The Gospel of Ginger

Being Adopted, Part 2

If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.

If you want an audio version complete with sound effects, here you go:

It is the summer between my sophomore and junior year. I am in my eastern Kentucky hometown, and, having just gotten back from a life-changing semester abroad in London, these hills do not deliver excitement at the pace I prefer. At least once an hour, my mind rehashes the email I sent to my birth mother, rethinking certain turns of phrase, wondering if I should have written things differently or not at all.

I work my two jobs—one as a newspaper staff writer with a byline and a weekly column, and the other as the grave shift cashier at the local gas station. I wonder if she thinks I’m an idiot or a creep looking for money, or if I’ve completely upended her life, or if the message just went to her spam folder and I should just get over it.

One evening before bed, I’m dialing u p my college email account on the Compaq Presario in my sister’s room when I see it: she has replied. Instead of just leaving the subject line as

RE: suddenly

like any mere mortal would do, she has changed it to

not so suddenly

revealing a hyper-attention to detail and tone that makes me feel like I’m reading a note from myself from the future. I slurp the ten paragraphs down so fast I get brain freeze. In the movie of my life, the 1980’s-tinged Brazilian techno music swells¹ and I sit stunned in a solitary sugar frenzy, no one with whom to share this who could fully understand. She is real and alive and had her hands in the dirt earlier today, planting trees in her yard before writing this! She knows I exist and approves of me, at least a little:

You do not know how excited I am to feel your personality coming out of your writing.

I print it out, so I can take it in my room to analyze it while I fall asleep. Someone else might judge her style as glib, but I recognize it as playful and smart. I have spent my entire life not recognizing myself in anyone, feeling like a stranger in a strange land, and even in the cadence of her email, I am comforted to know that I did, in fact, come from somewhere. She begins by ribbing me about my own choice of words in my email, and I notice she has taken the time to thoroughly reply to each statement I made and each question I asked, because, as she says,

You deserve it!

She tells the story of the events that led to me—a story that begins with heartbreak and despair. Her big brother, her idol, was killed in a tragic accident. After losing him, her sunny disposition turned nearly suicidal and she could hardly function. Her parents’ own grief meant they weren’t able to be there for her at all, and because she was so alone, she relied on the one person who was (sometimes) there for her: an on-again off-again boyfriend of a couple years who, from what I can glean, was a bit of a loser. But he had to be “the one,” she thought as a young person: he was all she had at the time.

O.K. blah, blah, blah, I wound up getting pregnant just five months after graduating from high school. I did not tell my college roommate who was a friend from high school. I took a job in another city to make things look legitimate. I did not even begin to look pregnant until well into the sixth month. Therefore, I was only there without a visit home for about two months. In this interim I got my mind back on track. I realized what a doofus I had been and quit feeling sorry for myself. After all, my brother would have kicked my butt and told me to pull myself together had he been there to do it!

Here is what I’m sure you want to know. Why did I give you up for adoption? Well, embarrassment…fear…feeling that there was no way that I could raise you like a loving couple who actually wanted a baby. I suppose one of my biggest idiosyncrasies (actually, it is just a plain flaw) is the expectation to be perfect. I felt like having a baby out of wedlock would show a character flaw and I held myself to a higher standard. I am a workaholic with an ambition that won’t quit. I knew that a baby would be ignored in that scenario. (By the way, after seeing your writing, I can tell that I made the right decision.)

The email goes on to say that she now has a wonderful husband she married right after college. They chose not to have children because

neither of us really wanted to be responsible for what we might create

but they enjoy life and don’t take things too seriously. She affirms that she would indeed be afraid of people in her life finding out about me, but she does want to know more about me and see pictures.

I keep reading and rereading her words over the next couple months, analyzing them for hidden meanings (Me? Is it someone like me that you wouldn’t want to be responsible for creating? I, too, have the same character flaw of feeling I should be perfect. Am I as unlovable as I sometimes feel, or was that just another one liner?), and memorizing her story—my story—like the Bible verses I learned in my childhood. The Gospel of Ginger.

I am 19 now, just like she was when I happened to her. I don’t have any need to meet her just now, but I enjoy the back-and-forth. There’s no straining to find common ground; I feel a connection without effort. I send photos and tell her stories, and she tells me some, too—such as how, when she was pregnant, she was staying with a Catholic lady, a volunteer who housed young pregnant women. The lady tried to con her into selling me to some rich people for $10,000. What a different story I’d have had if she had let them. But even at that young age, she had the wherewithal to stand up to these people because she cared who would be my parents. She “told them where to stick it” and moved out that very day.

Such power and principles are foreign to me at 19, maybe because no tragedy has yet struck. No externally-imposed bulletproofing of my spirit has taken place yet. Maybe expressly because she, at 19, made sure I was not bought like chattel, but delivered into the arms of people who she thought had the right kind of love to give me.

My view from age 19 is a shallow one. This experience of getting in touch with my birth mother feels as if I’ve wandered into a secret landscape and I’m sitting on a dock beside a picturesque pond, feeling the sun warm me, taking in the beauty of the day, wrapped up in the excitement of being here—but mostly, I’m smiling at my own reflection in the water, because this is the clearest I’ve ever been able to see myself. I have dipped my toes in, but with no concept of the life teeming under the surface, no real awareness of the cause-and-effect, the births and deaths, the Darwinian cycles taking place just beneath the surface.

Me at 19, not yet too concerned with life's deeper offerings

I’m back at college for junior year, galavanting around campus with my friends and an unboxed bladder of Franzia merlot. I’m stuck in a loop of hedonism and narcissism on repeat, and in between, I sometimes send her an email. For a while, she writes back, and then without fanfare, she does what I always do at parties, and slips quietly out the back.

At this point in my life, I usually take things as they come. Like she was at my age, I am head-over-heels for a loser—the “love of my life”—who is leagues away from being worthy of me, and I’m too busy letting him bring me down in every way to worry too much about the end of my brief stint as pen pals with the one who carried me in her womb. I know that someday, when the time is right, we will find each other again.

Part 3:

Should I Meet My Birth Mother?

1. I just heard a song that would fit perfectly here and it’s “Beautiful Life” by Gui Boratto.