I sat hunched over my phone at a small table in the windowless basement of the clothing store where I worked, and watched the New York state Assembly pass a law allowing adoptees access to their original birth certificates (OBC). I sobbed. 2019. 51 years old. Finally. …
It won’t be your kid because you read the books and took Lamaze and gave them baths, you made their dinners and rubbed their backs and came home in time and did the work. It won’t be your kid because the school was good and piano lessons and dance classes…
Have you ever vented to a friend about how your parents’ divorce fucked you up, and the friend said something like, “at least you have a roof over your head” or “no one else I know is fucked up from divorce?”
Probably not.
Most people understand why adults divorce, and…
November is National Adoption Awareness Month.
She surrendered me for adoption upon my birth. In three months, they took me from the womb to the NICU to the foster care to my adoptive parents. Gloria, my biological mother, did not know she was pregnant, she entered the emergency room for…
It was 1987, my freshman year at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The First Intifada had just begun. Young Arabs with keffiyehs around their necks stood at a long table near the cafeteria’s exit, a Palestinian flag hanging behind them.
“Sign the petition! Free Palestine!”
They terrified me…
I had forgotten the way depression lives in my bones, the way it’s burrowed into my marrow, luxuriating in the soft sponge, relaxing in the safety of its hard container. …
I was alone on a big bed in a light filled room. Sun streaming through skylights, pristine pale hardwood floors and light blue sheets wrinkled just so, like a Parachute ad or Dwell magazine spread. I turned over, saw a wet spot. Had I peed? Yep. I observed my accident…
The gift of food when words are scarce.
When my dad dropped dead of an asthma attack in the middle of cousin’s daughter’s 1st birthday party, I was 3,000 miles away, lounging on my couch in my husband’s boxer shorts, eating whitefish salad and herring in cream sauce straight out…
I am the innocent child some are determined to protect. I know what it is to be born into this world unwanted and unprepared for. I am the child of a woman who had no children after giving me away to strangers. …
Where are you, John Prine?
I drove north on the 101, past the Hollywood sign and hillside houses on stilts, into the flat land of the San Fernando Valley. Entering Ventura County, I turned off the suddenly unfamiliar radio and listened to John Prine. I Remember Everything.
I’ve been down…
I got my first TV writing job at 48, took 26 years to find my birth family. It’s never too late, you’re never too old. Keep going. lostinadoptionland@gmail.com
