Just Be
Just Be By Haiku Kwon Thirty-eight years into adoption—I’m still waiting for the “lucky” part of the “lucky adoptee” narrative to come into play. Many of us have been told how lucky we are to have been “chosen.” But I wasn’t chosen. I was like an opaque plastic egg with a surprise toy coming out of a vending machine: your money already invested, you’d get what you got.
The Courses of Adoption
The Courses of Adoption By Stacia T Hello, Dear One, It may not seem this way now, but you will learn to appreciate your life’s journey as you do an expansive, many-coursed meal. Each course will provide you with lessons, although some will be more pleasing to your palate than others. The first course is naturally where you begin. You are taking things in and getting to know yourself.
The Poet
The Poet By Shae Lee Flanked by a 90-year-old writer,rumpled with a jaunty-toothed grinand nimble
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday By Julian Washio-Collette “Leave the past in ashes.” What I really want to tell you is—I feel an ache in my heart that gives me no rest. Meet me here. Ashes are the aftermath of burning, an indiscriminate consuming heat returning all it touches to a homogenous chalky black. Ashes that inaugurate a season of purification and readying to receive the light of new life at Easter.
Why I’m Still Here
Why I’m Still Here By Rebecca Cohen I survived.I lived.I grew. Despite the howling void, the nothing place.
A Note to Little Heather …
A Note to Little Heather … By Heather Lewis Hello Kitty came out in 1976. I was born 1973. I feel a kindred spirit with her. Cute, Asian, big head … All of her marketing is adorable, and I am here for it. The love of Hello Kitty carried me through to adulthood. To this day, I have a slight obsession with Hello Kitty that I try to keep at a level below neurotic.
The Gift
The Gift By Anna Grundström Trigger Warning: Brief mention of self-harm (cutting). I was not the type of gift that came wrapped in pretty paper. Instead, I was packaged in a thin wrap-around shirt, tied loosely at my right side and a pair of beige bottoms. Almost a newborn, 30-days old according to the birth date listed in the parchment paper document labeled “Certificate of Transfer of Child.” I was brought from Indonesia to Sweden where I became someone’s daughter—for a second time.
Unlocked
UNLOCKED By Audrey B Unlocked—Come closer, young one. What are you holding so very tightly?
Exist
Exist By Rebecca Cheek Trigger Warning: Brief mention of death. “If there was one thing you could do again in life, what would it be?” asked my nine-year-old daughter, unexpectedly putting me on the spot, as children do. Of course, I was also rushing home in traffic from her judo class, distractedly planning how to get dinner finished and a kid bathed before an Adoptee Voices Writing Group session.
Nobody’s Secret
Nobody’s Secret By Akara Skye Two weeks ago, my birth father died. His death should have come as no surprise; he was 86 and in poor health. I found his obituary online through a random search. If I hadn’t seen it, I doubt I would have ever known he died. His family doesn’t know of my existence. The news swallowed me whole with grief and profound sadness.
A Tourist at the Family Table
A Tourist at the Family Table By Lucia Blackwell My niece places a chocolate cupcake on the table and sticks two candles into the slurry of frosting. Her two-year-old daughter sits at the kitchen table next to me, her seven-year-old sister across from her. My niece lights the candles and takes her place at one end of the table, and her mom, my half-sister, sits at the other, camera in hand.
[Enter Name Here]
[Enter Name here] By Cynthia Landesberg Placing the paper bag on the end of the cafeteria table, I see the name written in my dad’s thin, slanted handwriting: Cyndy, with two y’s. He still insists on writing my childhood nickname on the bag, a name no one knows at school, rendering the label useless if I actually misplaced my lunch.
LETTER FROM THE FACILITATORS
It was a year ago that I received a Facebook message from a Sara Easterly, inviting me to participate in some cockamamie scheme she was calling the Adoptee Voices writing group. I am a recalcitrant naysayer by nature, but something about Sara’s enthusiasm, vision, and verve was infectious, and so I found myself agreeing to join Sara, some dude with the mononym Ridghaus, and a woman with a golden voice and the wisdom to go with it, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston, for the first cohort of the Adoptee Voices writing group.
While Sara drew up a schedule for 2021, I initially agreed to just one session at a time. I didn’t want to get sucked into something I would regret, like that time I signed up to be PTA Secretary, and couldn’t get out of it for the next four years because no one else wanted to step up and do the job.
I quickly discovered that Adoptee Voices writing group gave me back just as much—if not more—as I put into it. While I hope that the writers have benefited from my writing expertise and advice, I know that I have greatly benefited from hearing their stories. Gaining new perspectives, I am constantly amazed at the adoptee’s capacity for resilience and our writers’ tender regard for each other.
And now, here we are, one year on, at the end of our fifth cohort, about to start the sixth. Sara no longer has to ask me if I’m on board for each upcoming session—she knows I’m committed.
Since that first cohort in 2021, Sara’s vision has only expanded. She and Jennifer, along with sage therapist Kate Murphy, lead the “Honor Your Voice” writing group on Mondays; on Wednesdays, she, Ridg, and I facilitate the “Hone Your Craft” writing group; and she and Susan Devan Harness are collaborating on a once-monthly group for published authors, “On the Page.”
Appropriately, paper is the traditional gift for a first-year anniversary. From the very beginning, adoptees’ lives are defined by paper: amended birth certificates, doctored documents, official records that are kept hidden, other official records that are fictions of bureaucracy. A Korean adoptee, I am a “paper orphan,” declared by the government to have no mother and father, even though there is another document with my mother’s fingerprint on it, signing over her rights to me, forever severing our bond.
But, we adoptees can also reclaim our lives on paper. It often starts in childhood, when we keep secret journals that are the repository for all the confusion, anger, and hurt of our identity issues, alienation, and the yearning to just fit in. We seek refuge in the books that let us know we’re not alone, that speak to our marginalized souls and make us feel seen and included. And after we have emerged from the fog, we pick up pens to write for our very lives, becoming the subjects of our own stories, reframing the adoption narrative, word by word, page by page, writer by writer.
It is our great pleasure, then, to present the fifth edition of the Adoptee Voices e-Zine, “On Paper.”
Happy paper anniversary, Adoptee Voices! May there be many reams to come.
-Alice, with Sara, Ridghaus, Jennifer, and Kate
