ve always gotten my medical care at the clinic in our town—the clinic where I’ve worked for years—so it occurred to me to go to the medical records department and review my chart. I spent my lunch break on August 22, 2005 reading my medical records. The first line of the last page in my chart—essentially the first page documenting my life with the Sheas—said “Adopted Baby, 4 lbs 4 oz.”  Finally, I had confirmation that I’d been adopted.

So what are we supposed to do the day after—the day after our life is upended by a call, an email, a Facebook message, or clicking on new DNA results?

Mail-away DNA kits promise adventures of discovery, mysterious and exotic cultures, and inspired histories of relatives once lost; they are instead Pandora’s boxes and, once opened, can never again be closed. My kit certainly led to discovery as promised, but not the kind seen reflected in carefully crafted and nostalgic commercials. In my case, half of my family tree, meticulously constructed over decades, lay in pieces on the floor, leaves violently stripped from limbs in a sudden storm. The father who appeared in my now fading childhood photos and forever inscribed on my birth certificate, prominently positioned on the first branch in that tree, hadn’t, I discovered, created me. His leaf was the first to fall. I numbly stared at the screen as each of my four paternal half-siblings faded entirely away. A full-sibling transformed into a half-sibling. My paternal tree was bare.

DNA tells no lies, and the truths it reveals can be shocking. Day One, Discovery Day, raises questions rather than answering them. What the hell just happened? Who is my father? How does one deal with a half-empty tree at 58 years old? How does one process a nearly sixty-year-old lie? With these and countless other questions racing in my mind, I did something counterintuitive and went to sleep, my brain pleading for time to decompress.

On day two of my non-paternal event (NPE) journey, I woke surprisingly calm and energized despite having no earthly idea what I needed to do next. I was accustomed to dealing with complex problems, but this was like no mystery I had ever tried to solve. I paused, took a deep breath, took inventory of what I had at my disposal, and was encouraged by what I found.

The abundance and quality of my DNA matches were tremendous assets. While there were no parent or sibling matches on my list, there was an individual labeled as a possible “1st cousin” who had a publicly available tree with 1000+ entries. All by itself, that was a gold mine. I also matched with several dozen second and third cousins and noted the same surname repeatedly appeared in that group. A quick cross-reference with my first cousin’s tree found that same name within his first two generations, so the odds favored I was on to something important right away. Was that my father’s name?

While I technically had a free Ancestry account, I quickly discovered that I would need to upgrade to gain access to any of the choice information I needed to fill in the many voids in my understanding, so I paid for the cheapest version offered. The resources available through this paid account were immense and much better than expected, but I hadn’t opted for the more expensive plan that provided access to old newspapers. I quickly learned that was a mistake, so I did what any other mature and law-abiding citizen would do in my situation and became a Google and social media stalker.

We were sitting in the car on the way home from school and I shared with my son how I re-discovered a childhood Bible of mine that my dad had given me, and I couldn’t wait to show him because my dad had really cool handwriting.

He replied, “I think I got my handwriting from my dad…” then we had this pause moment that comes with the reality of an NPE discovery. My dad, his grandpa, didn’t pass his cool handwriting down to him—or the color of his hair, his eyes, none of it. We found this out a little over a year ago – and it’s been a struggle for me to return to center.

But then the empathy and grace came in: “He wasn’t your genetic daddy but he taught you lots of stuff and that counts too, mama.”

Empathy for other people’s experiences is something I hope he’s gaining from this experience he’s walking with me.

Since late March 2021, no, mama hasn’t been okay—not 100%. But I’m working on it each and every day, and he sees that. People have reacted differently to this experience—and we talk about how there’s no good or bad guy—just people doing the best we can to deal with something traumatic and new.

He sees me have good days and bad days. Of course, I shield him from most of my bad days, but he knows words like “mental health” and “therapy” and “gratitude journal” and he sees me struggle but he also sees me succeed. And I get the blessing of seeing him grow and learn and absorb, and I am amazed at his self-confidence and sense of self.

I made an NPE discovery a little over a year ago and I continue to tell myself that, “The bounce back is going to be epic.”

When your whole world shatters and time and space stop making sense, you need something to hold onto as you sit in the suck and hope better days are coming.

And better days do come.

But then so do bad days.

And medium days.

The bounce back isn’t as dramatic as you picture; it’s quieter and more sustainable; comprised of hard work and clinging to sanity.

It’s small victories and painful boundaries being set by others and yourself.

It’s f-cking hard, not epic.

It looks like going to bed at a normal time after reading no less than three devotional and one prayer app.

It’s praying. So. Much. Praying.

It’s talking about the same thing repeatedly until you apologize to your friends and thank them for their continued patience.

It’s panic attacks at the idea of being social when you used to be an extrovert.

It’s a smaller, more sustainable friendship circle.

It’s breaking down multiple times because nothing goes as planned.

In a single afternoon, I experienced both sides of the non-paternity event (NPE) / biological family fence, and it all started with an unexpected phone call from a friend.

I was traveling out of state and three hours from home. Only a few minutes after I transitioned from the backroads of scenic North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains to congested I-40, I received a text from a familiar name. Because I was driving, I called back rather than texted. I knew him as both a friend and professionally from a previous vocation and didn’t find the text unusual. Although the call started with small talk, like many conversations, I perceived some nervousness and hesitancy in his tone, so I encouraged him to “just spit it out.”

He told me that he’d purchased a DNA kit as a Christmas gift for his sister, the family’s historian and amateur genealogist, and she’d discovered something unexpected in her results. The entirety of their father’s side was missing in her DNA matches. Perhaps thinking there was a mistake, she encouraged her brother, my friend, to submit his sample. He found the same results; there were no DNA matches on his dad’s side. Over months of research, she had carefully and painstakingly pieced together a picture that seemed to reveal their biological father. His sister had reached out to this person and he consented to submit a DNA test for confirmation. The results were in. My father was their biological father. My friend told me we were half-brothers.

Life doesn’t equip you for every moment, and this was one of those moments for which I was unprepared. I had no script to follow, no foundations on which to rest or react. While still weaving through increasingly heavy traffic as I slowly edged towards Asheville, I inquired about the ages of my friend and his sister. Quick mental math revealed that the older had been conceived when I was two and the younger three years later. Though my parents later divorced, they were married during the births of both of these individuals. As shocking as it was, this news somehow too comfortably aligned with the mental image I had developed about my father. My father and I were significantly misaligned in nearly every meaningful aspect of personality, temperament, demeanor, and worldview. We have been estranged for years. I chuckled out loud as I processed it all.

There was, however, a certain uneasiness that began forming in the back of my head. I had submitted a sample for DNA analysis several years earlier, primarily because of curiosity about my ethnicity. I had given the DNA matches section little attention. My father, my friend, and his sister, all closely related, should have been recently added to my match list, yet I hadn’t received a single notification from the DNA company that these new persons had been added for my review. As several direct-to-consumer DNA companies offer this kind of service, I first thought my new relatives had used a test from a company different than the one I used, but my new half-brother confirmed that they’d used the same company I had. My next thought was that I was no longer notified when matches appeared. This seemed entirely plausible as I gave very little thought to these matters. I didn’t have the company app on my phone, I had forgotten my password, and I hadn’t brought my laptop. I was several hours from home and unable to further investigate this possibility.

i.
I am sitting on a giant red rock.

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

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

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

I am 18 months old.

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

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

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

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

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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