adoption

By Akara Skye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Michelle Hensley

Sometimes…

She says in her tiny voice

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

But there is no one to hear her.

Sometimes …

She says in her bit bigger voice

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

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

Sometimes….

She starts again.

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

What if I…?

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

SOMETIMES….

She speaks out, and her voice is steady.

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

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

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

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

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

THIS IS THE VOICE SHE SPEAKS WITH NOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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By Louise Browne

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

By Shannon Quist

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

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

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

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

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

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By Caitlin Jiao Alexander

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said, “it wouldn’t.”

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

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

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Q&A with Rebecca Autumn Sansom
Nancy Verrier, LMFT, became so deeply intrigued by her adoptive daughter’s response to having been relinquished that she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and wrote her thesis about what she called the primal wound—the trauma of separating a child from its mother. Her book, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, published in 1993, is in its 15th printing and has been translated into seven languages. Its message resonated with filmmaker and adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom who, along with her biological mother, Jill Hawkins, PhD, have produced a powerful documentary starring its author and exploring the theory that the trauma of relinquishment must be acknowledged before healing can occur and examining the cultural shift the book kickstarted. Reckoning with the Primal Wound is the first feature-length documentary about relinquishment trauma that explores the perspective of both adoptee and biological mother and features, in addition to Verrier, psychologists David Brodzinsky, PhD, and Amanda Baden, PhD.  In September 2022, the film premiered at The Catalina Film Festival in Long Beach, California. It’s since been seen in dozens of screenings to enthusiastic audiences of adoptees and others, has been accepted into 20 film festivals. Here, we talk with the filmmaker about the genesis of the film, it’s creation, and its reception.
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By Hannah Andrews

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

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

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

Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades.

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

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

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

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

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

I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.

Lisa “LC” Coppola, a domestic adoptee through the department of children and family, is a mental health counselor who has years of expertise counseling adult adoptees and others touched in any way by adoption. A heartfelt advocate for those relinquished, she’s also a therapist and, in collaboration with Boston Post Adoption Resources, is the creator of the Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories speaker and writing workshop series. A writer from the Boston area, she often explores themes concerning relinquishment and addiction. Now, she’s created a resource to guide therapists and peers who work with adoptees. Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is a 52-week journal with prompts based on core themes that emerge in therapy and a script to help group facilitators. The journal can be used by adult adoptees on their own or under the care of a therapist, by therapists as a tool in their practice, and by peer-led support group moderators.

How would you describe this journal and what makes it unique?

The book is a guided journal, yes, but it is so much more than this. It offers 52 guided writing prompts based on common themes in adoption that we see clinically at Boston Post Adoption Resources, a nonprofit mental health agency. But the prompts are framed with resources including a post adoption vocabulary section and suggested reading, so the individual writer has access to knowledge if they want to do a deeper dive of study. The combination of prompts and resources also assists mental health professionals who might not be well versed in adoption-related challenges or therapies. Most graduate-level programs only spend eight minutes on the topic of adoption, believe it or not. So therapists can use this journal to become more informed about adoption loss and then as an aid to guide adoptees out of the fog—meaning out of the denial of the complex trauma of their adoptee experience.

Probably the part I am most excited about is where I include detailed instructions for adoptee volunteers—peers who might want to coordinate peer-led support groups. The instructions cover how to establish a group and how to organize weekly meetings using the journal prompts as themes and assignments, and even include a script to make the idea of running a meeting less daunting and more do-able.

Adoption is a psychological barrier. Not knowing how or why you got there, it feels like you are forced to live your life in a bubble, chained to the ground that belongs to someone else.

Inside your head, your brain feels like it’s being restricted, with a thick invisible fog that’s anchored at the base of your skull with an axe. Physically your voice has been stolen from you by society and held to ransom. Your heart feels crushed with grief and loss. Your perception of life is skewed into one that others expect you to have. Your abilities and life skills are severely hampered, distorted, and delayed. Your identity is confused. When you finally see a way out, it’s like you’ve been drugged; your consciousness stumbles out of the fog while your body and your abilities hit against every obstacle imaginable. The only way out usually means walking through your adoptive family’s collective heart. Bloodied guilt drags behind you like a constant reminder of where you’ve come from. Waves of pain and guilt hold on to you, trying to pull you back in.

The light ahead is blissful yet I feel lost, not knowing where to go or what to do next or even how to do it. The unknown is frightening but I feel compelled to breathe like it’s my first breath and take each step one at a time in hope that I will eventually find myself, wherever that may be.

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

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

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

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

In 2016, I was living a great life, newly retired after a 35-year career in the corporate world and enjoying the extra time to indulge in travel with my beloved husband. That spring, on a whim, we decided to submit DNA tests to Ancestry.com.

Privately I hoped for a miracle. I had a secret.

In 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight.

In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me.

After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie.

***

For decades I privately grieved my son but never spoke of him. Many times, I furtively searched for Jamie but always hit a brick wall. Adoption records were still sealed in Louisiana, continuing the archaic shadow of secrecy.

In October 2016, while out walking my dogs one evening, a message ‘Parent/Child Match’ popped up on my iPhone causing me to stop me in my tracts as my knees gave out from under me.

After 49 long years, Jamie had found me. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family?

Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton.

Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to ice cream to posting a popular podcast.

Can you each summarize your adoption journeys?

Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters.

Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, and she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

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.

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critical, 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. Her father was a high-school art teacher and her biological mother, Tess, had been one of his students. When Tess became pregnant by her older boyfriend who lived in Boston, the teacher and his wife adopted her daughter.

Growing up in this white family in this white community, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was 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—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 authentically who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her 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, Tess, 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.

i.
I am sitting on a giant red rock.

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

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

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

I am 18 months old.

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

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

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

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

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.