Member-only story
Some Doors to the Past Stay Closed For a Reason
On complicated ancestry, adoption, grief, and confused instincts
When my dad died last summer, there was one thing that happened that excited me a little bit while going through his things. We found his birth certificate, which I had never seen before. It was a relatively new copy that I believe he had obtained when his dad died for legal purposes.
My dad was adopted as a baby, and it was largely a mystery as to what the circumstances were. He never told my mom he was adopted for the first few years they were together. One day my aunt (my dad’s brother’s wife) blurted it out when talking about my dad in a fairly rude/blasé manner. My mom was stunned, this was all news to her.
My dad didn’t like talking about it, clearly. He had good reasons for this. His adopted mother died when he was fourteen, and he was told in a cruel manner by another family member to stop crying so hysterically, that she wasn’t even his real mother. So it’s understandable to me why he had issues around his back story.
We knew a little bit, but I had never seen his birth parents’ names before. Just seeing them in black and white was a small thrill, a tantalizing piece of a mystery I had never thought would be solved. I saw my dad’s birth name, it felt so foreign and strange.
