An essay 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.

Twenty years later, in April 2022, Dad’s cousin Joanie picked me up and drove me to the old neighborhood in Dorchester that had been home to her grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts (including my grandmother), brother, and five cousins. Doyle’s Cafe had closed, but it turned out not to be a namesake anyway. My great-grandfather by that name had never even lived in Boston. He died in a mining accident in Nova Scotia when my grandmother was barely a year old—roughly the same age my father had been when he lost her. Soon after, my great-grandmother married a man who was by all accounts a good husband and adoptive father to her children—two girls and a boy. The boy, my father’s uncle, legally changed his last name when he left for World War II in case he didn’t come back. He wanted to be buried with his adoptive father’s name. This small detail, in addition to my grandmother’s new married name, explained why it took so long for my mother to find them.

In the old neighborhood, my new cousin (once-removed) Joanie showed me the house where she grew up, then the house where my grandmother had grown up, and finally the one she’d lived in with her second husband after returning from Indiana. We followed the path Joanie used to walk on her way home from elementary school—past the Italian bakery (gone now) on Dudley Street where my grandmother worked. Joanie stopped in everyday after school, knowing her Aunt Mimi would give her an anise-flavored cookie. I wondered if this might have been the happiest part of my grandmother’s day—the part she looked forward to. Because when she was done at the bakery, she went home to an abusive husband. If she tried to hide at her sister’s house, Joanie recalls that he would come and beat on their front door, demanding to know if his wife was in there. Joanie’s mother would never let him in. She remembers her Aunt Mimi disappearing into numerous glasses of white wine.

She also remembers that the Consumptive Hospital in Mattapan where my grandmother spent her final days didn’t allow children to visit for fear they would contract tuberculosis. Joanie was nearly a teenager by then, but when she joined her mother and grandmother to visit her Aunt Mimi, she could only stand outside and wave back to her at the window. And then one day, she wasn’t there.

Joanie was aware of a photograph of a smiling little boy displayed on her grandmother’s mantelpiece. She would look at it when she was a child. She knew who he was, but she didn’t know where he was or understand why he wasn’t with his mother. She’d always assumed her Aunt Mimi must have escaped a horrible situation. Karen, the cousin who’d first connected with my mother, remembers their grandmother telling her and the other younger kids that the portrait on the mantlepiece was just a cute photo she found in a catalog. But family legend had it that their grandmother said a prayer for him every day. She died in Nova Scotia at the age of 75, just a few months after my brother was born. The little boy in the photograph was 25 years old. When I texted photos of my father as an adult to Joanie and Karen, Joanie immediately recognized the smiling face from her grandmother’s mantelpiece.

I knew from a young age that my grandmother had left my father. It was relayed to me in such a matter-of-fact manner that it felt distant, the way history was taught in school at that time—all names and dates of battles with none of the emotional toll of war. I kept it in my peripheral vision until I grew up. By allowing only sidelong glances, I wouldn’t have to feel the enormity of it in my chest and in the pit of my stomach. I suspect it was normalized for Joanie, too—that it lived in the back of her mind, filed under decisions that seemed odd but that the grownups must have had logical reasons for.

Joanie had a vague notion that she might have a cousin in the vicinity when she drove through Indiana once to visit her daughter in San Jose, but she wouldn’t have known where to begin to look for him. Anyone she knew who might have had a clue was long gone. The story may have felt like a long-forgotten dream to her by then. But when Joanie, who is a mother of four and grandmother of ten, looked me in the eyes for the first time, it must have become real to her. She wondered aloud, “How can a mother leave her child?”

As Joanie and I kept in touch, I shared my memories of my father, of the cousin she never met. Even up to the end of his life, I told her, he was irreverently funny. She said he would have fit right into the family when I relayed the story of him, upon hearing my mother come home from a grocery run while he was getting bathed by a hospice nurse, exclaiming, “Oh my God, my wife’s home!”

Joanie loved hearing how well my father’s life turned out despite his losses. He was raised with the help of his paternal grandmother until she died painfully of cancer. My father was barely a teenager. My grandfather had lost a brother to meningitis at a young age, and then his own father in 1949, right around the time he had become a single father. Then, it was just the two of them—father and son. Through his grief, my grandfather remained a steadfast father, once noticing a George Orwell novel his future English major was reading and worrying about its age-appropriateness. He stayed up all night to read it. Having never gone to college himself, my grandfather was over the moon when his only child went to Notre Dame and then to law school in New York City. But I suspect he was happiest when my father returned to Indiana to settle down and start his own family.

In his quiet way, with neither billboards nor television commercials, my father slowly made a name for himself throughout Indiana. Specializing in workers’ compensation law, he saw that factory workers were taken care of financially when they were hurt on the job. His proud father remained his best friend and moral compass until the day my father buried him. Now they are buried next to each other, tended to by my mother.

The more she learned stories about my father’s and grandfather’s lives, the less Joanie was able to reconcile them with her lifelong assumption that somehow her aunt must have been a victim. Why else would she leave, she’d thought. Now she calls it an awakening. It didn’t—and shouldn’t—change her love for her Aunt Mimi, whose sadness she always felt in their interactions. But in her mind it exonerated my grandfather.

My grandfather wasn’t perfect. But what I always come back to is this. If my grandmother left because my grandfather wasn’t a good person, why wouldn’t she have taken her child with her? Even if, as is likely, she was struggling with her own demons from traumas I’ll never know, she had an abundance of family support in Boston. If it feels unnatural to imagine a mother leaving her child, it feels much more so to imagine her leaving the child in the clutches of a villain.

With her new perspective, Joanie was delighted to hear that my grandfather eventually found love again. When my mother was eight-months pregnant with me, he married the woman I knew as my grandmother—the one who knit blankets, taught me how to make a pie crust from scratch, and cared for my grandfather in his final years so lovingly that my father always insisted she added 10 years to his life. In an odd mirroring of fates, she had suffered an abusive first marriage and would gush about what a gentle and loving man my grandfather was.

When my mother retired and her interests turned to genealogy, all my father cared to know was what ever happened to his mother. My mother still feels a twinge of regret for not unearthing his family before he died. As much as I wish he could have met his cousins, who already feel like family to me, I can’t imagine that hearing his mother’s story would have given him any peace. He had the wisdom to understand the flaws in the question, “Why wouldn’t she just leave her abusive husband?” But it would have to sting to know that on some level she had chosen to live with him over being with her only child. It would have to sting to know how his mother had suffered.

I’ve felt my father’s loss deeply my entire adult life—I recently found myself bawling while reading Because of Winn Dixie to keep up with my eight-year-old. I feel for every child who has ever blamed themself for their parents’ decisions. But now that I have my own children, I feel my grandmother’s loss too. Nothing is more unbearable to me than the prospect of missing out on watching my sons grow into adults—not seeing what the world has in store for them, and they for it. Their professional successes are much less interesting to me than the hope that our small biological contributions to the world will tip the balance toward kindness, even if only by less than a billionth.

My father was kind. He didn’t pepper people with compliments or make small talk, but he listened, and he noticed everything. He had no patience for gossip. He thought deeply and saw every issue from multiple angles, which must be why I never heard him criticize anyone, including his mother, especially his mother.  Weeks before he died, he detailed his remaining three cases from his hospital bed to a trusted lawyer and old friend. He needed to know that these people would be taken care of. He didn’t want to abandon them. That his mother never knew the goodness she added to the world might be one of the most tragic losses from her short and unhappy life.

Mary O’Reilly is a science illustrator, designer, and writer in the Boston area, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and three guinea pigs. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Science Magazine, and Chemical & Engineering News, and she writes about the role of art in science in a newsletter called The Art of Basic Science at maryoreilly.substack. com. For more about Mary you can visit her website at www.oreillyscienceart.com or follow her on Twitter @oreillymk.

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. It 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.

Oddly, through the fog, there was clarity. I knew the connection of that name to my parents. I knew the connection of that name to my mother, who had always seemed particularly friendly with the father of the family. I knew, on some preconscious level, how this had come to pass. My mother would later admit to having had an extramarital affair and said she had planned to tell me on her deathbed. I couldn’t even begin to unpack the narcissism and grandiosity in that statement.

I had never, for one single moment in my life, suspected that my loving and generous “Daddy,” was not my biological father. But I knew this was not a mistake. I knew this explained what had been missing in my life even though I had never thought anything was missing. I knew this was how my life was supposed to turn out. I knew I was losing a father and gaining a father. People speak of life flashing before their eyes at the moment of death; my life flashed before my eyes at this moment of birth as a new person. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense.

I also discovered that I had been right all along: I am related to someone famous. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, renowned 18^th-century philosopher, statesman, and author of Faust, widely considered Germany’s answer to Shakespeare, is someone I can now call “Cousin Wolfie.”

I took the last bite of my turkey sandwich, closed my eyes, and waited for the fog to lift.

Michelle Tullier is the author of nine self-help books, including the Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination (Penguin, 2012) and has recently turned her focus to creative nonfiction, with the book No Finer Place in progress—a memoir of DNA secrets and finding one’s sense of self in the murky middle of the NPE experience. A graduate of Wellesley College with a PhD in counseling psychology from UCLA, she is a former university career center executive director and faculty member who taught the psychology of work. Tullier lives on an island in Maine because her goal in life is to not be hot. Find her on Twitter @Tullierauthor and reach her through www.michelletullierauthor.com.

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, 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.

Matthew Jackson is a late-discovery adoptee. A retired police officer, he lives in Omaha, NE, near his birth family, with his cat, Aiden, and an extensive collection of Star Wars props and Lego sets.

By Kathleen Shea Kirstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I know she was a loving mother?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“He’s already married, idiot,” she snapped. But he looked hurt so she continued, softer. “I’m sorry. You’re not an idiot. I’m just upset. If I’m not married, daddy’s gonna have a fit. Probably kick me out.” She cried into his chest and put her hand on his thigh. He rubbed her back and patted her head. This led to them making out, but she started crying again and pulled away.

“I’m sorry. I just gotta figure this out.” She looked out into the distance, away from the screen beyond the cars with attached speakers hanging in their windows.

When it seemed like he couldn’t handle the silent tension any longer, he said, “Well, I’ll just marry you.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Really? You’d do that for me?”

“Yeah, I can’t let you have a baby alone. I’ll raise it as my own.”

She grabbed his face and kissed him hard. Real hard. Then they went back to the car and made love in the back seat. No condom needed.

***

March, 1965

Linda placed her toddler, Cindy, into the crib, hoping she would finally take a nap. Dave was in the living room of the duplex the Air Force gave them. Sometimes she wondered if he married her just to get out of the barracks. He was asleep on the couch when she walked in.

“Dave, honey, I’m going to the PX to get some cigarettes and bread. You listen for Cindy now, okay?”

“Shoot, what time is it?” He bolted up out of his nap.

“It’s only 2. I’ll be right back. You won’t be late for your field training.”

At the PX, she needed to get two carton of cigarettes, Winstons for her and Pall Mall non-filtered for Dave. When she reached for the Winstons, her hand touched another hand. An airman who’d been reaching at the same time. He smiled at her and motioned for her to take them.

“Ladies first” he said.

“That’s a mighty big assumption you’re making.”

He laughed, and that’s when she noticed his eyes. His sky-blue eyes that sparkled and touched her somewhere deep in her soul. He had blonde hair like hers.

“Now, I ain’t used to being out funnied. Especially by someone as beautiful as yourself.”

She blushed, grabbed the carton of Winstons and reached for the Pall Malls.

“You sound like you’re from the South. Around here I’m so used to hearing all them Yankees from up North talking.”

“Yep, I was born in Lubbock Texas. Spent some time out west, too, but the accent is pure Texas.” He grabbed his Winstons and held them up to her. “You got good taste in cigarettes. Well except for those. I don’t see you smoking a non-filter. Did you go and marry one of them Yankees?”

“Yeah, Private Dave Johnson,” she blushed.

“Don’t reckon I know ’im. You from around here?”

“Yeah, born and bred. Daddy’s a mechanic out at the Chevy dealer on Highway 18.”

They walked toward the cashier. He stopped and picked up a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“You drinking all them yourself?”

“Maybe, depends on how many show up to my going away party.”

“Where you going?”

“Home. I’ve done my time. Good bye Uncle Sam, hello freedom. Especially with that shit brewing over in Vietnam. I’m outta here.”

“Well it was good meeting you…Sergeant…”

“Blair, Bobby Blair. And you are?”

“Linda Johnson.” And she blushed again.

“Well Linda Johnson, your husband is a very lucky man.”

“Thanks.”

“Y’all should come to my party. It’s gonna be at the NCO club tonight.”

“Oh, we can’t, his unit is going out in the field later.”

“Well hot damn, this is my lucky day. We’ll see you at 7 sharp. Dress nice.”

And then he walked away with a smile before she could even object.

***

“Alright, honey, don’t work too hard out there marching all around,” Linda said to Dave as he sat Cindy down and kissed his wife on the cheek.

“Maybe you guys can go over to your parents for dinner.”

She walked over and held the screen door open for him so he could get his backpack through the door.

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just get some sleep without all your snoring going on. Don’t play any poker, you always lose. Bye, love you.”

He walked out to his car, a blue and white Rambler. Linda was well back inside when the screen door finally pulled itself closed.

Inside, she picked up the phone and dialed Peggy’s number. She opened the freezer door and pulled out a cherry Popsicle for Cindy.

“Hi Peggy. Can you watch Cindy tonight?”

She heard the screen door shut. When she turned around she saw him grab his hat off the couch.

“Forgot my hat,” he said cautiously.

“Oh honey, you scared the shit outta me.” She didn’t know if she was busted.

“Sorry.”

“Bye,” she said, relieved he hadn’t heard her on the phone.

He walked toward the door but stopped.

“Why do you need a babysitter?”

“I’m tired. I told you. I can’t sleep at all with you snoring all damn night. Please just go before you’re late.”

After he left, she had to explain to Peggy why she needed a babysitter.

“Oh, I just wanna spend some time with momma. Just me and her.”

“Why didn’t you just tell Dave that?”

“Because he’s jealous of my mom. I’ve told you that.”

“Uhhh, no you haven’t.”

“Well, I guess we just don’t talk enough. Yeah, he don’t want me hanging out with momma anymore. Can you believe that? Listen I’ll only be an hour or so.

***

Before walking into the NCO club, Linda waited outside, smoking a cigarette. When a group of four walked in, she got right behind them, making it look like she was part of their group.

Their eyes locked from across the room. He was at the bar talking with a couple guys. He watched her walk toward him. Her dress fit snugly around her small waist. Her lipstick matched the dress. Red and hot.

Hello Mrs. Johnson. I’m so glad y’all could make it. He put his hand on her shoulder to guide her to the bar. The electricity between them was palpable.

Bob leaned in close so no one could hear.

“You look amazing. And your eyes. Not only are you funnier than me but your eyes just might be bluer then mine.”

She blushed.

“If we were to ever make a baby, well I tell you what, that baby would have the bluest eyes…”

“And a divorced mom.”

“You know what I think?”

“What do you think, Mister?”

“I think you blush at all the right moments,” which made her blush again.

An hour later, they were parked at the levy on the Mississippi River, watching the stars and occasionally a passing barge. They laid on the hood of his Black Dodge Dart. Linda could feel the heat from the engine on her back.

“What do you mean, you never seen a shooting star? What the hell y’all doing up here in Arkansas? I tell you what.”

He reached out to hold her hand. She rolled over on her side, facing him.

“Why you looking at me? We’re supposed to be looking for shooting stars.”

“I only wanted to look at you. I’m just so happy right now.”

“Is that those three beers talking or Mrs. Johnson?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Ma’am, I believe it’s your name.”

“Dave’s a good guy and all but … well … I ain’t never told no one else this. Except for him. I was pregnant when we met and he said he’d marry me and raise another man’s kid. So that tells you what kinda man he is. And I appreciate it, I really do. But ….”

“But what?”

“But we’ve been together almost two years, and he ain’t never brought me to the damn river to look at stars.”

“Honey, I’m just trying to get in your pants.”

She laughed.

“I’m just playing the slow game,” he added.

“You’re ‘bout as slow as a damn ol’ freight train. I’m being serious. It’s that I’m so bored out of my mind. He just doesn’t do it for me.”

“Do what for you, cook?”

“Bobby Blair, I am trying to be serious. What I am saying is my life isn’t what I thought it was gonna be. And tonight, well it’s just special. I needed this so bad.”

“Well I needed this too.” He pulled a whiskey bottle he’d been sipping out of up to his lips and took a swig. He offered it to her but she shook her head. “See something happened I haven’t told anyone either.”

“What?” She squeezed his hand and touched his face with her other hand.

“My daddy just died.”

“Oh my gosh, when?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

“I’m so sorry. Give me a hug. An honest hug.”

“And now I’m out here at the Mississippi River giving this beautiful married woman an honest hug, whatever the hell that is.”

They embraced. He put his mouth into the warmth of her neck and breathed her in.

“And I’m really sorry, hon.”

“Well don’t be. He was a sonabitch if there ever was one. Drank himself to death. He used to spend all our money on damn booze and staying out all night with no count women and then come home and beat my momma. Thank God he left us. Though we were broke and had nowhere to live, we were free from that bastard. I didn’t even ask for leave so I could go to his funeral.”

He rolled over on his back and pulled her over to him. Her head rested on his chest and she could hear his heartbeat. She felt his lungs puff out as he stifled a cry and then pretended to cough.

“Look at that….” He pointed at the sky. And sure enough just where he was pointing she saw her first shooting star.

Ten minutes later, they made love on the hood of that car.

And 56 years later, I found out he was my dad.

Don Anderson is an NPE who lives with his wonderful wife in Los Angeles. He’s a TV promo producer, documentary filmmaker, and a small business owner. He found out on September 19, 2021 that his dad wasn’t his dad. Life will never be the same. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s the creator and host of the podcast Missing Pieces — NPE Life.

A story 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.

“You’re dripping.”

“Oh!” She rose from the chair and hurried into the kitchen. At the sink, she shivered, ran cold water then hot. She picked up a towel but couldn’t remember what it was for, tried to think of her life before that moment, of branches scratching her arms as she picked plums from the backyard tree, the older boy taking the younger one’s hand as she shooed them outside, the growl of her husband’s truck as he drove off, but her mind would not let her linger, shoved her thoughts away and slammed the door.

Maybe then. Maybe the crash was then.

He must have heard it too. Maybe they both reached for the curtain. Maybe he was standing behind her, so close she could smell the spice of his aftershave, the faint tang of his sweat, could hear the quiet scrape of his suit jacket against his shirt when he moved. Or he was standing feet away, against the edge of the table, pen in hand, impatient. She sensed his determination, his need to follow through. The heat from his skin radiated toward her.

 “I just need to—” she said.

She does not know how one body found another, over the space of a room, over the resistance of gravity, over the weeping in her mind, how a minute expanded and contracted. She will never be able to explain how the plums boiled away and burned, how she was left with only broken glass glinting on the pavement and another beating heart.

Lisa a Franklin is a writer, photographer, and career coach. She lives in Walnut Creek, CA, with her husband and two cats. In 2018, she discovered through a DNA test that her biological father was someone other than she had always believed. 

By Adam E.L. Anthony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By 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.

 “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.

It has been an honor to be raised by you. It has been a blessing to see you be a grandma to my son. It is a privilege to share your last name. I want to say thank you for loving me. For raising me. For stepping in when my mom couldn’t. For holding space for your own son and the woman who is raising his son. I appreciate it more than words can express. I tell your grandson that God gave me you because he saw I needed a mom. Instead of thanking you with words, I will do it with actions. I promise that your grandson will only know the unconditional love that you have shown me. Not only in words, but in action.

Because it is an honor to raise him, as it has been an honor to be raised by you.

Michelle Talsma Everson is an independent journalist, editor, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021 and, since then, has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

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.

However, after decades of ambiguity, just this week New York joined a handful of states when the Court of Appeals ruled that the ICPC does not apply to out-of-state non-custodial parents, only to foster and adoptive placements. But most states still interpret the ICPC to apply, even when there are no allegations of unfitness, so thousands of children will continue to be unnecessarily ensnared in the foster care system.

This was the day that we thought Aiden’s case would finally be resolved, yet another bureaucratic blunder has gotten in the way. Aiden has already lost his sisters to adoption.  Overcome with despair, he collapses on the floor in the elevator banks, clutching me and sobbing as I try to comfort him. He becomes increasingly hysterical as the caseworker repeatedly tries to reach around me to take him, and I keep pushing her away. Then Aiden reaches up, gently touches my face, and asks, “Why are you crying?”  I’m not even aware that I am. The tears roll down my face—the kind that come unbidden from a bottomless well and that no amount of control can stop—even when I return to the courtroom.

*Aiden is a pseudonym.

Dawn J. Post is an expert in children’s rights, advocacy, and litigation and a memoir/CNF writer focusing on foster care. Much of her work seeks to elevate the voices and experiences of foster and adopted youth involved in child welfare systems. She’s a legal advocate and child welfare consultant based in NYC.  

By Hannah Andrews

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

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

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

Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades.

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

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

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

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

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

I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2018, I smashed into my own sunset.

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

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

Why should I have to SEARCH for my own information?

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

I don’t know.

What I do know is:

Mother-child separation is undeniably traumatic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t make us beg for it.

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

Cue the sun.

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

By Rebecca Cheek

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?

The adoptive mother who chose me did not pattern healthy love, so I am doing my damnedest to break that cycle of hurt, hopelessness, and pain. It is a choice I can make to protect myself and my children. I am grieving one mother who, for whatever reason, could not keep me and another one who “loved” me to the point that she suffocated me with control and manipulation. This complicated adoptee grief, starting from my relinquishment at birth and enduring to today when I am an adult in my late 30s, has been hard coded into who I am. Grief flows into my body like blood, vitally important to live but messy when it gushes out.

Like all child-rearing milestones, the start of middle school has come, and another will soon take its place. I will figure it out like I normally do and handle my fear with deep breaths and long sighs. I will tell Noah, “I’m new to being a parent to a middle schooler like you’re new to being a sixth grader. But I’m here for you, I love you, and I’m already so beeping proud of you. Not because of your academic achievements or cunning wit, but because you are you.” That is what I would have wanted to hear when I was in middle school.

Later I walked by the same tree where I found the baby bird. I looked in the monkey grass, but it was not there. I hope it is safe with its mama, up high in the tree, where it will grow and fly away as it was meant to.

Rebecca Cheek (she/her/hers) is a transracial International Korean American adoptee living in South Carolina. She has a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a background in manufacturing of drug delivery systems and quality assurance management in chemical manufacturing. However, she’s taking a pause in her professional career to raise her children and try to figure out what she wants to do when she (really) grows up. In the meantime, she’s actively volunteering through multiple organizations. She’s a peace seeker, who strives to live her life yogically.

By Michelle Talsma EversonI 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.

“We are so glad you found us,” your sister, my aunt, wrote on a Hanukkah card.

“Well, we recognize you and our children recognize you,” your brother-in-law said.

“It’s ok, I’ve got him,” my best friend says as he takes my son under his wing and allows me the privacy that comes with the occasional breakdown.

“You did nothing wrong, this isn’t your fault,” my bonus mom says as I lose my shit from time to time.

I am so grateful for the amazing people in my life; I pray their awesomeness overshadows those who aren’t supporting or seeing me in the way I would have it if I could control things. I have learned that I can only control myself. (I’d have preferred to learn this in so many other ways.)

So, I move forward and enjoy the moments where it doesn’t sting as much. I embrace those I love, and I keep a small flame of hope and prayer. I tell God thank you and I ask for peace for both of us.

“I have a good history of bouncing back,” I texted you once. It’s true, but even the strong need rest and safety. And I will find that, just not with you.Michelle Talsma Everson is an independent journalist, editor, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021 and, since then, has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s  also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

By Eve Sturges

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-discovery adoption, donor conception, and non-paternal event. As in: “I found out that as a teenager I had fathered a child; 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’s 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 TikTok 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. 

I do what any responsible person with feelings does in 2022: I post about it in a Facebook support group for MPEs. I know it’s the only place I will be understood, and I am right. The community love-wraps me in digital hugs immediately. Emojis rain down in solidarity. When I read the comment from a friend with rainbow hair, “wrapping you in my arms,” I cry harder. 

The only unusual detail about my non-paternal event is that my biological father reached out to me; typically it’s the offspring who deliver the news to unsuspecting parents, most often after a mail-in DNA kit offers unexpected results. But when I was 38 years old, a man named Peter called and said, “We’ve been waiting for you to find us!” “Us” included five new siblings. I had always wanted siblings. 

Let me start over. 

I grew up with three siblings and married parents. My parents are still married, despite the phone call that revealed I was actually the product of an affair they’d hidden long ago, hoping to forget. They met in high school and are determined to stay together forever. In a complicated and heartbreaking state of affairs between my family and a government foster system, one of my sisters left our home at age 12 and later died from medical complications resulting from her Down syndrome. My other sister suffers from myriad mental and psychological challenges that keep her functioning like a highly anxious 6-year-old. I have a brother, too, and it isn’t that we don’t get along. We do, it’s fine. But that seems to be as good as it will ever get: fine. Somehow, the three-year age difference between us makes an endless sea of different childhood experiences, and we have very little in common. It seems as good a place as any to mention that they—my brother, sister, and parents–all have blue eyes. My dark features were just minor details, explained away with shrugs and vague ancestry references, a song and dance familiar to many of us in this special club.

So, yes, I have siblings. I have an entire family, intact. But this photograph staring at me from Facebook? We’ve never had a photo like that. Congenial, familial, comfortable. Everyone at that dinner table in Montana has brown eyes. My dark, thick eyebrows were MADE to be with those people. They are my people. I am their people. 

And yet … is that true? As a psychotherapist, I take my clients through an exercise called “feelings are not facts.” I first learned it from a mentor when I was in my twenties, and I learned about it again while studying cognitive behavioral therapy in graduate school. A lot of emotional experiences aren’t based on the actual world around us, and it can be helpful to check one against the other. 

My biological father died shortly after contacting me. He turned my whole existence upside down and then left me holding the pieces. The truth will set you free, but the truth will fuck everything up, too. With my identity shattered, the relationship with my parents fractured, my world spinning, I finally connected with a few of these brothers and sisters on Facebook in early 2020. Three were receptive, two were enthusiastic. The pandemic prevented in-person meetings, but so did the stress of all the challenges that came with it in our everyday lives: lockdowns, mask mandates, toilet paper shortages, disastrous testing centers, grounded flights, zoom schooling, doom scrolling, and life evolving around us faster than we could keep up. I have three children and a private therapy practice that I run from home. Oh, and a podcast. How and when was I supposed to connect with these siblings, and where would we even start? 

I can hear my mentor’s voice in my head, and I can see myself with clients: feelings are not facts. I let myself cry, and I also start to list my feelings out loud: I feel like I would fit in at that dinner. I feel like it would be the sibling connection I’ve always craved, and they’ve left me out on purpose. I feel like we would all know each other in an unspoken understanding about having dark, thick eyebrows. If I were at that dinner, we could finally explore the millions of questions we have about each other, our father, and who we each are as his individual offspring. We would probably stay up all night and take another beautiful photograph with the sweet light of dawn coming in from the other direction. I take a minute to scream into a pillow about the maddening powerlessness of it all. 

There’s nothing left except the facts: If Facebook is any kind of evidence, I actually would not fit in with these people. We have extremely disparate opinions, lifestyles, values. They’ve made little effort toward me, but I haven’t done much better. The truth is that I don’t believe I was left out on purpose; I wasn’t even a consideration. It’s still an idea to chew on, but it’s different than an intentional snub nonetheless. The fact is that more than one sibling has suggested to me, in our brief message exchanges, that there are brewing tensions in the family, and they have their own complicated history; it is unlikely that the golden hour glow stayed for long. 

The fact is that I am often lonely in post-ish pandemic Los Angeles. I miss the ease of companionship and get-togethers, and we’re all exhausted by Zoom. Transition fatigue is real, and I’m unsure how to transition into six or seven new sibling relationships while we’re all navigating everything else. The fact is that I love dinner parties, and I’ve always wanted Fiesta tableware. The fact is that I am scared I’ll offend or frighten them with my millions of questions. The fact is that there’s a lot I don’t know about every aspect of this complex situation, and that is the hardest obstacle of all. 

The fact is that there are, actually, no dogs in the photograph at all. 

I’ve adapted the “feelings are not facts” exercise for and with my clients and added a second tier—the Serenity Prayer. This isn’t from my mentor or CBT therapy. Originally written by a theologian in 1933, it’s famously known as a foundational tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous. (No one reinvents the wheel.)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

The courage to change the things I can, 

And the wisdom to know the difference. 

The fact is that despite not having an idyllic relationship with the siblings I grew up with, I do indeed have a family that extends to many aunts and uncles and cousins who love me. We don’t have a cabin in Montana, but we have taken plenty of photographs over the years. A recent reunion was in Idaho, and I don’t remember feeling lonely or unsure about the definition of “family” on those days. I can’t control this picture on Facebook that made me cry, but I can contact my cousin, Jesse, who always brings the best camera. 

“Hey, didn’t we take some group shots on the beach? I’d love a copy please!” I shoot off using a family thread in WhatsApp. Others chime in: My cousin Mariah in Ethiopia also wants a copy; my aunt Ginny in Portland was wondering about it just the other day! Within minutes, a new photograph dominates my screen. We don’t all have matching eyebrows, and there isn’t a golden glow because it was overcast that day, but everyone is smiling. I remember that we are a supportive, fun group despite various challenges over the years. I consider the differences between us, and the family history, and remember that a photograph only captures a single moment, and a photograph doesn’t tell the whole story. 

I write a second message, this time to a half-brother in Wyoming. He posted the dinner party picture that started it all. Our relationship, thus far, is Facebook acceptance only. The courage to change the things I can. “Hey! I saw that family picture at your mom’s house. It looked so nice and fun. I hope you’re well. Now that COVID seems to be fading, maybe I can finally meet y’all one day soon.”  It’s met with silence, but I know I did my part. 

24-hours later, a message rolls in. “That’d be awesome. Sorry, I was at the gym.” 

A few weeks later and we’re still exchanging small notes back and forth, some kind of awkward attempt at conversation and getting to know one another. I messaged a half-sister too, and she wrote back about a recent move to Florida and with sweet questions about my own family. I feel less forgotten, or ignored. I’m holding back on the really big questions, but it feels like we’re closer to a dinner party than we were before. That’s something. 

I’m reaching out to my people here, too, the ones I consider my Los Angeles family, instead of feeling sorry for my lonely butt and waiting by the phone. I’m working on gratitude for the life I have, instead of wondering about the life I could have had if every single thing was different. I am allowing myself to feel my feelings, but I am trying to remember to check them against the facts, too. Eve Sturges is a writer and licensed therapist in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family. She’s expanding her private practice to serve the NPE population through counseling and education. Contact her for more information. Her podcast, “Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges” can be found on all the podcast platforms. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter @evesturges and on Instagram @everythingsrelativepodcast. She’s also the creator of Who Even Am I Anymore: A Process Journal for the Adoptee, Late Discovery Adoptee Donor Conceived, NPE, and MPE Community. Order it here. 

By Eve SturgesBy Eve Sturges

By Kathleen Shea KirsteinAt 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.

Armed with this new information, I called the probate court and asked them to search for my adoption records. Hopefully, with the information they contained, I’d then be allowed access to my birth certificate and could get my passport.

I scheduled a lunch meeting for two days later with our clinic psychologist to problem-solve how to approach my parents. Forty-nine years is a long time for them to keep the secret. I wondered what kind of defenses they’d built up. I wanted advice about whether I should tell them I knew I was adopted.

I was surprised when my Dad called me at work on the morning of August 24 and asked me to come over to the house right away. My intuition kicked in. Somehow, I knew my parents were going to tell me the truth about my birth. I grabbed a long stem red rose from the gift shop on my way out the door to give to my mom. Dad clearly remembered that I said that I might go to probate court to see if they would hear my case sooner. He must have realized I’d find out the truth, so he likely convinced mom they had to tell me and they had to do so that morning. They were not aware that I’d read my chart, so the timing of his call was coincidental.

I left work and arrived at my folks house a little after 9 am. Standing in the living room, Dad asked, “You know why you are here?”

“Yes, I said. “I’ve known since Monday I was adopted.”

Mom then told me that the state did home studies, even back in 1957, and that caused the delay in filing my birth certificate. She remembered that she wanted to make a good impression, and since she loved to sew, she made me a new dress for each meeting with the state worker. Once the home studies were satisfied and my placement approved, the court finalized my adoption when I was 14 months old with a little ceremony that changed my name. I can’t help but wonder if that’s similar to what happens when a person enters the Witness Protection Program. What did I witness that I needed protection from? My original mother?

My mother was upset. She told me the day I won the trip to Cancun was the worst day in her life, and that she felt like her life was over. I think in that moment our roles reversed and I became the mother, making sure she felt secure and nurtured. Nurturing was never her strong suit. She was better at keeping up appearances.

I reassured my parents and told them that nothing in our relationship was going to change, and it became my job in a way to forever prove my loyalty until they died.

And that was the lie I told. That nothing would change. Because everything changed.

I thought of them in a different light. That’s when I realized they’d kept me at arm’s length most of my life. Over the years, even my kids have observed I was treated differently than the sister I grew up—their biological child. The pedestal I kept my parents on began to crumble. When the truth came out, I kept thinking about how they lied to me on those occasions when I point blank asked if I’d been adopted. I was consumed with wondering how they could have lied for so long without giving something way, especially after I learned from my mother’s cousin that my mother had the entire town under a gag order. My friends all knew.

Looking back, I see there had been a few close calls when I was growing up. I worked in a multidisciplinary clinic as an oncology-certified RN and administered chemotherapy to patients. The time I pushed medication in to patients’ IVs was always a chance to chat and get acquainted. Talking to one patient, I mentioned that I knew her daughter-in-law. She asked what my parents’ names were, and when I told her, she said, “Oh, are you the one they adopted”? I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so. I called my mother that night to ask, but she insisted I wasn’t adopted. “People are always confusing us with a family in town that adopted a baby the same time you were born,” she said. I didn’t think my mother would lie to me, so I believed her. And I thought I had her hands and looked a little bit like her, so I trusted what she told me.

I wonder what would have happened if those close calls had been fully realized and if I’d pressed my mother harder. If I hadn’t blindly trusted my parents, would I have known sooner? Would knowing sooner have a made a difference? I didn’t realize it then, but I lied to myself and my parents that day in their living room when I told them nothing in our relationship would change.  Everything has changed. Nothing could be the same because the person I was changed in those moments.Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a registered nurse.

By Mark OverbaySo what are we supposed to do the day after—the day after our lives are upended by a call, an email, a Facebook message, or by 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 “1^st 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.

I created a private family tree focused entirely on my new paternal side, buoyed by the perks and freedoms offered by a paid Ancestry account. In the beginning, this unique tree was winterized, not a leaf in sight. Despite that, it was comforting to know I could use this proxy as my personal DNA spreadsheet, adding or subtracting new names and dates as I experimented with various paternal hypotheses. There were also many unfamiliar terms and tools I’d encountered early on this path. What was a centimorgan, and why was that important? Who was an NPE, and was I one? What does “DNA Painter” paint? I needed to learn this new language of genetic genealogy and took up this study earnestly and with a focus that would have made my medical school professors proud. I cheated, though, and watched YouTube videos repeatedly until some of it sunk in. Please don’t tell them.

Armed with a new vocabulary and growing confidence, I added the names of the people I thought were my paternal grandparents to my proxy tree. As it turns out, they were very distantly related (5^th cousins) and, before marriage, shared the same surname. This explains why there were so many of my close matches with that name. While no one source identified all their children, I was gradually able to piece together a comprehensive list. They had seven children, six of them boys, spaced over fourteen years. Each son became a leaf on my proxy tree.

In the meantime, I sorted through my mother’s archives. My mother was the family genealogist, historian, and archivist. She’d neatly cataloged our lives by carefully collecting, storing, and displaying family photos and memorabilia. From my first haircut to her grandson’s kindergarten graduation, no momentous event went undocumented. Mom left behind crates and boxes of scrapbooks, photo albums, and genealogic records. Since her passing, I hadn’t looked at them, so years of dust added weight to these treasures. She was a packrat, and there were mountains of records to pour through. While I didn’t expect to find an envelope with my name on it containing a letter titled “Mark, this is the real story of your father,” I was sure hoping for exactly that. There was, of course, no such letter. Even though she, like me, was born in Tennessee, I knew after college she lived and worked for a few years in central Florida, in the same area that my newly discovered paternal grandparents had lived. That had to be an important clue, but if she’d ever told me the details of where she lived and taught, I’d forgotten them. I was looking for that kind of needle in this voluminous haystack. I didn’t find anything revealing in my first pass through her archives. On a second pass, though, on a card measuring a mere 2 x 2 inches, the name and dates of where and when she taught were printed. I had missed it the first time through. As it turned out, this unassuming little card was the key to unlocking my mystery.

My best guess was that my biological father was close in age to my mother and so, at least temporarily, eliminated a few of the possible brothers from contention. I had narrowed my list to the three most likely and began to dig deeper into each one. By sheer luck, the first Google search I started yielded an obituary that stopped me cold. When a photo is included in an obituary, typically it is one taken within a few years of the individual’s passing. This image, however, was of a much younger man who, to my eyes, looked just like me. Breathlessly, I read his biography. He had taught at the same school as my mother during the same time. The physician part of my brain reminded me that it wasn’t proof but was extraordinarily compelling evidence. The emotional side of my brain, though, knew I had just found my father. The author of this obituary had unknowingly left me breadcrumbs to find him.

I was both thrilled and unnerved. Many take years to find their father. I had found mine in just a few days. This had been too easy, and that made me nervous. I needed someone to look over my work to see if I had made a mistake. I contacted a group I read about in some genetic genealogy-related material. I turned over all my DNA information to a DNA angel, including my proxy tree. My angel was thorough, compassionate, and amazingly efficient. In just a few hours, she confirmed my research. I had found my father. She recommended that I ask a half-sibling to submit a DNA sample for a more visually comforting verification, especially for my new biological kin. This, however, would require a massive leap in my journey.

I knew from the obituary I had five new half-sisters, but reaching out to one of them felt too big a jump to consider. Instead, I contacted my closest DNA match, who I now know was a half-nephew. He was kind and empathic while also protective of his mother and aunts. After thoughtful consideration, he agreed to share my information with his mom, telling me he had no idea how she would respond. Knowing that the road to biological family connection was littered with bad outcomes, I waited nervously for whatever awaited me, braced for denial, anger, and rejection.

Twenty-two days after my NPE discovery and five agonizingly long hours since I last heard from my nephew, I got the news. The youngest of my new half-sisters reached out through Facebook, warmly welcomed me to the family, and included three photos of our father. She volunteered to submit a DNA sample. We began to talk immediately. Three days later, I heard from another sister. She was equally kind and accepting. Many more photos and long conversations followed. Within a few short weeks, I had heard from them all. Each graciously shared photos, press clippings, and memories of my father. While we had no script, we began to process this most unlikely of unions through, at times, challenging but honest conversation, laughter, and tears.

I had been made whole again. The bare half of my family tree now had budding leaves. Together, we pondered what came next.Mark Overbay is a (retired) physician and in his second career as an academic school dean at a small college nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. He’s an avid reader, captivated by the wonder and complexity of the human condition. At 58 years old, an unexpected DNA discovery forced a reexamination of his prior perceptions of family and identity, and that ever-winding journey continues. Overbay is an amateur painter, novice writer, and a lover of freshly-brewed, loose-leaf Chinese teas. He met his wonderful and supportive wife while both attended medical school, and they have been inseparable for more than 35 years. They have one son and two high-energy Labrador Retrievers, Whiskey and Yona.

By Michelle Talsma Everson

By Michelle Talsma Everson

By Mark OverbayIn 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 toward 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.

In the continuing awkwardness that this kind of conversation quite naturally brings, my friend blurted out the question: “You’re the adopted one, right?”

“Adopted? Hell no, I wasn’t adopted,” was my immediate and somewhat embarrassingly defensive reply.  I’d seen my birth certificate on many occasions. I had a copy at home. My father was listed as my father. The brother I was raised with couldn’t be adopted either, as he favored dad in both looks and several aspects of disposition. This adoption thing was wholly unexpected and unsettling. I wasn’t chuckling any longer. He was surprised by my reaction and referred me to his sister, as she had supplied him with this bit of information. I called her immediately, and she confirmed the story. My father had told her that mom was pregnant but not by him, and he married her and “adopted” me despite that. Never once in my 58 years had he or mom told me this story. Instead, he decided to reveal this to a stranger, assuming that I already knew. My mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s in her last years, had taken that secret to her grave. The rest of the drive was a blur. When I finally made it home, I rushed to my laptop, opened the DNA app, and checked my matches. There were no new close matches. My father, my friend, and his sister weren’t there. I searched all 80,000+ of my DNA matches for my surname. Not a single match appeared. As a series of waves rushed over me, a realization unfolded. My father wasn’t my father, at least biologically. The brother I was raised with was likely not a full sibling. My friend and his sister weren’t new half-siblings after all. I wasn’t adopted as my father had revealed, at least in the legal definition of the term. My mother was my biological mother. I found several names I recognized from her side of the DNA match list. I had no idea who my biological father was. In just a few hours, my family history unraveled. Fifty percent of my family tree was utterly wrong. I immediately shared all this with my wife and son and then called my brother and friend to inform them of my discovery.

As the reality set in, an unexpected calmness enveloped me. This genetic enlightenment, oddly, was both liberating and validating for me. As I became older, the differences and distance between my father and me grew wider and wider. I struggled to understand how two people could be any more unlike each other. I didn’t want to be anything like him and feared that somehow the pull of his genetic nature, whatever that meant, would slowly invade mine. I was conscious of the possibility and intentional with my thoughts and actions to guard against it. To learn there was no genetic blueprint with his stamp on it inside me was cathartic. A virtual weight had been lifted from my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there. The change was immediately palpable.

After a fitful night’s sleep, I awoke energized. Although I had no idea how to do so, I was determined to find my biological family. While that’s another story, my “both sides of the fence” experiences helped better prepare me for what was to come.Mark Overbay is a retired physician in his second vocation serving students in higher education. An avid reader, he’s highly interested in exploring the magic and mystery of the human condition. He’s an amateur painter and a novice writer. Overbay believes that writing informs and, hopefully, improves his thinking and processing. He and his wife of more than 30 years have one son and two young, energetic chocolate labs, Whiskey and Yona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I discovered B.o.B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was pimping myself before I ever heard of Kendrick Lamar. Tryna figure out how to sell myself to a people who were in the market for a pre-prescribed Blackness that was self-destructive. And as a transracial adoptee raised in racial isolation, this pimping was a survival skill, and a violence inflicted on myself.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo, @matthewcharlespoet