Adoptees exist along multiple timelines. One timeline presents a tidy narrative, a seamlessly linear story of how a baby was introduced to a family, like a missing piece, to make it whole. My tidy narrative—one that so many adopted people have—is that a woman loved me so much that she wanted to give me a better life. In my story, the woman lived in Greece and was pregnant and unmarried in 1976. Giving birth to and putting her child up for adoption—how that language makes me cringe now—in the United States was surely the best option for a bright future. This is the timeline leading up to my birth in California and adoption by a Greek-American couple who had been trying for years to have a child. My adoption was an answer to their prayers, and this timeline builds a narrative with a simple beginning, middle, and end.

The tidy narrative and seemingly linear timeline sustained me into early adulthood. Sometimes, though, this timeline intersects with others that are less tidy—puncturing, splintering, and dislodging some stories, while wedging thorns into others. Adoptee time, for me, though invisible for years, eventually led to such a disruption. 

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The first rupture in my timeline occurred when my daughter was born in 2010. I was 33 years old, and in the years before her birth, time passed nearly unseen. I experienced the transition from single-life to married-life as a leisurely schedule change; plans with my old friends waned and were replaced by plans with my new husband. I quickly realized after the birth of my daughter that my experience of time had forever changed. Life with a child both accelerated time and collapsed it. I watched as this ever-changing being evolved almost instantly before my eyes, marking each milestone—rolling over, eating solid foods, starting to crawl—with my husband, pediatrician, family, and friends. Time also folded inward, pulling the future alarmingly close. My new baby poked me forward, too quickly, as I projected ahead to preschool, graduations, grandchildren, and eventually my own death, saying goodbye to all that feels so precious. 

Why do I do this thing that terrifies me so much? 

Why do I imagine the end to all that I love? 

Time crept in from behind, too, and a new timeline grew as an offshoot to the tidy one from before. For the first time in my life, I recognized myself in another human being. My daughter’s birth cracked open a gap in my timeline, one that started moving backward. I began to trace a history from this small baby to my own body to the body that birthed me, asking questions I had never asked before. 

How does a woman relinquish a child? 

What really happened to me?

My daughter’s birth created space for two seemingly contradictory things: profound love and unimaginable loss. With this loss, a new timeline emerged, one that is not linear, but moves backward and forward. As I learn some details, others change. Sometimes there are large swaths of time missing; always, there are messy ruptures, the markers of adoptee time.

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I met Voula once, in 2019, in Greece. I was 42 years old, one year older than she was when she gave birth to me. I was her only child. She never married. She died three years later and left her Athens apartment to me. This was the second rupture in my adoptee timeline, one so profound that I wonder if I will ever recover. The experience of trying to know, posthumously, who Voula had been in life has tossed me beyond all sense of time.

I spent two weeks in Voula’s space—now my space, I suppose—in the summer of 2024. With my 14-year-old daughter by my side, we worked together to untangle Voula’s possessions. This felt like an impossible game with no clear path to winning: to decipher the life of a woman I met only once but who was responsible for my life, to learn about the woman who birthed me but whom I never had the chance to know. Voula’s space showed me signs of who I imagined her to be. A teacher, like me. A woman who loved to read, like me. A person who cared for her clothes, like me. Her space also showed signs of a person in cognitive decline, soiled adult diapers pushed into the corners of her closet, dirty towels stuffed into the china cabinet, and open bottles of liquor on the kitchen counter. I don’t want to imagine that dementia set in, but it did. And she was alone, her child and granddaughter, whom she met only once, 5,000 miles and an ocean away. I’m afraid that one day this, too, will be me.

It was in this apartment of the woman who gave birth to me and who had died three years before, where yet another timeline began to emerge. In early September 1976, Voula traveled, alone and pregnant, to her brother’s home in California. There, she planned to give birth to and relinquish her baby, away from the eyes of her family, friends, and employer in Greece. Upon her return to Athens after my birth, my biological mother kept my adoption documents in her bedside table, under a set of classic Modern Greek texts and a display of religious icons. The sacred and the profane guarded the name of my biological father and his place of employment. He, too, like Voula and me, was a teacher. In this stack of yellowing documents at Voula’s bedside, I read words that broke me, wondering if they broke her, too. “You are relinquishing all rights, custody and control and any association whatsoever with the child to the couple whose names are noted on the consent form.” 

Who translated these words into Greek so she could understand? 

How does a mother negotiate her feelings of loss across languages and seas? 

In giving me the gift of her apartment, I inherited something even more bittersweet: these papers, withheld from me by the state of California, agreeing to give me away. 

Next to her bed, for 46 years, Voula kept a paper with my adoptive parents’ names, written in English in the unmistakable script of a person who writes in Greek. With this handwritten paper, my daughter found more documents that the state of California refused to provide to me without a petition. On September 17, 1976, about two weeks before I was born, Voula was served with a notice from the U.S. Department of Justice summoning her to an immigration hearing, stating, “You are an immigrant not in possession of a valid unexpired immigrant visa and are not exempt from presentation thereof.” As a cruel complement to this document, my daughter found a statement from the Greek-American doctor who facilitated my birth and placement with a Greek-American family, along with the receipt for a one-way ticket back to Athens on Olympic Airways, good for travel up to one month after I was born.

The tidy timeline that once told the linear story of a child’s birth, a mother’s love, and a couple’s wish to start a family fractured into multiple messy narratives. A sophisticated woman and once-avid reader suffers from mental decline until her death. A teacher who has an unplanned pregnancy flees her country in shame to save her livelihood. A temporary traveler to the United States is accused of being an illegal immigrant. A woman suffers the trauma of relinquishing her child and keeps every paper documenting that loss at her bedside her entire life.

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For adoptees, timelines collide and collapse, building new narratives while crushing others. The tidy narrative that serves as the foundation to an adoptee’s early life grays and crumbles with time, creating apertures for new stories, events that occurred, and dreams never realized. 

I imagine all the things I already said goodbye to, sometimes without ever knowing, always without having a choice. A life in another country, with another mother. I imagine a past that I never experienced in actual time, existing in an alternate reality, as Shannon Gibney describes moving through portals in her book The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. I wonder what it would have been like to live in Voula’s one-bedroom apartment with her in Athens. I wonder what summers would have been like visiting her family’s home near the Ionian Sea. Voula was a caregiver for her own mother until my biological grandmother’s death. 

Would we have been three generations of women building a glorious communal feminist

life? 

Or would we have resented each other for our unconventional choices that didn’t

conform to gender norms of the times?

Alas, adoptee time will never tell.