Before I found my birth family, characters I’d never met danced through my head. Once, I dreamt that I slipped into their home during a holiday meal, hiding in their pantry behind the canned peaches.
The aromas of crab cakes and corn pudding wafted in as shoes tapped on linoleum. “They must be southern musicians,” I thought, for surely that tap had rhythm to a song I knew. But I dared not peek. In awakening, I went back to assuming my mother was a Russian Ballerina, it sounded more poignant and romantic . . . the gift of creating when all is unknown.
The word “Family” always had a nip too it, I envied those who resemble their sister or have traits of a great great grandmother found on Ancestor.com. I felt as if those born into a family have been given a small plot of ground on Earth, a solid history and belonging to the human race. Without genetic relatives, it seemed I wandered untethered, like a gazelle dangerously lost from her herd.
When I first heard “we found her,” from the Children’s Home, I was given basic facts. She was a math major and scientist, she had no other children. I learned she had German ancestry and my father was Dutch. As soon as the phone was in the cradle, I went outside. The night was comfortably clear, but the stars felt too silent and turned upside down. Suddenly everything I knew, or imagined, was wiped clean, I was not Irish and had no reason to struggle with math! In subsequent years, we would both need to rebuild our identities, but carefully, much like an archeologist assembling ancient bones.
For several months, my birthmother and I wrote to each other anonymously. I painstakingly formed each sentence as if sacred text, and sent them to the Children’s Home. They removed any identifying information and mailed the letters to her. Back and forth we wrote, gingerly sharing details and clues to our whereabouts and selves.
One day, a small package arrived, inside was a Snoopy tie tack. “What an odd gift,” I thought, but what can one give in such an awkward reunion? There are no Hallmark cards to congratulate you on finding genetic relatives! Some even shake their heads and shoot despairing glances, “you ought to appreciate those who raised you,” they hiss (as if expanding one’s family negates love and loyalty) . . .
Almost twelve years later, my birthmother and I talk almost weekly on the phone. She’s given me the first photo album of my ancestors, carefully labeled in her looping script. Each year I learn a bit more about Aunt Florence or Uncle Harold and don’t need to hide among the canned peaches, for I’m invited into the past.
The Snoopy tie tack was my birth mother’s clue that she worked at NASA. If I had looked closely, he was wearing a tiny Space suit. This tack had gone up in the Space Shuttle and was presented to my birth mother at an awards ceremony just before we met. “Most of my coworkers passed their awards onto their kids,” said my birth mother. “Now that I have a child, I can pass it on too,” she said.
This gift twenty-eight years later, a piece of metal from Space, tethered me back to Earth. In meeting my birth mother, I found that small plot of ground.
