For the longest time, until less than a year ago, I regularly bought journals and notebooks and then put them up on my bookcase, blank. Or if I did write in them, I would tear out the pages. I was so afraid of being exposed. The problem was the thing I was hiding was me. I’d been doing it for so long I didn’t know. I thought I was private.

Instead of asking of the adoptee, What is wrong with you? a better question might be What is wrong? And because an adoptee probably isn’t even aware what is wrong, just that something is, an even better question might be along the lines of, I wonder what it was like for you when you were born?

I’m going to tell you about something here I have not written about for the same reason I keep something precious in my pocket—so I don’t lose it.

But it happened. It was real, and it was like winning the lottery. Only better because strangers weren’t calling for loans and my taxes weren’t affected. 

Baudelaire called out to the glazier, Make life beautiful! That’s the song I want to pace my days by, my sentences. My heart.

I resisted the show This is Us because so many people told me I should watch it. Should is like an alarm—it’s so easy to should all over your life—and I’m trying not to do that anymore. 

My writing partner is very persistent, and one night she wouldn’t take “Maybe later,” as a response. She got me to the couch and turned on the television. “It’s just so real,” she kept saying. “So true. So good.”

A couple of months ago I wrote to 23 and Me to tell them my story because, I thought, it was a good one. I heard back from them the next day. It was a good story, I’d thought, but I hadn’t dreamed it was next-day good.

I packed up all my stuff in California and gave up my apartment. I quit my job. I told everyone I knew I was leaving to write a book and that I wasn’t coming back until I was finished. I called the trip Write or Die. I was terrified. I honestly thought I might die. I was also alive.  I was finally going to see what I was made of.

I didn’t die. I only threw up once, and when I was done, I got up off the bathroom floor and went back to work. 

It was the best 93 days of my life. Write or Die taught me to listen to myself. It taught me how to write. It also taught me how to live. 

My daughter is in college now, and I don’t get to see her that often, but last night, Christmas Eve, she slept over, and for a little while, before turning over to fall asleep, we lay with our eyes closed and held hands. 

Being adopted made me feel special, unknowable. Like a had a secret room that no one else I knew had, except for my brothers. They also had no idea who their birth parents were or where they had been for the early part of their life. We were normal kids with secret compartments.

Except maybe we weren’t that normal. 

One reason I wasn’t able to follow my life-long dream and write a book was because I couldn’t follow a traditional narrative line. It’s the same reason I can’t tell a joke. I have a hard time going A, B, C, D. My mind jumps and connects A to J before I even get to B, and so I would get five pages into a story and already feel bored or lost. I wanted to get off the path of A and go to K, but there was the problem of smooth transition and narrative arc and etc. etc. I lived with the sadness that the one thing I wanted to do more than anything, write, was beyond my skill set.

What if I focused less on the story of adoption and more on the beauty of the telling? It’s like making the most beautiful cross to hang in a church. The craft of the object is glory enough, perhaps. What do I mean my glory enough? I mean I have the need to feel my life has purpose. I don’t want the purpose to be for me to carry the wound of adoption. I want it to be about fully realizing my potential. About naming, cursing, and praising, but all from the deepest part of myself.

So this is what it feels like to be an adoptee during the holiday season when you ride your bike down the street and see that the neighbors put baby Jesus in the manger already even though it isn’t Christmas yet. Technically that little guy should still be in his mother’s womb. Now, remember, Mary was supposed to be a virgin, and you’d think there might have been some shame and some potential discussions about adoption regarding the whole Jesus predicament, but, look: the world proudly displays that glorious child. He is the Son of the Father. We claim him. We celebrate his birth. 

And claiming the child matters.