What I learned from Adoptees On was that my story was worth listening to. At the beginning of each show, Haley gives the person she interviews seemingly unlimited time to tell his or her story. In the world, aside from the man I love, this was not something I had ever experienced: an accepting ear with no time limit. In my world, talking about adoption was sort of like talking about, depending on my audience, herpes or dandruff.

You know when you go to a river and you put your toe in and then your foot and then you go up to your knees to get used to the water? We didn’t do that. I don’t even remember what we said to each other. What I do remember was feeling I was safe. 

I fell in love with my partner well before the twenty minutes were over. And she fell in love with me. Truly. We talked about it, laughing, amazed. We emailed for months afterwards. We had connected on what felt like a soul level solely through touch. 

You see, I forgot to take out the garbage. There is something wrong with me.

And that’s one of the hardest things about being adopted. 

The feeling of being wrong. 

I don’t remember my first class at Willow Glen Yoga, but I do remember the first time Kent told me I was in the club. I went home and told my husband. He high-fived me. “I told you you’re still an athlete. You had a ten-pound baby and you still got it.” (Okay, really, I have no idea if this dialogue occurred, but I like it, and I’m the writer here, so Namaste.)

My friend had taken my hand so she wouldn’t lose me. This was what being over fifty years old was turning out to look like: love and acceptance and the surprise of how close to death we all are along with the mutual surprise of how strong we all are. 

When you are young, feeling different isn’t always the straightest route to personal empowerment. Acknowledgement of difference is something that comes with age. You don’t leap off the diving board before you feel safe in the water. Generally, you need to feel grounded in your self and your family before you can leap off into the world of I am different. Look at me. 

By the time I left, Christina and I had bonded. I became her writing coach, and she would come down to my room and we would sit knee to knee and get her to clarity on the page. It was wonderful to work with someone who was both shockingly intelligent and so grounded in her heart and courage. I wanted to be more like her: a fiercely bright and loving student of myself, my family, my community, and my world. 

I wonder if when Baby Z misbehaves, I’ll look at her and secretly wish I had swiped left. There were so many other children I could have chosen. I wonder if I’ll stay up at night and look at my phone, swiping, thinking about what could have been when Baby Z is acting like a…like a…like a child. 

I have had more than one person ask if I was bipolar. Granted, the three people who asked were bipolar themselves, and I always said no, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t feel bipolar, whatever that felt like, just as, when therapists suggested I take antidepressants I thought they were missing the mark. I didn’t feel depressed. I felt…wrong.

When blood relatives turn their backs on adoptees, it’s often a knife in the part of the brain where the adoptee stores self-worth. Why would I want to exist if the very people who made me either deny my existence or don’t care enough about me to meet? It’s not rocket science, and yet it’s a point a lot of people seem to miss. 

So, It's Martin Luther King Jr Day, and I’m not adopted anymore. 

I know. It just happened. It’s so crazy. I go and write a memoir about being adopted and make it my life’s work to talk about how adoption affects people, and then I go and discover my adoption’s not real.