Dueling Narratives – India Itinerary 2022

There are two narratives that claim authorship over my origin story, or what remains of an origin story. The two narratives are not entirely mutually exclusive. The first one relies on written records and documentation provided by the orphanage where I stayed and issued by a South Indian court. The documentation has dates, official seals, […]

I wonder…

I wonder if my parents ever think of me. I wonder if they love each other. I wonder if they ever loved each other. I wonder if my dad has patchy facial hair. I wonder if my mom’s eyelashes are dark and beautiful. I wonder if they are my parents. I wonder if they walk […]

Internalizations Gone Wild

I grew up assuming that I was adopted because my biological relatives could not take care of me. Implicit within that assumption was that they did not want to take care of me. I never found it to be very harsh. I just assumed that they were unable to care for me and so they […]

My File Part III: Mouse Free

[This is a continuation of My File Part II: Bites Away] A few days after graduating from college and returning to my childhood home I found myself in our dirty cobwebbed basement rummaging through Tupperware boxes. These boxes were filled with contents from my childhood. Most of the contents of the hulking green metal desk […]

Family In Flux

A theme that keeps cropping up is this idea that adoptees, although I still don’t really like that title, are not really related to their adoptive families. It seems that underlying this argument is the assumption that family is defined by who is biologically related to each other. Obviously though, as I’m sure everyone acknowledges […]

My File Part II: Bites Away

[This is a continuation from My File Part I: A Baby’s Biography] Sitting on my hardwood bedroom floor I pulled back the manila cover. An old typwritten piece of white stained paper sat in front of me. The top of the page read “Congregation of the Sisters of The Cross of Chavanod” below in bold […]