I’ve always known I was adopted.
From earliest memory, my adoptive parents so normalized it, it was just what it was. Why think more? Or maybe it was a guy thing. In her twenties, my also-adopted sister searched for her bio parents and found them. Was a brief, unfulfilling encounter, yet when my life imploded in my thirties, I put a waiver in my file at the agency that would release my identity if my bio parents did the same. Was a passive nod to a deeper need I was finally beginning to feel.
Three years ago, my oldest daughter did a DNA test. Found she had 19% Indian blood, which could only have come from me—a new ethnic identity beckoning. She asked if I could get more on my/her bio family, so I spent $163 to get all the “non-identifying” information I could. One document, the social worker’s narrative, riveted me.
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It was like a movie playing in my mind. I could see her and for the first time ached to meet her. But for her choice, grown up in a radically different family with a dozen aunts and uncles my own age…who am I really? Not that child…but how much the one I became? I know that who I most deeply am has nothing to do with family of origin, but this story, this unmooring of who I’ve always thought I was, is helping cut a path to identity like a machete in a rain forest. We don’t need a new origin story to begin remembering who we are, but we do need to learn to cling less to the one we have.
