Essays, Fiction, Poetry

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

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

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

Dear Ava,*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neighborhood kid: Where are you from?

Me: Here.

Kid: No, I mean where are you from?

Me: Here. Queens. Jackson Heights.

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

Me: Oh. Well. I don’t really know.

Kid: Wait, what?

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

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

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

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

From a very young age, I was always deathly terrified of cockroaches—these slimy, dark creatures that live in the smallest and darkest crevices where nothing else could ever imagine existing. I think this fear originated from being allowed to watch horror movies with my older brother before the age of 5. My mom told me that if I started to believe any of the movies were real, she wouldn’t let me watch them anymore. She assured me that the events in these films were just fiction, even though a lot of the scenes felt very realistic. If I started to have nightmares or be afraid because of the movie, I would not be permitted to stay up late and hang out with my older and cooler brother. I simply hid my terror about the many scenes that elicited fear. That’s how I continued to hide my feelings for the rest of my life, stuffing them below the surface so no one could access them and use them against me.

I specifically remember watching a particular episode from the 1980s series “Creepshow” in which a cruel germaphobe is killed in his apartment by a swarm of cockroaches. I don’t remember all the details, but I was terrified by the scene in which hundreds of bugs crawl out of his mouth and over his eyes. I was convinced that these filthy, awful creatures would find me and bury me too.

In the southeast, we make up special names for these creatures so they don’t sound so grotesque. In coastal North Carolina, they’re referred to as water bugs to differentiate the larger insects from the smaller bugs. The large cockroaches usually thrive in conditions with more rain and humidity and typically are more present when the seasons change to cooler weather as they search for warmer environments indoors. This important distinction is made so people will know that this type of cockroach exists through no fault of theirs. The other kind—the smaller variety—may signal to others that there’s an infestation due to less than ideal conditions, such as uncleanliness. As an adult, I find this differentiation ridiculous; it seems to reflect the way that our society silently judges others for their simple existence today. Because why would an infestation be anyone’s fault? This seems to place blame on being dirty or being poor or having no ability to rid yourself of the infestation.

In the picturesque city of Charleston, South Carolina, a true representation of the genteel south, these disgusting creatures are referred to as Palmetto bugs. I still remember the first time I saw one. I squealed in a panic while my then-boyfriend calmly explained that the Palmetto Bug is the other state bird of South Carolina, a true beacon of the city—a flowery term to describe a very ugly insect in hopes of accepting its indigenous right to exist in a city that barely stays above water.

Strangely enough, I’m not that afraid of spiders or other insects. I have a healthy fear of snakes, but an irrational fear of cockroaches, especially the large ones. Regardless of what they’re called, my fear of them continued to grow. Whenever I saw one, I broke out in goosebumps all over while silently trembling and desperately trying to escape the room. What is it about the creatures that live in the dark that make them so terrifying? Is it the idea that they live in a place of darkness or is it the darkness they bring with them that’s frightening? Maybe it’s the darkness that morphs them into these ugly creatures. Or is it that they live in the dark because they are terrible and are unworthy of living in the light?

It was winter up North. I was four, riding shotgun with my dad in a car on the highway. The naked trees scarred the grey sky, and now and again, birds flocked and dipped in the wind like shards of glass slicing the clouds. My cheeks burned hot. My dad had rolled the driver’s side window down an inch and the whistle of the cold wind sucked his cigarette smoke out the crack. Every time he took a drag, the tip of his cigarette glowed orange underneath the grey of the ash. When it got low, he lit a fresh one from it, then tossed the butt out the window. The inside of the car smelled like Kool menthols, sedan vinyl, and drugstore aftershave.

I was unbuckled because we all were back then, and I fidgeted in my seat, uncomfortably eager to reach a bridge I would be able to see from the driver’s side window. I didn’t know why I felt nervous, only that I had a knot in my stomach that periodically lurched into my throat.

When we got close to the bridge, I slid across the bench seat, grab my dad’s arm, and peered down the divide between the two sides of the highway into a gully that led to a tunnel, where I got a quick glimpse of a black hole framed by the arch of the bridge. I could never quite see what was inside that little hole, but I kept trying. I needed to see it, but I didn’t know why.

I suppressed a thrill of fear whenever I saw it. Mostly I feared missing the opportunity to look inside the hole, because I believed I must look inside it, or else the day would go wrong. The hole bothered me then, and the memory of it bothering me has bothered me for most of my life, with the kind of prodding nag you feel when you are on a 46-year hike and there is a pebble in your shoe. You can ignore it for a while, but eventually it rubs, then blisters, then becomes infected. Then it festers and begins to rot, and you worry about it possibly killing you.

For years I didn’t remember where we went on those rides, so I didn’t know what to make of the memories, or of my fear of seeing that bridge, so I banked them alongside hundreds of other memories that made no sense, like the time I was awakened from sleep by yelling and the shattering of the storm door glass, and the next day, after the doctor had stitched up my mother’s hand, I broke the household silence by asking what had happened and my parents said, “Nothing.” Or when I once got up the courage to ask my dad why he was always so mad at me, he told me to ask my mother, and the bitter way he said it made me afraid of the truth. Or that time when, after several years of chasing his love and not catching it, I asked my mother if he was my real father and she said, “Shame on you.”

Years later, while visiting my dad, I brought up that morning drive and the bridge and he said, “That was when I used to take you to daycare.”

“I went to daycare?”

“You don’t remember? It was a home daycare. Run by a guy. You cried every time. Every day for a year you cried, and I never knew why.”

“And you kept dropping me off there? To a home daycare center run by a guy? To a place that made me cry every day?”

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

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

I did not ask to go on the tour, but when it was offered, I readily accepted. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I did not have much access to Korean culture. My parents were not the kind who celebrated or shared the beauty and culture of the country I and my two adopted siblings had come from. I recall meeting Bertha Holt on two occasions for large gatherings when I was very young. The evangelical church community my adoptive parents belonged to recruited new members throughout the Long Island, New York suburbs. Their church members adopted roughly 100 Korean children. I have a picture in my mind of us all posed in a hall with Bertha wearing a hanbok. Somewhere on Long Island, in a box of my now-deceased parents’ photos, it may be hidden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All you had

To do

Instead of saying

I love you

Was to tell me

The truth

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

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

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

The Girl’s Mother left The Girl’s Father when there were just two young boys—before The Girl existed. She left the alcohol and physical abuse. She actually divorced him, though none of her children were aware of that until 83 years later, when a granddaughter stumbled upon the records online.

The Girl’s Mother built a small home for herself and her sons. Life was good and she was happy. She had a boyfriend, though no one remains to speak of him, and she was happy for the first time in years. She was as kind as the day is long, plus some, and deserved every happiness.

The Girl’s Father had been raised by a harsh and demanding mother, thereby creating a son of similar demeanor. One day post-divorce, The Girl’s Mother opened the door to her ex-husband and his angry mother. The angry woman said, “You will take him back and you will make it work.” Wanting to do right by her sons, The Girl’s Mother allowed The Girl’s Father to move back in. Best guess is that until that day she’d had as long as two years of happiness, free of this alcoholic anchor.

The Girl had been born during one of her father’s many temporary stretches of sobriety, and he loved her from the start. The Girl had given him back his family. Many years later, he told The Girl that on the day she was born, he went to the home of her mother’s boyfriend and told him that she would never be his now—that HE had won. This was the first The Girl had heard of a separation and a boyfriend.

The Girl grows. There are now two older brothers, a younger brother, and a younger sister. The older siblings like to point out her differences—her different-colored hair, her build, her personality. What they don’t know is she already feels different—odd. She doesn’t feel like she belongs. She is her father’s favorite but her mother’s attention isn’t as easily obtained. Years later, when he is a grown up with children of his own, one brother acknowledges that The Girl’s Mother raised her with a higher level of indifference. He tells her that he has doubted her place in the family and always assumed she was adopted. As if she hasn’t felt this disconnect her entire life.

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

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

For months after I received the surprise DNA test results that revealed a not parent expected (NPE) event, I was obsessed with research into all things regarding a deceased Black man named Paul Keith Meeres, my biological father.

During the Vietnam War, I was more likely to identify with draft dodgers and conscientious objectors than someone who had actually served in the military, so it was a surprise to find out that Paul Meeres was a Marine in 1943 in World War Two.

Ancestry.com’s extensive records cited his rise in rank from private to sergeant and back to private on the muster rolls, and I was curious about the reason for this military inconsistency. I’d already received his death certificate, so I used it when looking for answers and requesting information from the National Archives.

Discharge papers arrived with a picture of Paul Meeres on his first day of muster. It was sad seeing a photograph of my biofather as a teenager going off to war. He looked so young. I was relieved to learn he was honorably discharged because I was learning about some of his self-destructive behaviors and feared that they might be the cause for a demotion in rank. Unfortunately, there was no information about the demotion. I would need personnel records to obtain that information.

On a beautiful warm day in September 2018, I was in Dumbo, Brooklyn, sightseeing with out-of-town friends. The change in military rank continued to trouble me as I wandered through photography exhibits under the Brooklyn Bridge. Separated from my friends for a moment, I stumbled upon an exhibit by the Marines. I asked Sergeant Bryan Nygaard if he knew how a demotion in rank happens. He asked where my father had been stationed.

When I told him Camp Lejeune and Montford Point, he said with an air of admiration, “Oh, he was a Montford Point Marine!”

He told me that in 1943 the first cohort of Blacks were allowed in the Marines, and that there could have been any number of reasons someone got demoted; racism could be one of them. He gave me his card and said to contact him if I had any further questions.

As I walked away from the Marine exhibit wondering why Sgt. Nygaard seemed so impressed with where my father had been stationed, my first cousin, whom I found on 23andMe.com, called me. She had a close relationship with Paul Meeres, who was her uncle. After we spoke, she texted me a photo of him in the Marines while he was stationed in Japan.

“Dad had the same color green eyes,” my brother said as he slid into the booth across from me. I was meeting him and my sister for the first time, and as much as we were trying to keep things light, it was awkward. I took a deep breath, willing myself to relax, and smoothed the navy sundress I chose to wear for an occasion that was casual yet monumental. I smiled and looked at my new brother’s face—the face of a stranger—yet one in which I saw a whisper of familiarity. Squirming in my chair, I realized I could be talking about my own face, one I barely recognized anymore.

How did I get here? I’d taken a DNA test for fun, never imagining it would change my life and my identity. Finding out that my dad—the man I grew up thinking was responsible for my thick hair and long skinny feet—was not my biological father rocked my world and led me on a journey of tearing myself apart and putting myself back together again.

Stumbling across the word ecotone recently, I learned it is the area between two biological places with characteristics of each. A marsh, the boundary between water and land, is an ecotone. Like a marsh that is part this and part that, I too, am an ecotone.

Finding out the truth of my paternity was a gradual process; I was like an archaeologist painstakingly cleaning layers of dirt from an artifact. First were the DNA test results with unexpected heritage. This led to examining my existing family tree, each climb up it leading to dead ends. DNA testing companies notify you when your DNA matches someone else in their databases, and as I began to receive these notifications, the names of the matches were foreign. I realized something was out of place, and my gut was telling me it was me. I began receiving messages from my DNA family, each one kind and inquiring, as they too were trying to make me fit.

Eventually, suspicions turned to proof, and my biology shifted. I was out of place. Unlike tectonic shifts that move the Earth’s plates either toward or away from each other, finding out that I biologically belong somewhere else, simultaneously moved me away from one place and toward another.

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

I was adopted in 1956. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that at that time unwed mothers faced ruin if they didn’t relinquish their infants—but my adoption was a lifelong event. It was a closed adoption, meaning that all genetic connections were severed when a new birth certificate was issued. This separation from my birthmother was the first trauma I experienced, and it influenced every aspect of my life. It diminished my self-esteem, disrupted my identity, and left me unable to form secure and satisfactory attachments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My mother believed in me, and because of that, I believe in myself. And I really can’t think of a greater gift that a parent can give their child.” Those words ended my eulogy, so I stepped down from the podium and solemnly returned to my seat. Later, as I mingled among the crowd, quite a few people praised my remarks.  While kind words are standard at funerals, their comments seemed heartfelt and genuine. I thanked them, adding that praising my mother came easy because of my strong, life-long bond with her, a bond that would be her legacy forever.

“Forever” lasted 16 years, ending the day my mother reached up from the grave and wrought emotional ruin on the living, particularly me.

I distinctly remember being 11-years-old when my dad heartlessly embarrassed me at a school event. Being at odds with my father was commonplace during my childhood and peaked during my teenage and college years, after which I largely eliminated him from my life. As a child, I recognized fundamental differences between myself and my dad. I looked nothing like him. He was athletic, I was not. I excelled academically, whereas he had struggled as a student. The list goes on. When I returned home after the embarrassing school event with tears in my eyes, I bluntly howled at my mom, “How is he my dad when I’m nothing like him and he’s nothing like me?” “He’s your dad, just try to forgive him,” she replied. Over the next quarter century, I asked her some version of that question on dozens of occasions, sometimes in a calm voice, sometimes in harsh tones through gritted teeth. She always responded with some version of that same answer. For some reason I just accepted her words rather than taking my question toward a logical conclusion, probably because I never realized that trusting your mother was fraught with risk.

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

I stole it from the hospital.

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

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

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

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

Whenever I tell this story, there’s always the same reaction: “I don’t know what to say.” And who am I to blame them? How could they? I wouldn’t either.

Sometimes, I still don’t.

I’ve always known. From my earliest waking memories, I knew I was special; I knew that he was special too. Because he was a donor, and I was a donor child, in our unusualness I had a bond with this mystery man. But I didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know I existed.

When you’re a donor child with a single mother by choice, something can happen. There’s a certain void. An abyss. Not a crater, because that would imply something was once there. You feel empty. You feel lonely. You didn’t have a choice. In this situation, everybody but you had a choice.

Let’s backtrack. It’s April 2018, and I’m lying on my stomach, stretched out on the stone-cold floor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, on a retreat. Only three months until my 18th birthday. We were told to take some time to write and meditate. I’d been meaning to write this letter. Now I finally have time to do it. “Dear Dad.” No, that’s not right. Wait, yes it is! “I love you!” “Please love me!” “Please…want me.” Want me, goddammit.
I never sent the letter. My 18th birthday arrived. Finally. I reached out to California Cryobank. The deal is that you get three tries to reach out; if the donor never responds, you aren’t allowed to facilitate contact ever again. And the donor has a right to his anonymity. Anonymous until 18. But he still has a right to turn you down when you turn 18. Such a bright age, 18. Shiny, almost. Full of promise and potential. Hope for the future.

This year I turn 48, the age my father was when he died of pancreatic cancer. So I had a genetic test. I wanted to know if there was a reason to worry I might get—or have—cancer. I already know I have risk factors: an immediate family member who died before the age of 50, and I have Ashkenazi Jewish heritage on both sides.

A desire to foresee my fate, to know my destiny, opened a Pandora’s box. In order to get a genetic test, I was required to receive counseling first, to understand how genes work, what risk factors I may have, to decide whether I really want to know if something deleterious is waiting for me.

In our session, the counselor talked me through genes and inheritance. On a piece of paper, she drew a genogram, a family tree with symbols depicting gender and relationships, known cancers, and deaths.

“In anthropology, we call that a kinship chart,” I told her. As an anthropologist, I was familiar with these models. Kinship diagrams show relationships. For anthropologists who go to live in foreign cultures, it’s a tool to reduce confusion between common names in the community of study. It’s a way to map a community, as relationships between people impart more meaning and contextual information than does an individual.

My genogram only had ten symbols on it. Ten known family members, five of whom were deceased. The genetic counselor wrote the words “limited info” on the paper depicting my family. “That was quick,” she said. “You don’t have a lot to go over because you don’t have a lot of family.”

A 2019 PEW Research Center survey found that 27% of home DNA test users discover unknown close relatives, meaning a person could accidentally learn they are not biologically linked to those to whom they thought they were related. DNA tests can have devastating emotional consequences when people learn they have no genetic connection to their kin.

But I was in the inverse situation: my genetic test results impacted biological relatives to whom I had no actual connection.

My father had estranged himself from his family of origin when he was in his early thirties. He cut off all contact with his mother and two younger brothers by the time I was eight. (His father had died by then, due to heart-related issues, as far as I know.) I don’t know why he did it, but as an adult reflecting back, I think disconnecting was what my father felt he had to do to survive.

Forty years later and 26 years after my father’s death, I had the test and learned one copy of my ATM gene has a pathogenic mutation, an alteration with sufficient evidence to be classified as capable of causing disease.

Two days after I learned I’d been adopted, we met to talk about the secret you’d kept from me. Looking back, I was completely unprepared for that conversation. I was still in shock from learning you weren’t my biological parents and that you lied by omission about this my entire life. What follows is what I wish I’d have known to express then in that first conversation. I didn’t know then that would be our only conversation about this. Had I been able to say these things then, I think it would have made it easier on all of us.

I don’t regret being adopted. I’ve had a great life; in reality I’ve been spoiled. You did a good job raising me to be the man I am today. You made me feel loved and supported. You taught me the importance of hard work and perseverance. You showed me the simple pleasure gained from working with my hands. You also guided me toward an honest life where I stand up for what I believe in without worrying much about the personal costs.  When I look at my life now, I don’t see how I would have ended up where I am today if you hadn’t adopted me. I’ve got a great wife, wonderful kids, and a life I love. 

But none of this changes my need to know who I am and where I come from. Searching for and reuniting with my biological family hasn’t been something I did as a rejection of you or as a result of some failure in your parenting. No matter how much you ignore my need to know, it will never disappear from inside of me. I simply have to understand who I am, and because of adoption, there’s more to that story than who raised me. 

As I trace my roots, I begin to understand why I am the way I am. I still see your hand in molding me, but I also see the biological foundation of my attitudes and behaviors. I also know where some of my struggles came from. You tried to shape me to be more outgoing; maintain outward appearances; and adopt a go-along-to-get along mindset at home, but biologically it wasn’t who I was, so we clashed over these expectations. 

Discovering my lineage and meeting my biological relatives makes me feel more like a whole person than I ever have. I’ve seen myself reflected back to me in others—my rebelliousness and personal style; my difficulty in going with the flow; my mischievous sense of humor; and my deep introversion. Since I’ve met my biological father and heard stories about my biological mother, these traits all make sense to me now. Before, it just felt like I was doing something wrong. 

While I’m not sorry I was adopted, I deeply regret that you kept my adoption secret from me for 48 years. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I can see the places where I was trying to force myself into a mold that was never meant for me. While for the most part I’ve made peace with the time and energy I invested trying to be someone I’m not, I likely will always have nagging questions about what might have been had I stayed truer to who I biologically was. It’s still hard to look back on the internal struggles I had—feeling like I’d failed in some way for not fitting into the family mold. It makes me sad to think about the fuller relationship I believe we could have had if I’d known the truth.

When you were but two years old, I came into being.

We were unaware of one another’s presence, but we co-existed.

Separated by a thousand miles, yet side by side on this planet, we grew.

We were born alone, no siblings with whom to form that unique bond.

We were given a name and assigned a family.

But somewhere out there, just beyond reach, the other was there.

I don’t know why we were allowed to live for more than 50 years without one another, and why we weren’t permitted the connection so many take for granted.

Were we somehow assigned the payment for sins of the fathers?

Why were we destined to miss out on the comfort, the familiarity, of another human connected by blood, intertwined for life?

We will never know. We will always wonder.

We will never get that time back.

But from this point forward, we now know.

There is another person, no longer unreachable and distant.

A person with whom we share blood, and genetics, and values.

Silly little things, like a preference for rice.

Difficulty swallowing.

And a dark, easy tan.

And big, important things, like stubbornness and independence.

Fierce loyalty.

Refusal to follow illogical rules.

And a smartass sense of humor.

We will never again be without.

No one can ever take this away.

We have less time left to be siblings than we had to be without.

So I choose to acknowledge, honor, and place immense value on this fact:

For the rest of my time on this planet, I will be

Finally, and forever,

Your sister.