So what happened to your real parents?

OMG, you and your brother could like totally date since you’re not really related!

You must be really against abortion then, huh?

What was wrong with your real mom?

Did you see Sandra Bullock’s new kid!!?? squeeee!! he’s SO adorable!

Oh, wow, adoption is so beautiful – I love adopted people!

I totally want to adopt some day. I just don’t see the point in having your own kid when there are so many out there I could have.

oh wow, you are SO lucky!!

Yeah, I would totally adopt some day, but like only a baby, not one of those special needs or foster kids – i know this is fucked up, but they’re just so, you know…damaged.

so, do you know your real family?

Ugh, I SO wish i was adopted. My family is so fucking annoying. It’d just be nice to know i didn’t actually come from them.

Wow, you’re like, really angry.

I mean, at least you weren’t thrown in a dumpster.

Oh, you must be so grateful!

Isn’t it great that your parents wanted you SO much?? Oh, sorry, i mean your adopted parents.

You are so special!!

It’s so weird, but you almost actually look like your parents.

You must really love your birthmom for being so selfless and courageous.

I think it’s so great how celebrities these days are adopting all these unwanted kids, don’t you? I really admire them.

Oh…I’m sorry.

So, wait, I’m confused. Your step-parents? Wait, no your real parents? I mean your adopted parents. Wait, fuck. Ok, who are you talking about?

So was she like on drugs and stuff?

Oh really? My __________ is adopted. She’s so well adjusted. Not like you, I mean, sorry, I just mean she’s not all sad and angry and stuff. She really loves her parents.

Oh really? My _________ adopted a kid. He is SOOOOOOO cute and cuddly. They got him after that big disaster in ____________. Thank god they saved him!

But don’t you think you’re totally better off?

I always wished I was adopted.

Your parents are so nice though! You really shouldn’t be sad. If I were you, I’d be so grateful just to have a home.

OMG, you are SO fascinating – your life is just like an Oprah episode!

I know, I totally get it. I always felt like I didn’t belong in my family either.

So do you think you’ll adopt some day?

so you’re like, practically an orphan

were you like one of those african babies with flies on your face?

you must be prolife

who’s that white guy you’re always with?

so is he like your step-father or your father father?

wait, was your real father even in the picture when you were born?

was your real mom on drugs?

I just don’t think I could ever give up my baby

you must feel so grateful your didn’t grow up in the ghetto

wait, if  I come over, are there gonna be white people at your house?

so… your family is kinda like the Obamas

wait, if I come over are there gonna be black people at your house?

wow, your family sounds so…interesting

I wish I had two moms

you must get sad sometimes

is that your real name, like from your real mom

i’m confused, did you even know your real parents?

were you like in an orphanage for awhile?

you’re so lucky your mom didn’t have an abortion

are you in love with Brangelina’s family or what!

your family is just like a rainbow, so cute!

so did they like, find you in a dumpster?

I wish I had a black sister

you talk just like a white girl

you’re like the whitest black girl I know

how cute is Sandra Bullock’s son?

so like, do you ever think about finding your real mom?

you should go on Oprah and ask her to help, I’d watch that episode

do you even know your real mom’s name, wait aren’t you named after her?

don’t worry, when I met you I couldn’t even tell you were adopted

your family sounds so …lively

do you like LOVE that you’re family is so unique?

do you  just feel so lucky sometimes, I mean who knows where you could have ended up

I think I want to adopt, you know there are just so many unwanted children out there

i’ll probably adopt a baby of every race, to be fair you know

i really like that you’re not like, stereotypically black

are you afraid of people leaving you?

you’re like, not that fucked up for an adopted kid

the baby who rolled away

down a long hospital hallway

never to return

i did it

just like the women

before me

first mama       giving into the emptiness

of her unwilling womb

leaving small parts of herself

buried in the earth like treasure

then mother     enduring my kicks in secret

nine months of punishment from the baby

she did not want to keep as her own

and me             a woman now

living all the way across the country

kicking lovers out of my bed

refusing to return to anyone

a disappearing act         the finale

even when i am wanted

i don’t know how to belong

 —

By Mariama Lockington

by Mariama Lockington

this baby will be yours

the adoption paper read

finally, a daughter to call her own

mama cried with relief

cracked her swollen toes

the dead baby

the one before me

hovering over her head

a bundle of bloody moss

—

for the first three months

they were afraid to put me down

coddled like henry viii’s only heir

i slept on a throne

made of my parent’s pale flesh

shit in cloth diapers

rode around town

in a sheep-skin lined buggy

—

what if he had stayed

my birth father

gotten down on one knee

asked my mother to marry him

what if there had been

a square cut diamond

a house just outside atlanta

with a porch swing

i think about that house

a red brick, two bedroom

with sunflowers in the kitchen

what if i had grown up there

a southern girl

a georgia peach

—

then there is the woman

who comes up to me

after a reading and says

you must be so grateful

your mother decided not to have an abortion

and even though i believe

in a woman’s right to choose

i start to think about what if

i had been an empty inside of a woman

what if i had been her hunger

the ache that would keep her up at night

—

and then i think about

musclebonefluidchance

what if his sperm had missed her egg

i go back further and further

until i am entangled

in all the wonderings

no emergency exit

no one to say

stop baby, it ain’t worth it

so i think about holes

what’s broken what’s undone

i think about trees

about limbs

what if there were no mothers

no women

what if i had been born a planet

with hips of gas and rock

what if i inherited the dark orbit

of galaxy with no name

—

of course there is always the dead baby

the one before me

cradled in mama’s arms

she alone brings me back

how she would have had my name

but a different complexion

how mama would have thrown her

gypsy birthday parties every year

taken photos of her

watering eggplants in the garden

how she would have tried to fight off

the spell of mama’s violin

lulling her to sleep each night

how they would have loved her

with the love that was then leftover for me

how to be grateful for a story

that began with everyone

losing

someone they loved

a tiny excerpt from a novel in progress…

The birthplace. But before that. The uncomplicated life. And then the months we had together. You talked to me, told me stories. You ignored me, wore baggy clothes to school. I talked back: proteins and enzymes. Were you ever happy with me? When you dreamed of our life together, were you happy?

This is only my dream: You are seventeen, we are growing. Together, we go to band practice after school. You play the sax and I can hear its vibrations, its cool tone, resting there on your belly. I guess it must have wore off. I’m playing piano by the age of three and I have this ear. I can just play everything by ear. That’s you, but I don’t know it. The only thing I know is that you’re gone.

You cry a lot when we are alone together. We are thirsty – dehydrated and deserted land – wanting. We want to stay together, but we’re not allowed.

Your father, my grandfather, has made a decision.

This is not our body.
This is not your body.
This is not even a body.

So instead you will get to keep the memory of me and the shame of a body. You will bury it somewhere deep and dark – your cervix, the recesses of your mind, or a shoebox out in the backyard by the banks of a great river. A river that divides nations and could carry you away.

This is a river.
This is a borderland.
This is a forgotten legacy.

The first time I visited your parents’ house, your father couldn’t look at me. He held shame in his eyes and shook my hand like a business associate, but then changed his mind and hugged me like an awkward teenager unsure of his own body or mine.

I didn’t know it then: his choice or decision, his secret. I didn’t know he was the one that made you give me away, that his family never forgave him, but he did.

Grandfather: How can I write this in a way that’s not sentimental?
How about: You’re a piece of shit.
How about: You made a girl into a monster, a hateful woman body with a scarred and hollow womb where there used to be anticipation and mystery: a fairytale.

Once upon a time, long before time ever even began, there was a girl.

The first time I visited your parents’ house, your father took me out behind the house. He walked me down a small hill to the banks of the Detroit River, an arm around my shoulder. I felt like a son. There we staged a dress rehearsal for a real thing: grandfather and grandchild share a moment, a history passed down through generations that will eventually make future generations and continuing the passing.

He told me how the River – this River I’d known my whole life, this River that separated us from another country that didn’t ever feel like another country, but just a place to go on the weekends, this River whose legs reached for miles and miles and ran from this very house I began in, all the way past the very house I actually grew up in, and how before it had grown toxic from the oil and smoke and blood that poured out of the factories that built this city and then destroyed it, before it became a River that killed men who accidentally fell in and swallowed a mouthful or maybe just touched their lips to it, before I fished toxic fish from its belly and ran along its shore to find my brother covered in bees screaming for his life, and even before I snuck out my window late into the night to meet boys where wooden bridges crossed its surging putrid lifeforce and held us while we dangled feet and smoked cigarettes and touched limbs, before this – it had always been a great River.

Its name means The River of the Strait, he said. Because it connects these great bodies of water, he said. And it has carried settlers and fur traders and car bodies and rum-runners and drug smugglers and immigrants for centuries through this land, this stolen land, this ravaged land that now we live on, here next to this Yacht Club.

Your father told me all this and I felt like a boy child as the riverbank mushed beneath our boots. Then we went inside and when we couldn’t find you, I became your daughter again, searching. A legacy I can never escape.

This secret is yours to keep.
This secret is mine to wear.
This secret is a worn and tattered curtain.
This secret, my name.
This secret – - -

—–
Liz is one of the co-founders of BYLM, read more from her @ http://lizlatty.com

i love you but i hate you and i feel so numb to it all

i haven’t heard from you but i haven’t written either and if you’re waiting for me to call don’t be surprised to find my engine has stalled

love and hate

there’s no medium

no in between

there’s only cracks in the crystal ball and I hate it here cause i don’t fit in but there’s no place for me where you are

tell me what I’m supposed to have learned from this

—-

Just Me is an adult adoptee, reunited in 1999 but the situation is complicated. They consider themselves an amateur artist, poet, writer and photographer.

Read more from Just Me at http://rantandraveandrantandrave.blogspot.com/

You called me when I was 14 years old.
I walked outside and worked up the courage to hit answer
I didn’t have a chance to say hello, “My baby!!” and sobs were all I heard.

I played with the azalea bushes my mother planted
and I wondered if you touched them too
as I listened to you go on about your life and how much you regret giving me away
You talked about your trip to Hawaii, the new truck you had just bought for my brother
you mentioned my father as an alcoholic, the man you tried to trap into marriage.

All these wonderful events in your life were played out before me
as I sat surrounded by crushed flower petals.
I wanted to scream
PLEASE STOP, YOU GAVE ME AWAY, I DON’T CARE THAT YOU ARE HAPPY!
You never once asked a question about my life,
you barely gave me room to to say that’s nice
you cried and said you made a room for me after you left your husband,
you painted it pink and green
my favorite color is red.

I wanted to tell you that I grew up in an unhappy home, I was abused, mistreated, hated.
I wanted to let you know that it hurt to grow up unwanted by anyone,
never feeling like I fit in
But I just sat and tore up the azalea bush in front of my house
and listened to you talk about the brother I never had the chance to know
to hear that he was with you,
that you took him to Hawaii, that you were buying his tuxedo for prom
he was wanted, I was cast away, to a mother that wanted me, to a father that never did.

I wondered if you were so nervous to talk to me that you replaced your feelings with tearing up something beautiful too
were you afraid to ask me about how my life turned out?
did you even care as I blurted out my story to you?
I heard silence from the other end as what I said sunk in, I felt hatred, I was angry! .
You hung up the phone, speechless for probably the first time in your life,
as the baby you gave away took your breath away.

—-

My name is Katie, this is the first time I’ve expressed anything about my adoption. I’ve kept it bottled inside and finally found an outlet to get it all out. I am 21 and married, I have a happy life now with my husband who was also adopted as an infant. I have met my biological brother only once when I was 18, it was too hard to see him again. I have not spoken to my birth mother since that phone call in 2004, my biological father called me a few months ago and brought these feelings back up front. I only hope that I am strong enough to see them both one day so I can show them what they missed out on.

Read more from Katie F. at http://youdontknowwhatyougot.wordpress.com/

By Amanda K.

We sat together on the sofa. 

I was afraid to ask my own mother where the bathroom was. So I sat, knees crossed, staring down at the red burber carpet. 

I nibble at mint Oreos and listen to my grandmother babble on about apartment prices. It was the first time I had ever met her, and that was all she had to say.

I am grateful that my father has come with me. He knows that I am terrified. He sits between my mother and I- the perfect buffer. 

I have not seen my mother for 16 years. I can feel her presence in the room- suffocating me from across the couch. I want so desperately to look her in the eyes, to carefully examine every inch of her face. But I cannot peel my eyes off my sandals- beige with little turquoise gems.

I hear whimpering- the tiny cries of a woman who is seeing her child for the first time.

My father whispers something to her. He wants her to stop.

“Dont make a scene.”

She cries, and when my grandmother asks her why, she is ready with an answer.

“We’re all here, together. A real family.”

The father who didn’t raise me gets up to use the bathroom. I barely notice until I realize: it’s just the two of us now.

My mother inches closer and closer to me. I press myself against the arm of the couch. My mother places her hand on my knee.

She strokes my hair- twirling one of my golden locks in her soft, freckled hand. I want to die.

“My baby,” she says- barely and audible whisper. 

I want to ask her so many things. How could you? Did you miss me? Why did you do it? Can I ever forgive you? Did you ever love me?

But my throat constricts and I am silent. She is crying quietly and I want her to stop. I can’t stand to hear her cry- the soft tears that fall for the daughter who is sitting with her on the couch. The daughter who she would not recognize on the street. The daughter who has the face of the man who used to love her.

I look at my mother for a moment. She is wearing greek sandals and dark capris. Her skin is creamy and covered in freckles- her long auburn hair tied loosely in a low ponytail. She looks like she is wearing lipstick but I can tell that she isn’t. I lift my eyes a little higher and see her silver necklace, her black shirt. Someone should tell her that black isn’t flattering on such a light skin tone. 

But that someone isn’t me.

She catches me looking at her and I avert my eyes quickly. I am surprised when she begins to talk with me.

“When your parents left with you, I waited at the door for hours. I knew you were gone. I had heard the car drive away. I knew you were probably already at the airport. But still, I waited.”

I say nothing. I hear the toilet flush. It will all be over soon. I hear my father’s steps, muffled by the hallway carpet. I am happy to have him back. He is easier to forgive.

My mother knows her time is running out.

“I never wanted to see you go, baby,” she says, no longer looking at me but staring at the floor.

“You gotta believe me baby, I never wanted to see you go.”

—-

Read more from Amanda K. @ http://foundyourmittens.blogspot.com/

By a.m. baker

  Because I am:
            misfit
  mistaken
            miserably confused
                          misplaced…

            i write this thing about what i think i might be/could be: i write about
  beginnings and endings without endings…

            To be adopted:
  given away
            taken in
  abandoned
            found
  lost
            forgotten/remembered

  We try to define our adoptions by the fact that we were

1. “given up”
and
2. “taken in.”

This is a ridiculous dichotomy that tries to define something that
becomes bigger than the adoptee or the adopter or the biological
mother/father/sister/brother (and so on). Let me say:

I was adopted at birth, essentially—my twelve days of limbo in foster
care were brief, and I was called Peanut because of my preemie size. If you
ask me who my family is, I will tell you “these people,” referring to the
people who adopted me. Chances are, I won’t give much thought or
consideration to that biological family. I think so often we think the story
of an adoptee must be really dramatic, really horrific in order to be valid.

My story, strictly pertaining to my adoption, is not at all dramatic or
horrific. My birth mother, at some point, realized she would be incapable of raising me. I found out later that she had a son before me, and he was taken away by social services when he was two (which would have been in the late 1970’s). And I, born in the mid-eighties, was carted off, I imagine, immediately.

I once wondered if I would remember her smell, or her voice; now I know: she most likely never held me. I was a decision made by the collision of love (or something like it), and my destination was a decision made before I was ever cut from her womb. I sometimes wonder if the c-section line means grief, anger or loss to her—but I don’t give the woman of my birth much thought beyond that, to be honest.

More often, I consider my birth father. So often, like the idea of the adoptee being “given up/taken in,” we associate the journey of an adoptee with finding his or her mother—maybe siblings—but we certainly shift to conclusion of maternal ties. In my case, though, all non-identifying information was handed to me for medical-history purposes and I learned:

      my birth mother : short
      my birth father : tall
      his : green eyes
      hers : brown.
      she : small
      he : thin.

I imagine that, in this way, I look like my mother: I am short and have brown eyes… but beyond this, I am the picture of my biological father:

      artist
      musician

There were other words, defining factors that intrigued me about this figure, my biological father. One word used to define him that hypnotized, stung and terrified me:

                                        schizophrenic

At fourteen—or any age—this is a terrifying and mysterious word, something we usually don’t understand except, perhaps, by way of stereotype or fictional sketches. Van Gogh and his ear—these are the things we think of. I was secretly terrified of the day the voices would visit me.

                                        and then they did

At nineteen, after too many drugs and too much trauma, the voices came and insanity swallowed me whole. I did not eat or sleep or speak except in manic phrases that made no sense. I cannot remember much of it: the days in the psych ward, my family learning that I might not ever function wholly again. The next year was spent learning to live again. The next year brought these words to the surface, like dead fish rising:

                   Bipolar Disorder
                                              rape
        Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
                            manic/psychotic
                     suicidal (tendencies)/depression

I remember very little in that timeframe, circa 2004/2005. I do remember, though, suddenly thinking of that schizophrenic birth father. The doctors brought him up when looking at my vague history, too, and one psychiatrist said, “He’d be considered Bipolar I now.”

“Back then—in the eighties—if there were psychotic features, it had to be schizophrenia. But, really, you’re just like your biological father,” the psychiatrist said. And there: it made sense. I was given up, taken in at birth but there—that day I vaguely remember being told, essentially, you are your (biological) father’s daughter, I felt that I was, somehow, finally remembered and found.

I felt taken in.

My adopted family took me in: they signed the papers, went through the steps and hoops necessary to take me home. They didn’t know that I would be a wreck nineteen years later. They had no idea that I would bounce through psych wards, that I would disgrace the “good” family name.

At nineteen, with those dead-fish words rising, my adopted family stood by me. They could have said we give up, but they wouldn’t give in. They kept me, and again, I felt taken in. But still, something pulled me toward that thing of my unknown and misfit father. I didn’t speak of it: how could I tell my family that, for all their kindnesses, all their forgiveness, I really wanted to know the artistic addict that genetically founded one-half of my being.

After the Bipolar spiral, the medication zombification and the journey to living with Bipolar Disorder as a functional adult, I briefly played with the puzzle pieces of my unknown misfit father. As I said, my adopted family welcomed me back, though I was the artistic and crazy outlier in a family of religious and mostly rigid people. But this caused me a great deal of guilt–and then I wondered… where did my father end up, because wasn’t he the same crazy outlier in his family? I knew he belonged to a wealthy family in Chicago, that his family was riddled with doctors and lawyers and that he, though literally classified “genius,” was an artist who denounced academia:

        musician
                    painter
                              bohemian
                                            addict.

If I were told that I must find some genetic link in the chain of my biological history, I would choose to find my biological father. However, I know that, in reality, I would never begin to turn the page of that story: I could find a man on the street with holes in the soles of his shoes, no socks and no teeth. I might find something akin to that—better or worse—but most likely I would find something that gives me no hope.

The search of the maternal is expected—maybe encouraged. The paternal link is often put aside, dismissed. However, I cannot do that, because when I conjure the image of my biological parents, I imagine him vividly. I think he, too, is:

    misfit
               mistake(n)
    miserably confused
              misplaced

And I, given up/taken in, find it is not so much a thing of my having been lost or found. To find myself, I think, has nothing to do with knowing where my nose came from or where my mother’s mother came from. For me, it becomes not a thing of identity. I believe that, knowing what I know, it is better that I let the Unknown remain Unknown. My genetic father, the

        artist                         addict                        Bohemian
                      caught in                       pits of                               dreams:

I am his reflection, and if we were to meet, I believe we would stare and see us both crumbling. I could never be what he hoped for, and he could never fit the photograph I’ve snapped in my imagination. It is best, then, to let myself be given to the life of my adopted family who took me in despite my faults and failures. It is better, then, to let my biological past be a mystery. In dreams I see him watching me while I play melodies that come from nowhere; sometimes, when the invention of a melody slips from my fingers, I wonder if my father’s fingers played this same song.

——-

a.m. baker lives in a too-sunny climate where she can often be found writing in her garage with geckos to keep her company. she is the single mother to a very active tot, and she often enjoys things that involve string and sticks (like knitting). her fiction work can be found at 3:AM Magazine, and forthcoming at Opium Magazine. Her nonfiction can be found in GRIT Magazine and in the upcoming issue of Spin*Off Magazine.

you can follow a.m. baker on Twitter or contact her by email at baker.angelam@gmail.com