For as long as I can remember, I’ve been enamored with the night sky. As a child I would stand in my backyard, trees along the fences towering over me, windowing a vignette to focus my attention on the glittering constellations. I could see the black-blue space enliven and reveal the dusty Milky Way. When my dad’s brother would come to visit, they would sit around and drink, but I’d beg him to use his binoculars. Wandering off on my own so I could get just a little bit closer by orders of magnification, to the moon and stars.

Elementary school found me checking out books on Greek myths, astronomy, and Robert A. Heinlein fantasies. Still looking up, I would gaze upon that twinkling darkness and trace the lines of a great bear, a Cygnus, or find Orion’s belt, and remember the legends. Once, as a teenager, I discovered a garage sale boxed telescope. This long metal tube with convex and concave glass throughout had the power to bring the universe closer than my mere eyes. I convinced the seller to let it go at less than they asked, but for all that I had. Imagine my disappointment when I got it home and looked at the brightening moon, but it had a loose element and really didn’t work. Despite being broken, I held onto my telescope until I left that house, hoping it might magically fix itself some day.

Foremost of the stellar wonders were red giants, nebulas, and binary stars. I pored over every book I could find about a star’s life cycle from ignition until its last pulses and collapse. Have you seen photos of the Horse Head nebula? Stunning. And to this day, I have my phone with a pop socket of the Orion Nebula. But something that really captivated me was the image of two suns setting on Tatooine in the original Star Wars. Here, someone had visually rendered what I’d only read about, and the results wowed me. I felt like I stood in Luke’s place watching those binary stars move, along with destiny, towards the horizon. Each sun glowing their independent light into the system; the combined wavelengths enabling a wider visible spectrum.

Some time would pass between the release of Star Wars and my own entry into Adoptionland, then referred to as the Adoption Triad (bio parents, the adoptee, and adoptive parents form this triangle). At 19, after a relationship had run its course, my ex and I discovered that she was pregnant. With no support from our dysfunctional families and fearing an uncertain future, we turned to adoption to find a home for a child we could not raise. Relinquishing Taylor ticketed my passage into Adoptionland. Sixteen years later, I would discover that I had already been a citizen.

Shortly after turning 35, an innocent-looking letter opened a new world to me; I had a state adoption record. I had an Original Birth Certificate (OBC). This world, always beneath my feet, finally revealed. I now held two different roles in Adoptionland, or, as some call it, the Adoption Constellation. I was a binary star, both adoptee (albeit Late Discovery) and biological parent. These roles circled one another, bound in gravity and momentum. And since the Constellation has a multitude of possible roles, I found others like me too, who shine more than one light in this system.

As a bio father, I thought my role was to conceive a child, relinquish him, and then step back while stable adoptive parents raise him. Letters once in a while, respond to those. Get the yearly photos and give a call to say “thank you,” then call again for birthdays or at least send a card. Then the role as adoptee was less clear, coming – as it did – after I was gone from the house, having survived that environment, to raise my own children in a different model. But once I reunited with my bio fam and understood how much seeing and knowing them meant to me as an adoptee, I called Taylor to tell him reunion changed me, solidified me, enabled me to understand that if could I ever go back, I’d never give him up again. As an adoptee in reunion, I better understood birth parents and as a birth parent, I better understood adoptees. Both lights revealed more than either could alone.

Here in Adoptionland we live and work and breathe, a community touching 100 million in the United States, by the way, thanks to the constellation that surrounds us – those in the biological and adoptive families: grandparents, siblings, as well as social professionals. Binary stars and other multiple-star systems illuminate the landscape we all share, highlighting areas otherwise untouched without their unique perspectives. Our universe, composed of binary stars and multiple-star systems, illuminates the path for those starry-eyed, earthbound wanderers charting healing paths in Adoptionland.