Growing up, I thought part of existing was living with a stomach that hurt. As with morning sickness, my stomach wouldn’t hurt while I ate. So I ate a lot. 

I grew up with a fear of making a mistake when it came to writing. My father was a lawyer and my mother was a writer. It was okay to eat food that had fallen on the floor, but a dropped comma was something else...

I went home and my nephew took a video of me reading this story out loud and I posted it on YouTube. This was the single most dangerous and radical, in my mind, thing I had ever done. I was breaking the silence.

And then things got wild.

So many adoptees are such good actors that no one, not even themselves, know they are acting. 

He was starting school in September, and his parents were afraid that the other kids would tease their son for being like Linus, for dragging his insecurities and need for security so openly behind him.

I didn’t mind being cold. I often went without mittens and a hat in the winter because I liked the clean freeze of air against skin. The last thing I wanted was to wear my teacher’s cardigan, ugly and laughably large...

When sports commentator Al Trautwig tweeted that the grandparents who pulled Simone Biles and her sister Nicole from foster care and adopted them when they were young “are NOT her parents,” he might as well have taken a machete and gone for her feet. 

"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."  
—Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve been writing a lot about what I didn’t have because I was adopted. I talk about the missing birth certificates and contact with birth parents and lack of health history, but I haven’t written much lately about love.