Adoption: When I found out that my mom was adopted.

I was 6 years old when this story happened.

I am practicing tying my shoes on the bathroom floor while my mom was getting herself ready to go out to dinner. She is putting on her face. I’m trying as hard as I can to tie my shoes and the loop keeps pulling through. I start over and repeat the same process. Again the loop pulls through. My mom noticed that I am feeling frustrated so she picks me up and plops me on the edge of the sink. My small fingers start to rifle through her makeup bag, running the tips of my fingers over the edges of the familiar makeup smudged pink and white mirror. As she is putting on her lipstick, she says, “Gwen, I want to tell you something.” She paused for a few seconds, and then said, “I’m adopted.”

“Adopted? What does that mean?” I responded

“Well, it means that Grandma didn’t give birth to me, another woman did. But Grandma is still my mother, I just didn’t come from her belly,” Mom said.

The phone rang and she left the room to answer it. I climbed further up onto the sink, and stood, looking at myself in the mirror. I studied my face and I burst into tears, overwhelmed by a rush of emotions: confusion, sadness, and utterly broken. I jumped down to the floor and crawled into a little human ball to hold myself together, heaving and hyperventilating. My mom finished her phone conversation and came back into the bathroom. She picked me up and carried me into the living room. She sat down on the couch and kept me on her lap, facing her, wrapping my little legs around her waist — my favorite mommy position, the spider! Tears streaming down my face, she took the side of her hand and wiped off the tears, saying, “Gwen, what’s happened? We were in the bathroom talking and then the phone rang and I came back to find you crying so hard I thought you might pass out.”

Sniffling, I choked out, “You are adopted. That means that I’m never going to look like you. I love you so much and I think you are the prettiest person in the world and I always wanted to look like you, and now that will never happen. Because you are adopted. ”

My mother’s eyes widened and a rush of realization ran over her face. She had told me that she was adopted but I didn’t fully understand in my little person view of her explanation. I thought that her being adopted meant that I didn’t have the same bloodline as her.

My mom explained to me, “Oh sweetie, you are my baby. We do have the same blood, and you came from my belly.

My Mom told me years later, that at this moment, she had a rush of emotions pass through her. I didn’t know then that her journey finding her biological mom had started about 3 years earlier when I was just three years old. Before me and my brother came along, she was content with her adopted parents and sister. They were wonderful and supportive parents and she never felt like she was missing anything. She loved her baby sister dearly and was so proud to take on the role of Big Sister. She wore that title like a badge of honor. It wasn’t until my brother and I were born, and she suffered the loss of her adopted father who was her “favorite person in the whole world” that she started to think about genetics. She wondered what her birthmother and birthfather might be like and what traits they had passed on to her. Because as much as she wanted to look like her adopted mother, she never would. She came from another woman’s belly.

Sniffling some more, I managed to say, “You mean, I will look like you?”

Mom giggled and said, “You are a mix of both me and your dad so you have a good chance of looking like me and a good chance of looking like him but I really think you have qualities of both of us. You’ve got Daddy’s mother’s hair color, Dad’s mischievous smile and my blue eyes with the little golden ring around the center of your eyes, just like your dads golden ring.

I collapsed into my mother’s chest and stayed there for what felt like an eternity, completely exhausted from crying but relieved.

Then my mom said to me, “Me being adopted means that I won’t look like my mother, your Grandma. I don’t know who I look like because I’ve never met either of my biological parents. That’s the term for the woman who gave birth to me and my father.

I said, “Does that mean that Boppy is not your father?”

“No, Sweetie” She said softly. “Boppy is my father, he is the only father I have ever known and I love him so much but what it means is that we don’t have the same blood. He and Grandma are not my biological parents. But they are my parents.”

That was a little difficult for my 6 year old mind to fully understand but I was happy to know that I still had a 50/50 shot of looking like my mother and that my family was still in tact.