The Most Important Story We'll Ever Write

Late summer.  As the cicadas yield their song to crickets, I am overcome by the presence of someone whom I have never met.  For hours at a time, I find myself carrying on animated conversations with her, becoming forgetful and preoccupied in our silent communion.  This oratory in my head provides the basis for a letter which I write each year to this woman . . .  and then stick in a black letter box, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent. 

As my son’s birthday approaches, I know that I am not the only one watching his movement thinking about the milestones he has reached in the past year and imagining those to shortly come.  Half a world away, in a perpetually green and verdant land, there is another mother silently marking the days to the anniversary of the day in which she gave birth to a baby boy.  Perhaps she too writes a letter to him, as she did after his birth . . .  and then she too sticks it in a box shuffled away somewhere, not knowing to whom it should be addressed, or where it should be sent.

 Adoption is often filled with such silent observances of grief.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how our home, our story as a family, is filled with gaps — full of anecdotes and infant pictures of one child, lacking for the other.  A genetic inheritance we can map across one child’s personality and physique, and can only intuit in the other.

As my son matures, he will begin to not only see these gaps, but feel them, as if they were black holes in the story that connects him to us.  Even now, as he asks for pictures of himself as a baby, I wonder if he notices that within the pictures I show him of himself, he is a chubby faced toddler, rather than a newborn in arms.  

When we are born, we enter a story
to which we may or may not have access.
For adoptive families, this can be a
source of grief. 

Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that we are born at least twice — once, in body, and second, into a narrative — a story of the people (family, nation, religious group, etc.) which we are born into.  Our full development involves mastering these narratives, and then integrating them into a narrative which we alone can tell.

With this in mind, I feel the need to prepare the space in which he can enter the story of his life, a story that will both honor his journey home to us, and that will create opportunities for him to ask questions about it.

This year for his birthday, we are creating a book that will tell the story of my son’s journey home.  

The plot will have some significant gaps, not all the characters will have names, and the book may be riddled with increasing numbers of unaddressed letters.  Soon enough, he will begin to have questions, but most importantly, he will have a story he can recognize as his own.