Stories

It began before I even arrived at the conference. On a crammed shuttle from the Denver airport to the hotel, they began to speak. A birth mother. An adopted daughter. Their stories of rejection and loss gripped me with sadness. One of them asked me how I was connected. This word, connected, I soon learned is part of the language of this community. How I am connected to adoption? What is my story? The shuttle driver got lost trying to drop a man at the University of Colorado Hospital, and by the time we emerged back onto the highway, I was hot and nauseous. I had to lean forward to answer the questions of the woman in front of me, and that made me even dizzier. She referred to herself as a natural mother, and I knew enough to understand she probably doesn’t like the term birth parent, but I don’t know how to tell my own story without using those words, so we got mixed up. I told her that, yes, I met my birth father. Later she asked how my dad felt about the reunion, and I thought she meant my dad, not my birth father, and I said my dad is dead. She clucked in sorrow, and I clucked, too, but we were clucking over two different people. When we finally arrived at the hotel and stumbled out of the van, our stories tumbled out with us, gasping for air.

I had never been to a conference like this one sponsored by the American Adoption Congress, and that fact dangled from my name badge in the form of a shiny red ribbon with gold letters that spelled FIRST TIMER. After twenty-four hours, I was overwhelmed by the compassionate eyes that searched my face each time I stepped in and out of the elevator, so I removed the ribbon. At the academic conferences I typically attend, I am an essayist, rhetorician, composition or creative writing professor, all labels I have chosen for myself. There, I was adopted, a label I did not choose–although I did choose to attend this conference. “I’m here for information, to understand the larger conversation,” I told my roommate, a dear friend from high school whose story I knew before I arrived. At academic conferences, personal lives and labels are generally irrelevant. There were caseworkers and psychologists and lawyers at this conference, but most of the participants were personally connected to adoption: birth mothers, birth fathers, adoptees, and adoptive parents. People like me. And not like me. Our stories come together and separate and come together again, a tangle of tributaries spilling into a parent body.

I’ve spent most of my life as an adoptee disconnected from the conversation about adoption. Until earlier this year, I’d never even heard of the American Adoption Congress. I discovered the organization by way of a blurb about Ann Fessler‘s recently completed documentary A Girl Like Her, which Fessler showed at the conference. On the organization’s web site, I was drawn to this sentence: “The American Adoption Congress believes that growth, responsibility, and respect for self and others develop best in lives that are rooted in truth.” I am drawn to truth.

Adoption has never defined me or my life in any significant, recognizable way. I’ve never felt wounded or lost. I’ve always felt strong and happy and loved. That, I know, is a privilege. But now, writing this story of my adoption and reunion, I sometimes feel suffocated, like a character actor stuck in the same role, show after show. In this moment, in this book, at this conference, I am adopted. Elsewhere, I am this or that person (to whom adoption happened.) Only after meeting my birth family, after peering through my writer’s glass at the part of me to whom adoption happened, do I see what I never saw before. Still, when I pull the glass away, the detail blurs and I am whole again.

Being at this conference was humbling. There was so much pain there, so much loss. And so much strength and love and defiance, too. No secrets. No fear. The organization’s slogan was everywhere. So were the stories, more than I could begin to process. If I’ve learned anything since tuning into this conversation, it’s that there is no one way to be connected to adoption. Even my twin and I experience adoption differently. If I’ve relegated adoption to the back seat of my life, she’s not even allowed it in the car. During our college and early professional years, she often warned me from telling her friends that we were adopted. She didn’t want them to see her any differently because she was. She didn’t want them to define her by it. She didn’t want to define herself by it. I never minded people knowing I was adopted. Two different approaches all barreling toward the same conclusion: It doesn’t matter.

At this conference, it did.

In this story, it does.

Maybe it matters elsewhere, too, but I’m still looking.

In the early evening on the first day of the conference, my birth brother picked me up and took me hiking in Red Rocks Park. In the three years since we learned of one another’s existence, I’ve never spent time alone with him. We’ve seen each other only four times before, and we’ve always been surrounded by our children and spouses and various family members. I was almost giddy to have him to myself for an entire evening.

It was raining when we pulled into the park, but the downpour had slowed to a soft spray by the time we found the start of the Trading Post Trail. We trekked along the path, taking turns in the lead as we weaved around the spectacular red stone outcrops that are the park’s trademark.

Above the rocks, the sky brightened, and a nub of rainbow hung from a fat, white cloud in the distance.

“It’s hard not to feel small,” I ventured aloud. “We’re such specks in this vastness.”

He peered with me at the towering, tilting rocks formed nearly 300 million years ago.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes me feel grateful, for the chance to be a part of it all.”

Our trail ended at the base of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. I was last there in 1989, with the only brother I then knew, who had traveled with our family to Denver in order to attend a national gathering of Lutheran youth. It was our last family vacation for a long time. Nearly twenty-five years later, I am far more changed than this place, which looked just as I remember it.

By the time we hiked the 192 stairs from the base of the theatre to the top row of seats, my thighs were burning. Beneath the shadow of the magnificent Creation Rock, we sat to catch our breath and admire the Denver skyline and the stubby rainbow still hanging in the distance. At a loss for words, I leaned into my brother and put my hand on his shoulder.

Nobody around us would have guessed our story. Back in Denver, the people at the conference would have understood it. But here is what I realized, sitting there, adopted, with my biological brother. Here is what I realized, sitting there with my brother. In that moment, in this story, I am everything I have always been, and more.