Robbed of What-If
It hit me on the way home, twenty minutes after we turned south on I-25, the gravity of my real life actual fucking situation. I just spent an excellent weekend with the only two blood relatives I have ever met, my daughter and my aunt. It was glorious and because it was glorious, I was tearing up in the car, planted firmly in a counterfactual Ghost Kingdom that suddenly felt undeniably real, just out of reach, but vivid and true.
I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a spoiled brat when I talk about being adopted. I know, factually, that my biological mother was unprepared to care for me nor would she have been provided with the resources to do so. I feel guilty every time I pass a homeless person on a street corner or think about how I had the time and money to go to rehab and quit cocaine. I got a brand new car for my high school graduation and have no student loan debt to speak of. I am, in most manners of speaking, excessively privileged to lead the life that I do.
Those things are all true, but so is the fact that my birth was a family secret, something only my grandfather and mother knew about until it was too late, until I was already gone. Had my grandmother known, had my aunt known, they would have stepped in. When they found out, they cried on the phone together. And from that moment, thirty years passed to this one.
I reconnected with my aunt last year, and since then we’ve talked on the phone every other Saturday night like clockwork. She knows the whereabouts of my mother and tells me how she’s doing. She also tells me stories from the past. My grandmother passed away before I could meet her, but the stories I’ve been hearing for the past year are so colorful and mystical, they fill me with wonder and sadness that I missed out on knowing such a woman. This past weekend was the first time that my daughter and I visited with my aunt in person after so many phone calls and picture exchanges.
Oh, she is wonderful. She is my Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. That’s why this hurts so much. I missed out on thirty years with an aunt who loves me just for existing, who can tell me about myself, who sees my quirks and explains them, who matches my physical features with our family’s. I missed out on living with a blood relative who would have taken me in had she known.
Could have, should have, would have, but I didn’t. I was a minor at the mercy of those good Christian folks at the Methodist Mission Home, then the Texas government, and finally my adoptive parents, all of them aided by the shame a father inflicted on his daughter for getting pregnant out of wedlock, and the cultural understanding that women who messed up could simply go away and have it taken care of, never mind how she might feel birthing a human into existence only to have it taken away, never mind the trauma that this human birthed into existence would carry for a lifetime.
I’ve talked about it a great deal, that blur between reality and fiction, but after meeting my aunt in person and touching the paintings my grandmother painted, I felt it viscerally. I am fiction and I am real, I’m just a painting on the wall of a made-up landscape and yet, I still take up space. I’m a pile of what-ifs on the wrong side of a counterfactual coin toss. I am neither in this family nor that family, just somewhere in between, tethered down to reality only by the hope of the future that my daughter reminds me of, a story yet to be written.
And so, after a joyful reunion, something not every adoptee gets, I cried in the car on the way home, heartbroken to know and witness and experience and feel, for the second time in my life, that adoption robbed me of so damn much.
