A human being is not a secret. I went to Paris to meet with my birthmother’s husband. He didn’t know about me. She took the secret of me to her grave. They had been married 23 years when she died, one day before my 27th birthday. She died before I…

As an adoptee, I’m painfully aware that when money changes hands, humans become commodities — 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. The simple, humanizing…

Stop weaponizing adoptees for political gain — 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…

Hate is harder when we see each other’s humanity — 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…

Finding the courage to do more than just exist. — Today I will live. I will taste my coffee and the oat milk I foamed in the fancy foamer. I’ll taste the way sweetness gives way to bitterness and back and forth they go. I won’t just gulp it for the fuel it gives me, for the habit it sustains…

I forgot the force of anxiety — 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 had forgotten that anxiety doesn’t always feel like buzzing electrical wires, zipping and zapping around, that sometimes anxiety feels…

So practice forgiving yourself — 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…

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…

Stop using adoptees as pawns in the battle over reproductive rights — 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. A woman who died too young because her…