Do I Belong?

I was about six years old when one of my friends said something to me that I still remember.

“You don’t even know who your real mom is.”

I knew I was adopted.

It wasn’t a secret in our family. My parents had always talked openly about adoption, and they did a pretty great job of helping me understand my story.

But apparently, at six years old, I hadn’t thought through all the logistics.

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the woman I called Mom could somehow be considered anything other than my real mom.

So, of course, I went home crying.

I asked my mom if she was my real mom.

I don’t remember the exact words she used that day, but I remember the answer.

Yes.

She was my real mom.

Did she give birth to me? No.

But she was the one who read me stories at night. She took care of me when I was sick. She knew what I liked and what I didn’t. She put up with my incredibly picky eating—which, quite frankly, should have earned her some sort of parenting medal.

She loved me.

She raised me.

She was my mom.

Real as they come.

But I think something else happened that day that I wouldn’t have had words for at six years old.

For the first time, someone had suggested that there might be an asterisk next to my family.

That there was another mother somewhere.

A real one.

And if there was such a thing as a real mom, what did that make the other one?

And what did that make me?

I certainly wasn’t asking those questions at six. I probably moved on fairly quickly to Barbies, riding my bike, or refusing to eat anything but peanut butter and jelly for dinner.

But the questions didn’t disappear.

They grew up with me.

My mom was always open about the fact that I was adopted. But talking about the woman who gave birth to me was different. That was a part of my story she seemed much less comfortable making room for.

Looking back, I think maybe it was easier for her to think of my birth mother as someone who had been part of my story before I became hers.

But as I got older, I couldn’t see it that way.

I remember saying to my mom, “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t exist. You can’t have me without her.”

I wasn’t trying to diminish my mom’s place in my life.

I wasn’t looking for a replacement mother.

I loved my mom.

I was trying to understand myself.

Who do I look like?

Where did certain parts of me come from?

Did she think about me?

Did I have her eyes? Her laugh? Her stubbornness?

Those questions weren’t a rejection of the family who raised me.

They were curiosity.

And curiosity doesn’t diminish love.

I think that’s something people don’t always understand about adoption, especially when a child is adopted at birth.

There can be an assumption that if a child was placed immediately into a loving home, then there shouldn’t really be anything to work through.

But there is.

At least there has been for me.

I can tell you without hesitation that I was loved by my parents. I can be grateful for the family I was raised in. I can know that my mom was absolutely, unquestionably my mom.

And I can still wonder about the woman who gave birth to me.

Those truths don’t cancel each other out.

My birthday is coming up, and birthdays have a way of bringing some of these questions back to the surface.

Things I think I’ve worked through sometimes show up again.

There is joy in my birthday. There is gratitude. There is the knowledge that I was wanted and loved.

But there is something else there too.

My birthday is also the day another woman gave birth to me.

I wonder what that day was like for her.

I wonder what she felt.

I wonder if, in the years that followed, my birthday ever came and went without her thinking about the baby she had placed in someone else’s arms.

I don’t know.

I never got the chance to ask her.

As an adult, I eventually learned who my birth mother was. I learned that she died when I was very young, so I never had the opportunity to meet her.

But I also learned that I have biological siblings.

Meeting them has been its own mixture of joy, emotion, discovery and, of course, more questions.

They knew our mother in a way I never could. They have memories of her. They lived parts of a story that, for me, will always be secondhand.

And yet, through them, some of the blank spaces aren’t quite as blank anymore.

There is something pretty incredible about meeting someone who shares your biology after spending so much of your life wondering where certain pieces of you came from.

It doesn’t answer everything.

It isn’t supposed to.

But it has given me pieces of my story that I didn’t have before.

And those pieces haven’t taken anything away from the family who raised me.

They’ve simply added to my understanding of who I am.

Maybe that’s why, all these years later, as I work on a children’s book about adoption, I keep finding myself thinking about that six-year-old girl.

I understand her questions differently now.

She didn’t need someone to convince her that adoption was wonderful.

She didn’t need someone to tell her she shouldn’t be sad or curious.

And she certainly didn’t need to choose which mother was her real one.

They were both real.

One gave me life.

One raised me.

One’s absence left me with questions.

One’s presence gave me a home.

And acknowledging one has never required me to love the other less.

Adoption is complicated that way.

We like stories that fit neatly into categories. Happy or sad. Gain or loss. Grateful or grieving.

But adoption has taught me that sometimes two seemingly opposite things can be true at exactly the same time.

I was loved.

And there was loss.

I belonged.

And sometimes I wondered where I belonged.

I was grateful for the life I had.

And I wondered about the life—and the woman—that came before it.

None of that makes my adoption less beautiful.

It just makes the story bigger.

Maybe that’s what I wish people understood about adopted children.

Even the ones placed at birth.

Even the ones raised in loving homes.

Even the ones who know exactly who their mom and dad are.