The Parts of Me I Don’t Have Answers For

My adoption was closed. No letters. No pictures. No updates. Just silence where a person should have been. I grew up knowing I came from someone, but never knowing who she was beyond what was written on paper.

The records say my birth mother didn’t know she was pregnant until she was eight months along. Eight months. By then, there was no time to prepare, no space to imagine a future with a baby. She was eighteen years old—barely an adult, still figuring out how to survive herself. She didn’t graduate high school. She had been in and out of jail. I was born on the floor of her apartment. Not in a hospital. Not held by family. Just pain, blood, panic, and then me.

Those words—negligent, unprepared, unstable—live in my file like permanent ink. I’ve read them over and over, trying to understand what they mean for me. Trying not to let them define me. It’s hard not to internalize the idea that I entered the world as an accident no one was ready for.

I don’t know if she was scared. I don’t know if she cried. I don’t know if she held me. I only know that she left.

One detail in my adoption records haunts me more than the rest: she loved poetry.

That line feels cruel in a strange way. Because I love writing. I always have. Words became my safe place early on. Storytelling became how I survived confusion, grief, and the constant question of why. Sometimes I wonder if that love for language is the closest I’ll ever get to her. A genetic echo. A trait passed down when everything else was severed.

I’ve been searching for her for over twenty years. Sometimes actively—through records, names, possibilities. Sometimes passively—through dreams, curiosity, and that hollow feeling that shows up when people talk about who they look like or where they come from. I want answers, but more than that, I want context. I want to know why I wasn’t enough to stay. Or if it was never about me at all.

Adoption does something strange to your sense of identity. You grow up loved, yet still questioning. Safe, yet still unsettled. I’ve spent years wondering who I would’ve been if I had grown up with her. What parts of me are learned, and what parts are inherited. I’ve questioned my worth in relationships, struggled with abandonment in ways that don’t always make sense, and carried a fear of being disposable.

I know her name. I don’t know her face.

I don’t know if my eyes look like hers, or if my hands mirror hers when I write. I don’t know if my laugh sounds like hers or if we share the same quiet sadness. I don’t know which parts of me are hers and which parts I built alone.

But I want to know.

I want to see her and understand where I came from—not to blame, not to accuse, but to finally feel whole. To stop filling in the blanks with shame and start filling them with truth.

Until then, I write. I write because words are the only thing that have never left me. Maybe that’s the inheritance she didn’t know she gave me. And maybe, even in her absence, she’s been living inside every story I’ve ever told.