From Right to Know‘s Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, My Re-Birthday Book is an ingenious workbook for adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected), and donor-conceived people—anyone who’s had a DNA surprise or a shift in understanding about family ties. As a birthday book celebrates a new life and forms a record of identity, this Re-Birthday book does the same for those who’ve had to reimagine their families and their identities after experiencing a shocking disconnect. It’s a space to process the changes and challenges and record the journey—a creative means of affirming and documenting a profound transformation. Filling in the pages is certain to be an exercise in deep reflection, leading to a richer self-understanding. For people who may have felt as if life had rewritten their stories, this workbook is a tool they can use to take the narrative into their own hands and rewrite their own stories.

When Julianne Mangin was young, her mother, Pauline, would recite these meager facts of her own family history: that her mother ran a delicatessen, a business set up by her uncle; that when Pauline was six, her mother was sent to a mental hospital; and that the girl was then taken from her “good father” and left to grow up in a county home. Over time, Mangin came to wonder why these memories, recalled without emotion or elaboration, came to summarize the family history. How accurate were they, and what wasn’t being said? Secrets of the Asylum—a decades-long endeavor to answer these questions, points to the limitations of family lore and the power of denial.

In 2012, after her mother moved to an assisted living apartment, Mangin took possession of boxes of her photo albums and—though she had little interest in them—her genealogy files. But several weeks into retirement from her career as a librarian at the Library of Congress, she became curious. What she found was a haphazard collection of records, with duplicate and misplaced files and great gaps in research—surprising since her mother had also been a student of library science.

Mangin took up the task of organizing the materials even though she had no desire to pick up where her mother had left off. But as anyone who’s jumped into genealogy rabbit holes knows, once you start, even if reluctantly, it’s nearly impossible to stop. Mangin became curious about the gaps in her mother’s records, wondering if they were intentional and whether they existed because additional information might upend the stories Pauline told herself.

The culmination of years of dogged detective work, Mangin’s book is deeply researched and equally deeply thoughtful. After obtaining a trove of records from Norwich State Hospital and combining the information they contain with that from her own relentless fact-finding, she pulls on the threads of mental illness running through four individuals on the maternal side of her family and traces the effect of their illnesses and incarcerations on their descendants.

Her journey of discovery demonstrates that genealogy is more than a matter of tree-building. It’s evidence, as Shakespeare wrote, that “What’s past is prologue.” Her story movingly illustrates the way the past informs the present—how understanding the past helps us better know ourselves. Mangin, for example, gained insight into her relationship with her mother by uncovering the generational trauma that molded them both.

It was a realization that dawned slowly for the author. “I started out, during my transformation from reluctant genealogist to ardent family historian, just wanting a version of my family that made sense…. I sensed that there might be a bigger benefit to knowing the truth about the past, but wasn’t sure what it might be,” she writes. “Putting the facts along a timeline wasn’t enough. Sometimes, I had to wait until the meaning of these events evolved in my mind and the deeper connections between them emerged.”

She was deep into research before the purpose and significance of her quest became apparent. “I was starting to get it, why genealogists become obsessed with details of their ancestors’ lives,” she writes. “It’s the only way we can hope to know the people from whom we are descended, especially if they died before we were born. It was part of my need for a narrative, a story of where I came from, and what I might have inherited from my family line.”

While the story Mangin deftly weaves is highly personal and heartfelt, it’s also a slice of social history, examining both the consequences of poverty and the questionable treatment of the mentally ill in the first half of the 20^th century.

And yes, as you might guess, there’s an NPE (not parent expected) in these pages, but you’ll have to read it to find out where.

—BKJ

On Saturday November 4, 2023, The Benevolent Society, Post Adoption Resource Centre presents the Adoption Literary Festival to showcase a range of adoption stories in an Australian context.

The presentations will amplify the voices of lived experience and highlight the lifelong nature and complexities of adoption.

The first Adoption Literary Festival took place in the United States in February 2022. This will be the first of its kind in Australia.

The online event takes place from 9:30 am to 2:30 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (15 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.) Click here for more information and to book free tickets.

/*! elementor - v3.16.0 - 20-09-2023 */
.elementor-widget-image{text-align:center}.elementor-widget-image a{display:inline-block}.elementor-widget-image a img[src$=".svg"]{width:48px}.elementor-widget-image img{vertical-align:middle;display:inline-block}

Update: The study has closed and is no longer actively recruiting participants.

Two women in the DNA surprise community are offering a healing retreat for people who have experienced DNA surprises, May 4-7 in Tucson, Arizona. The inaugural DNA Surprise Retreat was created to increase community and support for people who have uncovered shocking information about their families after taking a DNA test.

Co-founder Alexis Hourselt, host of the DNA Surprises podcast, experienced her DNA surprise (also known as an NPE or non-paternal event) in 2021 when she learned that the man who raised her is not her biological father. In addition, she discovered that she is white and African American instead of white and Mexican, as she’d once believed.

“My DNA surprise caused a complete upheaval of my identity,” says Hourselt. “I was navigating these new family relationships, feeling betrayed by my raised parents, and discovering an entirely new part of myself. It was very isolating, but this is actually quite common.”

DNA surprise facts

• It’s estimated that 1 in 20 people have misattributed parentage.
• 82 percent of DNA test takers learned the identity of at least one genetic relative.
• It’s estimated that 3 percent of adoptees do not know they are adopted.

After Hourselt met co-founder Debbie Olson, owner of DNA Surprise Network, at a retreat for adoptees, donor-conceived people, and NPEs, they decided to create a retreat specifically for people who have experienced DNA surprises.

“The DNA surprise experience is so unique,” says Olson, who experienced her DNA surprise in 2019 when she learned that her estranged father was alive after being told he died. “We’re excited about increasing opportunities for people who have been through these shocking events to come together and heal.”

About DNA Surprise Retreat

The DNA Surprise Retreat is for adults experiencing the grief and shock that can only be felt following a DNA discovery. The four-day event offers expert-led sessions and community for NPEs, conceived people, and adoptees who have experienced a DNA surprise. The retreat will feature six sessions led by experts on trauma, grief, self-compassion, and more. All meals are included. Attendees can opt to stay on site at a local retreat center or register for the retreat-only portion.

Hourselt and Olson hope to continue offering DNA surprise retreats in the future. “No one imagines that their world will be turned upside down when they send off a DNA test kit,” said Hourselt. “People need to know that they aren’t alone and there is help.”

Learn more at dnasurpriseretreat.com.

HBO is developing a new documentary about unexpected DNA discoveries and is seeking participants willing to share their stories.

The film is to be produced by an award-winning team and directed by an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who is herself an NPE.

Described as “a deeply humane exploration of the seismic shocks that home genetic testing has brought to so many families, and how people are navigating these emotionally-charged journeys of self-discovery,” the project intends to “give voice to people whose lives have been upended by these long hidden truths, and to de-stigmatize some of the shame associated with them.”

If you are interested in participating or finding out more, please visit their website.

By Shane Bouel

Estranged Australian adoptee in reunion

The Faces of NPE Project was created by Carmen Dixon to help NPEs (not parent expected) know they’re not alone and to bring awareness to individuals outside the community. While reflecting on her own NPE journey, she remembered that it took time at first to find information and support. She did ultimately find many support communities and great resources, each with something different to offer. Now, she’s brought something new into the mix—The Faces of NPE Project.

The idea, she says, is simple. The project amasses images of the faces of NPEs. “Every year, we’ll keep adding new submissions to the existing project, and as the number of faces get added, eventually viewers won’t see specific individual portraits but just a sea of faces—and that’s the point, to emphasize how many NPEs exist worldwide.” The images, Dixon says, will be released yearly in June through social media as a public shareable tool that can be used to help generate awareness.

If you would like to be a part of this project, send your photo submission to facesofnpeproject@outlook.com.

Photos submitted between June 24, 2022 and May 14, 2023 will appear in 2023. Find the project on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you’ve made a shocking family discovery, it likely threw you off balance, maybe even knocked you down. You may have been—may still be—bewildered, angry, hurt, confused, anxious, depressed, or ashamed. You may have experienced all of these emotions and others in succession, all at once, or in an unpredictable pattern. You may feel overwhelmed and unable to make sense of all the feelings and at a loss about how to communicate your thoughts. That’s why licensed therapist Eve Sturges created Who Even Am I Anymore: A Process Journal for the Adoptee, Late Discovery Adoptee, Donor Conceived, NPE, and MPE Community. Host of the popular podcast Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges and an NPE (not parent expected) herself, she’s deeply familiar with the many ways the revelation of family secrets can sideline a person. It’s not a substitute for therapy, nor was it intended to be, but this first-of-its-kind journal is just the tool many need to help them on this unexpected journey; and for those who are in therapy, it can play a role, helping them think about their reactions and improving their ability to articulate their feelings. Sturges doesn’t provide answers. Instead, she offers prompts to stimulate your thoughts and kickstart self-expression. She asks questions and provides a safe space in which you can explore the answers, either privately, within a group, or with a therapist. Deceptively simple, it’s a crucial resource that’s certain to make a difference for thousands of NPEs and MPEs.BKJ

Born a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Vicki Charmain Rowan was adopted at two by a white couple who renamed her Susan. Already, at two, it was as if she were a child divided.

Susan Devan Harness has spent most of her life straddling two worlds, never having a secure footing in either, learning early that “It hurts to be an Indian” in the world in which she lives. Her extraordinary memoir, Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, is evidence that one can pluck a living thing from the soil in which it grew and plant it elsewhere, and though it may survive, surviving isn’t the same as thriving. Her account is a reckoning of a bitter isolation and a harsh record of a tenacious search for a sense of belonging. It’s a story streaked with a particular kind of loneliness, the kind that takes hold not in solitude but among people in whom the author can’t see herself reflected.

Raised by a mentally ill mother and an alcoholic father, Harness sees herself as different from those around her, and she’s acutely aware that she’s perceived as different, not only by the townspeople, but even by her father, whose lexicon is laced with ethnic slurs and who speaks derisively about Indians, describing them as gold diggers, deadbeats, “goddam-crazy-drunken-war-whoops.” She’s aware she’s not the cute little blond-haired blue-eyed girl her father says he always wanted. And at the same time that she feels hatred toward him, she’s aware of a self-loathing coiling inside herself.

She encounters few people who looked like her growing up, and she’s reminded at every turn that she doesn’t fit in. She lives in a kind of a gap between cultures where a question took root early: what did it mean to be Indian if she wasn’t raised in an Indian family? “The Indians don’t want me; the whites don’t accept me. They push me into each other’s court, always away from them. I am isolated; I am in-between,” she writes.

Harness fantasizes about finding her “real parents,” and yearns for them to feel real to her. “It is important they feel real because being Indian, living in this white family in this white town, and going to school with these white kids reminds me not only how different I am but how I will never be one of them.” So she dreams of the life that might be more authentic, “where I was ‘real’ instead of ‘adopted; a life where my skin color was the same as everyone else’s and I wouldn’t stand out, isolated; a life where ‘American Indian’ meant something more than ‘I don’t know.’”

When she’s a teenager, her father tells her her biological parents had been killed in a car accident, but years later, when she obtains a hard-won file of information about her adoption, she discovers there’d been no accident—that her mother, Victoria, is living only 30 miles from where she lives. In fits and starts, advances and retreats, Harness embarks on a quest to learn where she came from. She wants an origin story, a glimpse of her childhood, to find out what it means to be an indigenous person—the things no one in her family can tell her. She searches for her birth family and finds strangers. She tries to make meaning, but comes up hard against facts she can’t make sense of. “I don’t know why I was taken from a chaotic family filled with alcoholism and dismembered relationships and placed in a family with alcoholism and dismembered relationships,” she remembers. “My experience is that when I was removed from my blood family, then my birthrights, my membership in a family and a community, and the sense of who I was in the world were also removed from me.”

Although she develops a relationship with her mother and other members of her first family, there’s no place where she isn’t isolated, where she fully belongs, where she isn’t “other.” Still, she retains empathy for the family she can’t fully rejoin and is clear-eyed about the jagged complexity of reunions. “I had been flung to the waiting arms of a world who found Indians repulsive, with our lazy, drunk, promiscuous ways. The wounds I was left with still bled under the right conditions. And my being in her presence put me in emotional limbo. I had longed for this moment, fantasized about it when I was six, dreamed about it when I was fifteen. But my soul filled with dread as the reality check of who I really am seeped into the cracks of my fragmented identity.”

More than an account of her own story, Bitterroot is equally a biting indictment of the brutal assimilation policies of the U.S. Government and the historical injustices—the laws and treaties that dispossessed Native Americans in myriad ways. Harness comes to study anthropology  and labors to bring about change in the child placement policy. She works with other transracial adoptees to shed light on their experiences of living in a white world as American Indians and explores their collective pain of not belonging.

Bitterroot is exquisitely written and deeply moving. It’s essential reading—achingly beautiful prose that will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt they weren’t enough, who’s had to fight for the story that should always have been theirs, who’s ever struggled to find a place to belong.

Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition.

A domestic adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, Beatty was born in the Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, adopted into a working-class family, and told when she was young that she’d been adopted. She writes about the emotional life of an adopted child—the longing, yearning, the feeling of erasure and brokenness—and her fractured encounters with the birth parents she discovered after years battling the bureaucratic gatekeepers of adoption information.

Beatty’s lyrical prose sparks like a live wire. For anyone taken from a parent, her words will resonate, at times landing like a punch to the gut and other times like a balm. Adoptees will feel seen, and those who were not adopted may see adoptees for the first time after reading the memoir.

American Bastard punctures the rose-colored vision of adoption that poses the practice as a strategy for social betterment. In its place she offers the reality: “I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive. An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not—a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss, and grief. It’s too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from the mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents. The primary lifelong trauma.”

Beatty blasts away the whitewashed fantasy that casts adopters as saviors and children as rescued. She offers an unflinching picture of the damage adoption can inflict, the lifelong pain of abandonment it leaves in its wake, the lies and the effacement of identity.  She shatters the myths from the very first page, slaying every erroneous belief held by those who think they know what adoption is. “Maybe you are saying, ‘I’ve felt that way—I always thought I was adopted.’ Please, let me stop you. You weren’t.” She disintegrates argument after argument, makes sawdust of all the well-meaning responses adoptees hear all their lives, like those from people who think they understand because their mothers died when they were young. To one after another she says, “Please, let me stop you.” And sets the reader straight. “This is not about measuring sorrow. But this one’s about you—how you can’t seem to imagine, not even for a second, how it might be for someone who doesn’t know who they are—without boomeranging back to your own life. Try it. Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA—reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”

It’s devastating right from the start. And Beatty, in a letter to adopters, offers this brutal assessment—a startling, uncomfortable, and wholly welcome honesty: “What are you thinking? That you could tie it all up with a bow? You’ve erased a baby human to make yourself happy, to fill a hole, to do a good deed—at least own it: it’s for you.”

In no way a traditional memoir, Beatty’s poetic account mixes lyricism, essayistic rambling, fantasy, and stream of consciousness. It drifts back and forth across time and space, circling its subjects, diverting, and circling back. It breaks down, comes apart, and weaves back together. In a structure like no other, it dips and drops readers into the center of scenes and makes them work to get their balance. At times her words seem to dance on a knife’s edge—language that’s painful and raw and beautiful and ugly and insists on every page that you do not look away.—BKJ

matthew charles is a poet, podcast host, and educator. We talk to him about the experience of being a transracial adoptee (TRA), his emergence as a poet and activist, and the importance of self-expression.

In your bio, you use the phrase “racially marooned.” Can you talk about what that choice of words means to you and how it describes the experience of being a transracial adoptee?

The popular term I’ve heard other transracial adoptees use is “racially isolated” but I coined “racially marooned” because I feel it more viscerally evokes a sense of void in regard to lack of racial mirrors. I have a poem I wrote called “Closed Transracial Adoption is | God’s Gift” where I write, “i’m the first landmass that drifted from Pangea / you don’t understand how alone i feel.”

You’ve written that as a child you experienced life as if a veil covered your eyes. What did you mean by that and what happened to cause the veil to drop?

As a transracial adoptee whose body was raised racially marooned, I was acculturated into whiteness, made to believe that there were my kin, and my allegiances. Yet I was also rejected daily by whiteness through micro and macro aggressions. Realizing that even though my body was literally purchased by whiteness I had no purchase in whiteness was an apocalypse, of sorts. It freed me to practice Sankofa—a Ghanaian symbol that means, “to retrieve.” I had to retrieve the Black essence of who I am in order to reorient myself in the world—not as a(n adopted) child of whiteness but as a doubly displaced African.

Hip-Hop was formative for you as an adolescent and you were a performer. What happened that caused you to shift to poetry?

I’d always practiced writing Haikus to sharpen my ability to say a lot with not many words, so in some senses I was already interdisciplinary. However, at 17 when I was recording music in Saint Louis I lost my voice. I’d end up not able to speak for three years. This vocal disability still affects me to this day. It was in that purgatory that I more consciously altered my craft to poetry because I was afraid I’d never be able to perform or tour again.

When you began to express yourself—first in Hip-Hop and later in poetry—did you immediately take transracial adoption as your subject, or did that happen later?

No, I didn’t use rap to talk about myself. I used rap to project a false image. One of the reasons I shifted to poetry was because how I engaged with the genre of Rap felt constricting. I’d felt like I couldn’t be vulnerable. Themes of adoption began appearing in my work as early as 2018 but I didn’t set out to create a body of work with adoption as the central theme until my newest and as of yet unpublished book of poetry, meet me in the clearing.

Did you ever study formally or was Hip-Hop all the education you needed?

I taught myself all of the forms of Creativity that I practice—poetry, rap, essay, memoir.

Is poetry as much a means of survival as an artistic expression?

I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t have my art practice. As i write in “To Pimp An Adopted Butterfly,” art is one of my most enduring and longstanding relationships, and it has helped me know myself, and in the process of knowing myself it has saved my life countless times.

Similarly, are poetry and activism synonymous for you? Do you see your artistry as a form of activism?

While I don’t see them as synonymous, my artistry often is laced with activist intent. But the first goal in my creative process is to create something meaningful to me.

In art and in activism, who are your influences? Who are the most important voices among transracial adoptees—poets or otherwise? Who do you listen to? Who do you admire?

When it comes to art I like Lucille Clifton, Hafiz, Jay Electronica, and Joy Oladukun. But I’m not sure who the most important voices are for TRAs. Voices I’ve been most impacted by are Daniel Drennan ElAwar, Rebecca Carroll, and Hannah Jackson Matthews.

Can you tell us about your first book, You Can Not Burn the Sun, and the series of books you have planned?

You Can Not Burn The Sun is a self-published book of poetry I wrote during the 2020 Uprisings about my involvement in the Movement for Black Lives in Madison, Wisconsin. The follow-up is meet me in the clearing, a collection of poems about my life as a transracial adoptee raised racially marooned in Roseburg, Oregon. And book3 is in the works, it’s a memoir. Can’t tell ya the title yet, tho.

You created a podcast, little did u know, to “center the lived experiences, learned and inherited wisdom of transracial adoptees.”  Can you say more about how this came about? Did you start this to fill a void in the conversation about adoption?

In January 2021, my big homie Charles Payne told me I should do a podcast for You Can Not Burn The Sun but I was too insecure to pursue that. That was the genesis of the idea of me podcasting. Around August 2021, I realized what I would love to do is create a media platform for transracial adoptees because I wasn’t hearing the kinds of conversations I wanted to hear via podcast. My hope is to make more accessible conversations of race, class, gender, colony, and displacement from a critical adoptee lens.

So far, you’ve posted three episodes with fascinating guests, but you haven’t had a new episode recently. Do you plan to continue and if so, do you have new guests lined up?

Yeah, the next guest is Dr. Daniel ElAwar. I’m very excited about that. Hoping to get Susan Devan Harness on the show too, but we’ll see.

In your introduction to one of your podcast guests, identity reclamation coach Hannah Jackson Matthews, you say that as a result of the reaction to a poem you shared on her platform you realized you weren’t alone in your experience and that it was the first place you felt seen in ways “I’d never dared to show myself.” Can you talk about why it’s important for adoptees to share their voices and tell their stories?

As Black people in the US, we have historically had to explain our existence as oppressed peoples living in a racist society. After 2020, this is happening less so. Yet, as adoptees, the truth of our lived experiences is not as ingrained in the public imagination because the public’s imagination of us is shaped by adoption industry propaganda. First and foremost, sharing our voices is a liberatory act for ourselves because as adoptees we’re often taught not to be critical of adoption—bucking off this expectation empowers us to be more honest with ourselves about ourselves and the world around us. In sharing our voices, we find resonance among other displaced and dispersed peoples, and in that way, sharing our voice becomes an act of building radical community. It is invaluable to be seen and known by the communities we partake in.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.

On Venmo @matthewcharlespoet

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.”

As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black?

While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.—BKJ

In Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, prolific essayist Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart; Abandon Me; and the bestselling essay collection Girlhood, blends memoir with insight and guidance about the art of writing, primarily for an audience of memoirists.

Why highlight a book about the craft of writing in a magazine for adoptees, donor conceived people, and others who’ve experienced misattributed parentage? What does it have to do with you?

Possibly everything.

You needn’t be a writer to be inspired and educated by Body Work. The author’s razor-sharp insights are pertinent to anyone who wants to excavate their own truths; interrogate their traumas and their shame; and, especially, take ownership of their narratives.

To be adoptees or NPEs* means that part of our stories—the most foundational parts—were taken from us before we could ever know them. They were stolen for a host of reasons, but typically to keep others from facing uncomfortable truths—a theft that not only deflected shame from them but projected it onto us, suggesting that we are its source. Secrets were kept from us, and our stories were rewritten to better fit others’ narratives and preserve their integrity at the expense of our own. Our stories may be hidden behind closed doors, guarded by gatekeepers who insist we have no right to try to open them. If we persist and manage to unlock the doors, those for whom secrecy was in their best interest may tell us that what we discover is not ours to share. Sometimes we tell ourselves these lies.

Right out of the gate, Febos blows up any responsibility we might feel to hold tight to our stories and privately tend our traumas, and she positions storytelling as a strategy of reclamation. “Writing,” she says, “is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work in our society that would like to withhold it from those whose stories threaten the regimes that govern this society.”

In those words it’s easy to see the adoptee/NPE world as a microcosm of that larger society—in which the secret keepers who are threatened by our stories try to inhibit our voices. In this regard, her prescription is equally apt: “Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.”

In literary criticism, the genre of memoir has been a durable punching bag, dismissed and derided—despite is popularity—as a vain and trivial exercise in “naval-gazing.”  It’s a judgment that tells would-be storytellers their histories aren’t worthwhile and their traumas are unseemly—not for public consumption. Febos annihilates the argument and makes a compelling case that personal narrative can be healing to the teller at the same time it’s a balm for readers. Writing, she says, “has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others. There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”

She brilliantly explores what’s behind the dismissal of the form and, in particular, the admonition not to write about trauma, and turns the criticism on its head, asserting that writing about trauma is subversive and that resistance to the stories of oppressed people “is a resistance to justice.” Telling one’s story, Febos says, is, in fact, a requirement for recovery from trauma and for integrating the experience into one’s life.

To everyone who’s bought into this idea that trauma is a private matter not suitable to written expression, she’s emphatic: “Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a time-worn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and each other’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”

Febos acknowledges secrets as the seed of almost all her writing and recognizes the power of untold secrets to imprison. She argues that writing can liberate us both from our fears about the subjects we hesitate to write about and form the isolation we feel about them, demonstrating to ourselves and readers that we’re not alone.

The third of the book’s four essay chapters, “A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables About Writing About Other People,” will be of special interest to many NPEs who wonder how to tell their stories when doing so may cause collateral damage. Febos asks who has the right to tell a story and offers perspective for how to look at the ethical issues that may arise when the narrative you have to share could upset or wound others.

Whether you wish to write to publish or to simply to bear witness and feel heard, there’s much in Body Work that will validate your aspirations and inform your process. Febos inspires and encourages and insists not only that personal narratives are valuable but also that creating and sharing them are imperative. If you’ve been shamed, made vulnerable, been traumatized, told that your story isn’t yours to tell, Body Work will speak to you.

*NPE: not parent expected, non-paternal event, non-paternity event—BKJ

Everyone who’s had a DNA surprise will recognize themselves in the pages of Leeanne R. Hay’s NPE* A Story Guide for Unexpected Discoveries. Hay, a freelance journalist who’s earned certificates from the University of Florida College of Social Work, has crafted a memoir/guidebook hybrid, drawing substantially from her own NPE story and those of others to illustrate common experiences and issues that arise when family secrets are revealed and individuals learn that the families in which they were raised may not be their families of origin.

In 2017, on a whim, Hay purchased a DNA test, the results of which were shocking. Not only did she learn that the man who raised her was not her father, she discovered at the same time that her biological father was a man she’d known and loved since she was a child. And there began a quest to learn as much as she could about her origins, her ethnicity, and how such a monumental secret could have been kept from her. She felt rage toward her mother, by then deceased, bewilderment about her ethnic identity, and, soon, an overpowering sense of anger and helplessness.

If you’ve had a DNA surprise, these feelings likely will be all too familiar, and Hay offers the much-needed comfort that comes from knowing that you’re not the only one whose ever had these experiences and emotions or the only one who doesn’t know which way to turn. She offers gentle guidance about the range of situations and complications that may arise, from how to communicate an NPE discovery to others, how to use DNA to search for family, how to communicate with new relatives, and how to contemplate and make a name change, as well as the steps needed to move forward. She addresses the emotional pitfalls, including isolation, loss, and grief, and the repercussions for others who are affected by an MPE’s discovery. In addition to noting helpful resources, Hay also advises readers about the need to carefully assess resources to determine if they are truly helpful, expert-based, and reputable.

Although the book is written for MPEs and offers strategies for navigating the journey toward understanding, healing, and hope, its greatest strength may be as a guide for friends and family members, both families of origin and birth families. MPEs often rightly complain that no one understands what the experience is really like and struggle to express their feelings. Others may not understand and may believe that the MPE is overly sensitive or exaggerating the impact. Hay makes it clear that isn’t the case and advises people contacted by MPEs how to receive them with grace and understanding. This important aspect of the book can go a long way toward increasing awareness and understanding of the NPE/MPE experience and the needs of individuals in the wake of a DNA surprise.

A compassionate and clear-eyed guide to a challenging subject, it’s likely to inspire others to help fill the knowledge void and shine more light on the needs of NPEs and MPEs.Leanne R. Hay is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. She’s a graduate of Villanova University, with a BA in history and minors in sociology and criminal justice. While researching this book, she earned professional certificates from Florida State University College of Social Work in Trauma & Resilience. She lives in Texas with her husband and their miniature Schnauzer rescue pup Arfie. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter. Find the book here. 

A health scare kickstarted Julie Ryan McGue’s five-year search for her birth family, recounted in her new memoir, “Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging,” which will be published by She Writes Press in May.By Julie McGueLisa gives me a warm hug, and I introduce her to Jenny. “This is my twin sister.”

Her eyes flick from Jenny to me several times. “Wow. You two really do look alike.”

Jenny laughs and glances over at me. “About a month ago, we learned through DNA testing that we’re identical.” This isn’t a setup. Jenny and I hadn’t planned on bringing this up today.

Tagging on to my sister’s comment, I’m conscious of keeping my voice free of accusation. “When we were adopted, Catholic Charities told my parents that we were fraternal twins. Perhaps you can shed light on how this mistake might have happened?”

A slight frown erases Lisa’s smile. “Before coming over here to meet you, I studied your file. Your birth mother did not deliver you here at St. Vincent’s but at a maternity hospital. Whatever information was sent over from the hospital is what would have been captured in the records. I’m sorry for the error, but I’m happy you found out the truth.” So there it is, an apology, leaving me with no one to blame.

Lisa’s perfectly arched eyebrows frame her blue-green eyes. Her smile reappears. “Since you’ve already viewed the old photographs down the hall, I’ll show you a few other areas, and then we can finish in the chapel.”

We follow Lisa to the old elevator. As she walks, the social worker gathers her long brown hair into one fist and then drops it behind her shoulders. I remember this habit of hers from the post-adoption support group meeting last month.

The format of the meeting was simple. After signing in, we went around the U-shaped conference table and stated our name, disclosed whether we were an adoptee, birth parent, or adoptive parent, and then we shared where we were in the search and reunion process. If we brought someone with us, we introduced them.

For the icebreaker piece, Lisa asked that we offer a response to this question: “If you could say one thing to the family member you seek, what would that be?”

Ethnically and racially diverse, the group members ran the spectrum in age from thirtysomethings to seventy-year-olds. With the exception of two birth mothers, the rest were adult adoptees, and all but three were women. The common thread: Catholic Charities had facilitated everyone’s adoption. I was grateful that Howie and I had chosen seats at one end of the horseshoe. Since this was my first meeting, it settled my nerves to hear the group’s answers before taking my turn.

More than half of us were waiting to hear back from a birth parent or birth daughter/son. From my recent experience of waiting weeks for my birth mom to answer Linda’s outreach, I knew how excruciating passing the time can be. A woman, I guessed her to be in her late thirties, had been anticipating a response from her birth mother for over a year. When she broke down in sobs during her introduction, the Kleenex box at the center of the table shot over to her like a hockey puck.

Two older adoptees, both males, had yet to decide to send their first outreach letter. Howie fell in this category. For them, taking in the experiences of the group and deliberating over the pros and cons of search and reunion kept bringing them to the meetings. I understood their reluctance. Only twice in my fifty-one years had I seriously considered looking into my own adoption. If it hadn’t been for the breast biopsy pushing me down this path, I might not have learned of the confidential intermediary program or Catholic Charities Post Adoption Services.

One of the birth mothers and a female adoptee shared their reunion stories. Both glowed like someone who’d recently fallen in love. They passed around photos of themselves beaming, wrapped in tight embraces with their newfound relatives. To the group’s credit, each of us ogled at how much the searchers resembled their child or parent, and each attendee professed such joy and support for the searcher that I wondered why I’d delayed in joining such a compassionate crowd. Given the recent dismissal by my birth mom, I doubted I’d be sharing photos of my twin and me flanking our birth mother anytime soon. Nor could I envision Jenny and me sandwiched between both of our mothers—that thought almost made me laugh out loud.

When it was my turn to talk, I clasped my sweaty hands tightly in my lap. “I’m Julie. This is my first meeting. I’m an adoptee.” I tried to make eye contact with the people across the table. “I also happen to be a twin. Thanks to Catholic Charities’ policy of keeping twins together, my sister and I were adopted into the same family.” I smiled at Lisa, our moderator, and then I looked down at the tabletop. “Due to health concerns, I began the search for my birth mother last year.” I felt my brother’s reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Last month, I learned that she didn’t want to connect with us. I’m hoping she’ll change her mind someday.” When I glanced up, I caught the Kleenex box just in time.

Plucking a tissue, I introduced Howie. “He was adopted through Catholic Charities too and is considering a search for his birth relatives.”

Lisa jumped in. “And Julie, how would you answer the icebreaker question?”

The tissue balled up in my palm. I’d thought hard about this when the others spoke. The angry-rejected-adoptee-me, the one I’d been working hard at controlling these days, wanted to ask my birth mom: how could she look herself in the mirror every day–she who gave up not one, but two daughters, and rejected both of them? Twice.

The person-that-was-me-before-this-adoption-search, the one I was desperately trying to reclaim 24/7, chose a different response to offer the group. “I would ask her if she has thought of my sister and me throughout her life, and if she ever wondered what had happened to us.”Julie Ryan McGue is an author, a domestic adoptee, and an identical twin. She writes extensively about finding out who you are, where you belong and making sense of it. Her weekly blogs That Girl, This Life and her monthly column at The Beacher focus on identity, family, and life’s quirky moments. Born in Chicago, Illinois, McGue received a BA from Indiana University in psychology and an MM in Marketing from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University. She’s served multiple terms on the board of the Midwest Adoption Center and is an active member of the American Adoption Congress. Married for more than 35 years, McGue and her husband split their time between Northwest Indiana and Sarasota, Florida. She’s the mother of four adult children and has three grandsons. If she’s not at her computer, McGue is on the tennis court or out exploring with her Nikon, and she’s working on a collection of personal essays. Visit her website, and find her on Facebook, on Twitter @juliermcgue, and on Instagram @Juliemcgue.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

It’s not hyperbole to say I’ve never seen a book quite like Megan Culhane Galbraith’s extraordinary hybrid work of creative nonfiction, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book. Experimental in form and structure, it’s memoir, but at the same time a striking visual art project, an intellectual inquiry into the nature of memory, and a frightful window on the failures and brutalities of the American system of adoption.

While each aspect is equally compelling, the emotional heart of the book is the origin story of a girl who had three mothers before she was half a year old and the experience of the woman she grew to be, who, only during her own pregnancy, was overwhelmed by need to know her history and learn about her first mother.

It’s written in a powerful voice that can veer from playful to mournful and lingers on wonder and curiosity. The language at turns is discursive, fragmented, stream of conscious, and deeply thoughtful. Although Galbraith expresses a unique sensibility, adoptees and others who have yearned to know about their origins will see themselves here. The author’s meditations on the nature of identity, her compulsion toward self-erasure, and her fear of abandonment likely will resonate.

Here, the author shares an excerpt from this exceptional book, which will be released on May 21, 2021. You can support Indie booksellers and pre-order The Guild of the Infant Saviour at bookshop.org.

BKJShe was nineteen when she gave birth to me. I’d lost my virginity when I was nineteen.

She was a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin. I’m a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin.

On the pages, in her halting and nearly unintelligible penmanship, I was struck by how much I identified with her. Even her handwriting resembled mine.

TALENTS, HOBBIES, SPECIAL INTERESTS
very organized
good singing voice
interest in the arts, dancing (ballet + modern)
acting, writing poetry, reading

FUTURE ASPIRATIONS
To be a magazine editor

———

It is incredible how few concrete details I needed to feel connected across time. We shared a mutual love of books, music, and dance. I’d begged my parents to let me play the violin beginning in fourth grade. I’d danced with The Royal Academy of Dance up until high school, written poetry, fiction, and essays, and spent so much time reading in solitude that my adoptive mother once asked, “Honey, don’t you want to go outside and play?”

On my father’s side, she’d listed no age, just that he was Caucasian and English. He was more than six feet tall with blue eyes, blond hair, and fair skin. In the sections for his interests and aspirations she noted:

TALENTS, HOBBIES, INTERESTS: ?
FUTURE ASPIRATIONS: ?

I began to think about who I was at nineteen—a virgin for starters—and how incomprehensible it would have been to become a mother when my own future felt like it was just beginning.

———

MANNER IN WHICH PLANS FOR THE CHILD’S FUTURE WERE MADE BY THE PARENTS. REASONS FOR CHILD BEING PLACED FOR ADOPTION:

Since the birth mother is unwed, she is receiving no support from the birth father and thinks it best for the child to be adopted by a stable, loving family to best offer the child all the advantages she is unable to give.

———

She didn’t receive prenatal care until she was five months pregnant according to the paperwork. And he was no saint, but she also seemed forthright and unashamed.

———

DRUGS TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY

Alcohol:                                        AMOUNT: an occasional beer                                        HOW OFTEN: once/twice a week

Marijuana:                                    WHEN: first 4–5 months                                                 AMOUNT: total about 1 oz.

Cigarettes:                                   WHEN: throughout                                                          AMOUNT: 10–15/daily

———

She’d updated the paperwork within the last ten years. Her mother, my grandmother, had taken a drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES) during her pregnancy. DES was a synthetic form of estrogen given to women between 1940 and 1971 to prevent miscarriage. The daughters of women who used DES were forty times more likely to develop cancers of the cervix and vagina.

Medical terminology deemed them “DES Daughters.”

The drug’s side effects were known to skip a generation, meaning, they may have affected me—or worse my unborn child. Late-onset and irregular periods were one side effect for DES granddaughters like me. I didn’t get my period until I was sixteen: my biological mother got hers at around eleven. Other risks included infertility, cancer, congenital disabilities, and “fewer live births.”

I worked myself into a frenzy about this. I called my doctor; I demanded they double-check the health of my baby. I went to the library and researched the effects and side effects of DES. After I’d calmed myself, what struck me most was that my birth mother had cared enough to update my file.

One of my biggest fears about finding her was that she wouldn’t want to be found. But here she’d left a medical clue in these papers that signaled she was thinking about me. She’d left a Hansel and Gretel-like trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, as if willing me to find her.

So I did.

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2017, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Redivider, Catapult, Hobart, Longreads, and Hotel America, among others. She is associate director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Look for her on Twitter, on Instagram here and here, and on Facebook here and here. 

Jeff award-winning actress and musician Cory Goodrich has released her first memoir, Folksong: A Ballad of Death, Discovery, and DNA, published by Finn-Phyllis Press. Folksong is at once a remarkable memoir of love and longing, an emotional ballad of grief and forgiveness, an ode to self-discovery, and a heart-stirring look at the lengths to which a family will go to protect themselves and each other.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

 

Are we better off forgetting the details?

I started writing this memoir as a way to process my mother’s death and remember the events surrounding it as they happened before coping mechanisms settled in to destroy the memories in order to protect me. But I haven’t yet been able to write about the actual moment of her death. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding reliving those moments because writing them down will make them real again in my mind and bring me one step closer to a breakdown.

My mother went out of this world like she came in. “The Red Menace,” as she was called by someone along the way—probably my father, made her own choice as to when to go. There was no peaceful exit, even though we were there, holding her hands and singing to her. A timebomb went off and simultaneously destroyed her body and my life. Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but I was simply not prepared for the devastation left in her wake or for the PTSD I experienced, like a soldier having returned from war.

I’ll be honest: I was a little worried about my mental health in the months after she died. I was able to cope better when I was with my brothers and sister. Maybe something about being together again reminded me that, in spite of the years apart and the distance between us, we are still a family. We grew up together and got on each other’s nerves as children (and still do now as adults). When we are together, I remember I am not just an interloper to their happy little trio. Nothing has changed.

But when home alone, or even at home with David and the girls, I still get a little paranoid. Obsessive. Worried that I don’t belong to this family, and that there was a plot to keep the truth from me. To punish me.

I know this is not true, but my brain goes there.

I talk out loud to myself when I am alone making coffee.

I argue with myself. I start to doubt the information I’ve been given from various people, and I make up wild conspiracy theories in my head. I feel just a small crack emerge in my sanity, and I worry that another hit will blow that motherfucker wide open and I will fall down the chasm of insanity like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Down, down, down, down…

1989, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

I’m twenty-one and I’m doing a national children’s theatre tour of Alice in Wonderland. We are performing at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster. For some reason, we have a couple of free days after this performance, before our little bus-and-truck production moves on to the next city. Lancaster is only an hour’s drive from Wilmington, so I’ve asked my father, Tom, to come pick me up so we can spend a few days together before my cross-country tour resumes. I arrange for a ticket to be held at the box office under his name, and I tell him I will meet him out front after the show.

I am excited because Daddy has never seen me perform; he saw none of my high school choir concerts or musicals or college plays or cabarets. Nothing. I have only seen him in his world—in Delaware. He has never seen me in mine. I am thrilled that he will not only finally see me perform but he will watch me play Alice, the title character in a really charming musical for young audiences.

I’m nervous during the performance, knowing he is there in the audience, but inside I am beaming. My father is finally seeing me, the authentic me. Not the little girl but a woman, a paid performer. I AM pretty enough to be an actress.

I walk outside of the theatre after the performance, and I see Daddy standing by the box office window. I wonder, as I do every year when I see him again, if I should hug him. I run to him and pause awkwardly, and he says hello. I don’t hug him even though I want to. I wait for him to say something about my performance, and when he doesn’t, I self-consciously ask how he liked the show. “Oh, I didn’t see it. I waited out here.”

It would be cliché to say, “time stopped” or “my heart sank into my stomach,” but those things happened. The moment took my breath away—also cliché, but so true. All those years I spent growing up five-hundred miles away from him in Michigan, all the missed high school concerts, the leads in school plays, the chorus solos—these were the things that defined me. And here was the one chance he had to see—in person—the person I was and the life I had chosen, and he didn’t walk into the building. He was there, but he waited outside.

Sometimes, the things that most define our lives are not the things that happen, but the things that don’t.

Daddy died a year later, so there was never another opportunity, and even if there had been, I doubt he would have walked into the building then either. It plagues me. Did he not understand how important performing was to me? Did he just not care? Was this the ultimate metaphor for my life? My father never saw me perform. My father never saw me. My father never knew me.

And I never knew my father.

“There are things you don’t know about your father, Cory.”

And this is why I worry that another blow to the tiny but delicate crack in my sanity will shatter me wide open.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PRETTY LIES

October 5, 2017—One day post surgery

I spend all day at the hospital with Jim. Mama drifts in and out of consciousness, but she has been down deep most of the day. She wakes periodically and claws at the tube, but the breathing machine is still doing 95% of the work, pushing air in and out of her lungs. We are frustrated and heartsick, but the nurses and doctors keep repeating flatly that she is not processing the anesthesia in a normal fashion (duh), but it is nothing to worry about—everyone responds differently. I ask what they are giving her for her pain, and they say Tylenol and I lose my shit again. Tylenol doesn’t even begin to alleviate one of my headaches, how could it possibly work on a body cleaved in two? They refuse to give her anything stronger despite my pleas, and I wonder if they think the sheer pain will rouse her from her coma.

At around seven, Jim leaves the hospital to go pick up my sister Susie from the airport. He will take her back to the house in Green Valley, and I will sit vigil with my mother until I am too weary to take any more. I am curled up in the hard chair, playing music for her, trying to focus on my work as producer of a Christmas CD for the charity organization Season of Concern. Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men is about the furthest thing from my mind right now, so I get very little done. I crack open The House at Riverton and read the first page for the third time, but I cannot focus, so back into my bag it goes. I hold my mother’s hand and self-consciously talk to her. Can she hear me? What do I have to say, anyway? Will sappy declarations of love mean anything, or will she wonder who the hell this emotional basket-case child is? But I talk anyway and sing softly to her, feeling foolish but determined to let her know that I am there.

Mark, the day nurse, is in and out of the tiny ICU room, and he smiles and gives me encouragement, but I can see he is frustrated looking at the numbers on my mother’s chart. He has been adjusting levels of various medications throughout the course of the day, but nothing seems to satisfy him. I’ve asked him several times if my mother’s condition is something he’s seen before, and each time he shrugs and says, “I’ve seen it all.” But now that Jim is out of the room, his answer changes. He wants me to know the truth because he knows I know he has been lying.

Mark is short and sturdy; a comfortable man. I’ve also learned he is a musician, so I instinctively trust him. He is the type of man you could lean on, so I do. “Mark, is this normal?” I ask again.

He sighs and sits down in the chair next to me. He takes my hand. “No. It’s not. She is down so deep, and if she doesn’t start breathing on her own soon, you are going to have to make some difficult choices.”

“She doesn’t want this,” I tell him, shaking my head furiously. I can feel her not coming up for air, not breathing on her own because she wants to die, but you can’t exactly pull the plug on an intuition.

“Are there any other options? Is there anything else we can do?”

“Dialysis,” Mark tells me, “but we really don’t want to put her through that. It’s extreme.” He takes my other hand and looks me straight in the eyes. “So, we are going to do everything we can to get her out of this before we go that route.”

Okay…Dialysis—not a good sign.

I thank Mark for his forthrightness and his sympathy. He gives me courage by telling me the truth.

Here’s the thing about the truth: It is usually easier to handle than a lie. When you tell a lie, the person you are telling it to usually knows, somewhere inside. They may not consciously realize it, but an uneasy feeling sets in. They start to doubt themselves and their instincts, and they know something is wrong, even if they can’t quite put a finger on what that something is.

It works that way for me, anyway. I can deal with a hard truth. A pretty lie, on the other hand, is like walking in quicksand, every step pulling me further down and under, just like my mother is down and under in her postoperative coma.

Tell me the truth so I am not basing my life on a lie: Have you guessed my mother’s secret yet?Cory Goodrich came to Chicago to pursue her dream of acting in 1989. Born in Wilmington, Delaware and raised in Clarkston, Michigan, she’s a Jeff Award-winning best actress for her roles as Mother in Drury Lane Oakbrook’s acclaimed production of Ragtime and as June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash revue Ring of Fire at Mercury Theater Chicago. A five-time Jeff nominee, Goodrich has performed in productions at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Chicago Shakespeare, Theatre at the Center, Ravinia, Candlelight, and Drury Lane. A graduate of Michigan State University, she’s also a singer/songwriter, producer, writer, mother of two, and children’s composer with two award-winning CDs, Hush and Wiggly Toes and a recording artist with original country album W.O.M.A.N. As the recipient of the 2015 Cohen-Grappel Recording Endowment, Goodrich produced Wildwood Flower, a collection of traditional and original folk songs featuring the autoharp. Her latest experimental folk album, produced with The Quiet Regret’s Ethan Deppe, is set to drop in March and features music from her memoir. Visit her website, find her on Facebook, and on Instagram @folksongbook and @corygoodrich.

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple.

To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences.

Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

—BKJ

Excerpt from We Are All Human Beings

By Paul Kimball

 

For about a week I called the two numbers. As I recall, the New York number had a strange answering machine message. The L.A. number would just ring without any response. Try to imagine what this feels like. If she answers, I am going to speak with my birth mother for the first time. Perhaps this isn’t her, just a coincidence. I don’t know what to expect. I am so frightened. Once she answers there is no turning back. Both of our lives are changed in an instant. She has no idea that I am trying to contact her. I planned out my opening remarks carefully.

And then she answered.

It was the L.A. number. The one that kept ringing. This is how I remember the phone call. Luckily, I wrote this in my journal back in 2000.

Birthmother Wendy: “Hello.”

Me: “Hello. My name is Paul Kimball and I am with musicians local 189 in Stockton, California. I am looking for a professional cellist named Wendy Brennan.” With this information, she could hang up on me but always be able to find me.

Wendy: This is she. Later she told me that she thought that she was being asked to play chamber music.

Pause, pause, pause.

Me: “I don’t quite know how to say this but does the name Frank Novak mean anything to you?”

Pause.

Wendy: “It might.” It might? Does this mean that she knows who I am?

I don’t remember the next exchange.

Wendy: “Are you of Armenian descent?” She knows who I am, and I know who she is. No one but my birth mother would ask that question out of the blue.

Me: “Yes I am half Armenian.”

Wendy: “Oh my God. Where were you born?”

Me: “In Fort Bragg California, November of 1962. I think we both know who we are.”

We talked on the phone for three hours.

It was so friendly. I was ecstatic! I have never felt so complete in my entire life. A hole had been filled. I had a new friend. If that is how you describe being reunited! We were both classical musicians. We both played in orchestras. We were both nice and friendly. I had a birth sister who did not know of me. I was married with two daughters. She had performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as a soloist to good reviews. She had lived with Nadia Boulanger, the esteemed teacher of composers and studied cello with Paul Tortelier, the great cellist. She had been in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski and played in Broadway Pit Orchestras. I conduct orchestra pits for musicals. She had a New York accent. She split her time between L.A. and New York. I loved this woman. “The capacity for love had expanded.” She had a 31-year-old daughter who attended Juilliard as a child flute player and was involved as an actress in T.V., movies, and commercials. I act in plays and was even in a dopey local T.V. commercial in Stockton that aired constantly. People still talk about it on occasion.

We decided to meet as soon as possible. We had thought of a halfway point, but I wanted to drive down to her apartment in L.A.

I was teaching elementary music at T.C.K. at the time. I updated my fellow teachers on the story. I will always love them for their compassion.

The night before I left, I visited my adopted parents, Lorna and Bob. I held their hands and told them that I loved them. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to do this. They assured me that it was okay. Mom said that she didn’t feel threatened. From my journal in 2000. “I love them so much! They are my best friends. I tell them everything. I never want to lose them, and I get scared I might. I also don’t want to lose Wendy and Raya (birth sister). Both families are very important to me as are the Mullers (In-laws). I need all of them. I love Jeanette, Seth and Amy. I love Dominee, Alyssa and Ashley. These are my family members and I love them.”

It was time to drive to L.A. That week I had been only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. The evening before the drive I went to bed at 11:45 p.m. and woke up at 3:30 a.m. I copied down my story of Scream as well as a tribute to Jacqueline Du Pre that I had put in my journal in 1987. This was 13 years before meeting Wendy. When I wrote this, Jacqueline Du Pre had just passed away. I had no clue that my birth mother was a cellist.

The following was written 32 years earlier.

Reflections on Jacqueline Du Pre – October 23^rd, 1987

Jackie died on October 19^th of the ill fated disease, Multiple Sclerosis. She was 43, I believe. She has been and probably always will be my favorite musician, the one that I listen to more than anyone else. I consider her one of my teachers even though we never met.

I first heard of her when some fellow Berkeley High students were talking. They had seen and heard Schubert’s Trout Quintet on PBS. Jacky, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta were the players! Later when Rebecca (Strauss) and I were in the Berkeley Public Library we came across a Du Pre record and Becca said: “Paul. Check this out. I’ve never heard the record but you will love Du Pre.” When we listened to it I felt almost sick with emotion. I was struck by the absolute sincerity of her playing. She expressed so much that there was simply no way to miss it. Her tone is golden. It is her pure soul with nothing to disturb it. Every time I hear her, I am inspired, embarrassed by my own inhibitions in music, bewildered, determined, determined to not miss the wonders of life as I pass through it. Her second recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is one of the greatest musical accomplishments. In some of my most emotional moments I have often felt them by reliving her performance of this piece. The opening theme after the great introduction represents so much painful longing. It reaches into space, searching, searching for something. To me it is so lonely. Perhaps I relate this to the loneliness I felt in college. I often remember going for long walks and thinking about this theme with her yearning tone and feeling sad, yet expressing the sadness, not just holding it in. Lorna would be proud!

In my own playing I hear her traits. Trying to achieve a personal tone, letting the wonderful stresses in phrases come alive, but most of all, trying to be absolutely free and deeply sincere in expression.

Thank you Jackie. I love you and am grateful for your greatness. May you rest in peace having lived a difficult but important life.

Little did I know that in a way, I was paying tribute to my lost birth mother; my original musician, cellist. I felt sick with emotion listening to Jacqueline Du Pre but didn’t know the full reason. How could I? I was remembering Wendy’s playing from before I was born.Paul Kimball is an active musician, choir teacher, French hornist, and actor in Stockton, California. As a baby, he lived in foster care and was eventually adopted by a liberal Berkeley family in the 1960s. He is married to Dr. Dominee Muller-Kimball. They have two daughters, Ashley and Alyssa. Look for his book here. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Searching for Mom, an award-winning memoir by Sara Easterly, pulls back the veil on adoption, revealing its harsher side—the primal wound that leaves a child desperate to feel worthy, to belong, to be good enough. Easterly was adopted at two days old, born to an adolescent girl coerced to relinquish her in a “grey-market” adoption. She had difficulty attaching to her adoptive mother and struggled with feelings of abandonment by her birthmother, which spurred an impossible quest for perfection, a crisis of faith and trust, and a battle with overwhelming emotions. She felt broken and cast off, unwanted. To protect her adoptive mother’s feelings, she suppressed her deep longing for and curiosity about her birthmother, putting her own needs and desires last to keep a peace, until finally, when she was nearly 40, she admitted her desire to search. Her adoptive mother reacted with a cocktail of emotions including fear, anger, and defensiveness. And then everything changed, when she revealed that in fact Sara had been wanted by her birth mother, causing Sara to reevaluate everything she’d come to believe. In Searching for Mom, Easterly traces her search for, and reunion with, her birthmother, the strain it placed on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and the complicated bond she shared with both women. More than a search tale, it’s a story about love, faith, and spiritual transformation. Here, the author shares an excerpt from her compelling memoir—its first chapter.

—BKJ

Taking Flight

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

—Romans 15:1 (ESV)

 

Monday morning. I’d flown home to Seattle, back from Denver long enough to toss dirty clothes out of their suitcases and start a load of laundry. While my two daughters reacquainted with their dolls and Magna-Tiles, I recalled my mom’s response when I’d told her that I planned to return to Denver for another visit the following week.

“Oh. I’m not sure I’ll still be here then, Sara.” Mom started to say goodbye.

I cut her off.

“No. I’ll see you again.” I smiled, trying to pretend this was any other farewell. Trying to convince her—convince myself—that this wasn’t really The End. There was no way Mom was dying. I’d been fabricating this kind of confidence about her life for the last five years.

But goodbye was in Mom’s eyes. Goodbye was in her embrace, weak as it was, even though I’d grown accustomed to “air hugs”—lest I spread germs to her highly susceptible lungs and body.

Suddenly, I felt sure of nothing. I faked my way back to life-as-usual on the plane ride home, barely able to process anything my children were saying. I was Mama-on-Autopilot, dragging carseats off the plane, lugging weary bodies into the car and then inside the house, washing airplane crud off tiny hands. Not that any of this was unusual. Numbed-out mom dutifully attending to the needs of small people while furtively fixating on a swirling emotional storm was one of my specialties.

I needed to talk to someone so I called a close friend. Heather had been through this herself, when her mother died a few summers earlier.

“You’re back in Seattle?” she asked skeptically, confirming my unease.

“Yes, but I’ll go back to Denver again next week,” I said. “I told my mom I’m going to go back again next Monday.”

After an awkward pause, Heather said, “I hesitate to tell you this, but the end can go pretty fast.”

“Faster than a week?”

“I’m sure it’s different for everyone,” she said. “I just know it went really fast for my mom. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Unsettled, I called my sister for reassurance.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s been a change since you left,” Amy said.

Even though we’d been home for less than an hour, I moved full throttle, rebooking a flight back to Denver that would leave in two hours. After dropping Violet and Olive off at a friend’s house, I sped my way through childcare and scheduling plans while en route to the airport—calling my in-laws, the preschool teacher, babysitters, and my closest friends and neighbors.

For a moment, I paused from the grim matter at hand to applaud myself. As a new parent I’d learned about the importance of a support village—something often lacking in this isolating age without live-in grandparents or “aunties” next door, and thanks to a fleeing-from-church culture. Mindful of this, and in lieu of in-city grandparents and church-based community, I’d deliberately worked to surround my family with our own “village.” Look at those efforts pay off! I told myself.

All the week’s plans came together as I rounded my way into the parking garage at SeaTac airport. My husband Jeff, who’d been on a business trip, would land in Seattle within thirty minutes of my flight’s departure out of Seattle. That left just the right amount of overlap for me to hand him the car keys, tell him he’d find the car in row 5J of the parking garage, text him the week’s schedule for the kids, and kiss his stunned face on the cheek.

As an event planner by trade, I’d always been a master of logistics. But I usually spent months working on each event. This rushed effort surpassed anything I’d attempted before. Did I have help on my side? I wondered, and then caught a flit of an answer: Maybe this is the kindness God doles out when your mom is dying. In any case, the fact that everything lined up so effortlessly and would be so gentle on my daughters, made me think that I was flying in the right direction. I just hoped I’d get there in time.

More importantly, I hoped to be up for the challenge. Mom had been preparing for her death for the last four months, but that didn’t mean I had.

Sure, I’d read Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley. I’d even bought copies for my dad, sister, aunt, and grandma. I’d read about a dying mother who kept appealing to her family with travel metaphors, but whose family didn’t grasp that her last request wasn’t literal, which created a lot of unnecessary anguish for everyone during her final days.1 As a writer and reader, looking for meaning was right in my wheelhouse. I figured I’d be equipped to decipher any metaphors Mom might employ.

I’d also found out that dying people often converse with someone significant from their past who has already died, and how upsetting it can be for them if they aren’t believed. According to Callanan and Kelley, family members are the most qualified to figure out any of the hidden messages that could come from one of these conversations.2

When I was in my twenties, my deceased grandfather visited me during a dream while I slept on the pull-out sofa at my grandma’s place. It was a comforting dream, but the intensity of it began to pull me from sleep. My adored Papa was right there, I knew, and I fervently wanted to see him again. As my eyes slowly opened, I watched Papa’s translucent shape, lying right next to mine, evaporate. The mystical moment, too, dissipated. For the next two days I pondered talking to Mom about it. I wanted her to help me understand this encounter I’d had with her father, but she was a self-described “fundamentalist Christian,” and I figured she’d judge my spiritual experience as “New Age nonsense.” When I finally worked up my courage and recounted the story, though, Mom urged me to call Grandma.

“She’s been waiting for a sign from Papa,” she said, “She’ll want to know he’s at peace.”

Mom had helped me decipher Papa’s hidden message, and I, in turn, planned to help her. Maybe there’s more mystery around death and dying than we realize. I planned to be open to it, anyway. As Callanan and Kelley had said, “We can best respond to people who experience the presence of someone not alive by expecting it to happen.”3

Expectant or not, this was mostly practical book learning—savory knowledge that fed my brain and my propensity as an adoptee to believe in far-fetched stories. My emaciated heart, meanwhile, beat with a hankering for more.

Because my heart knew that I’d been afraid to face the reality of Mom’s declining health. I’d been too scared to speak important things that needed saying. I passed over vulnerable opportunities with jokes, denial, indifference, feigned confidence, forced control. I’d locked my feelings in a thick protective casing so I wouldn’t have to deal with whatever I was supposed to feel when I thought about the rest of my life without my mom—while wrestling with memories of our last two tumultuous years.

Deep down, did I ever even accept her as my mother? I would miss her for sure. Perhaps more for my daughters, only four and five, who wouldn’t get a chance to truly know her. But would it profoundly affect me when she was gone?

I felt so detached as I stared at the grey clouds outside the airplane window. But I’d vowed to give Mom myfinal gift: the peaceful death she deserved, the death a Good Adoptee⁴ owed her, the death I felt I needed to give her to prove my appreciation and loyalty.

I reached under the seat for my laptop and began compiling family photos for her memorial slideshow. I planned to leverage my event-planning skills to pull together the funeral she never would have dared to dream up.

Turbulence began to agitate the plane—the tell-tale sign that the Rocky Mountains were behind us as we approached Denver. I gripped the arm rests of my seat as the plane jerked in the sky.

Pushing away my feelings to give Mom what she needed was my training ground for becoming a parent. Ignoring my needs helped me get the job done: Making dinner when I’d rather be lounging on the couch devouring a good book … setting aside my own upsets or fears in order to soothe equally intense ones for my girls … hiding my true feelings in the face of hopes and disappointments. This all served me as a mother, didn’t it?

When I dared to look at the truth, I knew it served me as a daughter, too. It’s how I’d learned to stay safe, keep Mom close. Dutifully choosing her needs over mine ensured that she’d never leave me. Surely that’s where everything went so wrong, where I’d messed it all up, with my first mother.

Only Mom was about to leave me, too.

Images of being severed from her approached as fast as the plane slammed onto the tarmac. I thought about the pictures I’d just looked at—Mom’s glowing face, delighting in me, proud of me. Would I ever exude that much love for my daughters, the way Mom overflowed with it for us? Could I be as present as she always seemed to be?

Remember her manipulation and lies, though, I reminded myself. Her jealousy. Her mean streak. The last two years of mother-daughter turmoil because I broke the silence, stopped pretending … Those all told a different story.

A story I didn’t want to end this way.

A story I didn’t want to end at all.

I didn’t want Mom to die, and I definitely didn’t want our “us” to conclude before I could find the words my heart longed to say. I wanted to grow, become the person I yearned to be. A daughter—and a mother—who didn’t act out of obligation, a girl whose heart wasn’t unflappable, a human who dared to feel.

If only it were that easy.

© 2019 by Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

Read her essay on Severance here.