The Hole

It happens like a looped recording that repeats itself, playing a song you can't quite make out from a house down the street, partly driving you nuts, and partly making you strain to hear it more clearly. A woman's face might bring it on, or a tv show about grandparents, or an article about a country you've always wanted to visit. Part of my inner self just opens, and when I peer inside, it's just blackness. I have tried all my life to make the hole go away.

I was adopted by my parents; the people who gave me away are not my parents, because I've never met them. The woman has no desire to know me, and she has decreed that communicating or giving me information about my biological father would be far too embarrassing for her. Obviously, her comfort level is much more important than my selfish desire to know who my father is or meet relatives who might want to know me.

Maybe I really was switched with the baby in the next bassinette. I've given birth three times, and no tie is as binding as the one you have to the people who arrived here via your body. If I had given a child up and got a letter in my 60's thanking me for her life and asking for basic information, yes, I would speak to that person. I am nothing like my "birth mother."

When I tell people I'm adopted, they ask, "what do you know about your parents," as if these strangers are my real parents. They are not!! I try to explain that these are not my REAL parents, and they say, "You mean the people who adopted you?" Their interest in my parents whom I knew until they both died is zero, and these people I don't know get all the credit. It's something that chips away at your identity and makes you defend basic information about yourself.

Try to imagine that you can not answer even one of these questions: What ethnic group or nationality is in my DNA? Which of my relatives do I most resemble? What do any of my relatives look like? Who were my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins? What is the story of my birth? Who is my father? Is he dead? Did my relatives live to be old, or did they die young, and if so, what killed them?

Yes, I know. I should just be lucky to be alive and forget about it. And that's what I have tried to do, but sometimes with the slightest provocation, the hole opens up and I am once again swimming in the darkness of my unknown history. My family story began when I was placed in my parents' home, and I existed from that point on. Before that, there is nothing.