“How does it feel to know that your mother did not want you?”
I took a step back thinking that I must have heard her wrong. Searching the faces of the girls next to me on the playground, I hoped to find shock and awe, but instead, they were all looking at the same spot on the ground. Either I had missed the memo that intense staring would part dirt like Moses at the Red Sea, or they were equally as mortified.
Suddenly, I was inside a Dali painting, and everything started to spin. I remember feeling great shame for the first time in my life, and the irony was that it was for something that I had no control over.
I scanned Alicia’s face for some remorse, or at least a small gesture of back-pedaling, but instead she just stared straight into my eyes awaiting a response, completely unaware of the callousness of her words.
“But, don’t you want to know who your real mother is?”
Real mother? What does that mean anyway? Even twenty years after being reunited with my birthmother, I still struggle with the words real mother. What makes one mother more “real” than another, and what message do we send to ourselves and others when we demean one, and award one dominion over the other?
Although, I will say that for the most part, being adopted did not affect my life on a daily basis, over the years I did become a pro at filing away certain memories in a shoebox marked—“Reminders that you are different” when others offered a badge to jog my memory.
Each annual school physical, the nurses reminded me with their apologetic looks when I told them I did not know my family medical history; classmates, not so subtly, pointed behind my back as they shared my secret each time a new student arrived, and I found myself face to face with several other Alicia’s over the years asking, “but don’t you want to know why your mom gave you away?” “Which mother are you talking about?,” and “who do you consider your real mom?,” with the same inflection that someone asks what kind of sandwich you brought for lunch.
