My Blue Origins
An adoptee’s reentry does not guarantee safe landing
I was 39-years-old, staring at my father’s face for the first time in my life. To be precise, it was the second time, but I have no conscious recollection of the first. I saw him the day I was born, as he held me and said his goodbyes, but my infant eyes could not focus very well and I had not learned to process language, so I suspect he sounded like the adults in those Charlie Brown cartoons. Like all other infants, I relied on touch and smell to make sense of my world for the first few weeks, and like every baby, I was scared and confused when my mother and father disappeared. For most babies, their parents return after a short while. Mine never did.
Eventually, I could decode the words my adoptive parents spoke to me. It was one of the first things I learned, one of the first memories I can consciously recall — that I was adopted. Being adopted is not my origin story, however. My adoption is the story of the day two wonderful people became my forever parents and realized their dream. It was a lilac and marigold day, the start of a new life. But it was not the beginning of my life. There was a lot of me before I knew them. I existed before my childhood of rainbows and swimming pool afternoons with melting ice-cream sandwiches and fluffy golden retrievers licking my toes. My origins are blue and this is the story of finding them — of…
