Eight weeks. At eight weeks, in utero, I was…how big? I really don’t know. I do know that I didn’t yet have the gift of language. I didn’t yet have words to express myself; at that point, I couldn’t even kick so anyone would notice. I could cause nausea, I suppose.

This particular eight weeks coincides with our collective rebirthing. We’re poking our heads out from our domestic cocoons, into a world that is both different and eerily familiar. As for me, this birth, I have language; I have a voice; I have power. 

My stories and essays about adoption have, I’ve noticed, often included a deep dark hole. Sometimes it’s a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and sometimes it’s just a hole. The hole is where I found myself, an adopted child, tossed about by the whim and fancy of Fate. There was an odd comfort in the hole, despite its being lined with cold, damp earth, despite its being dark, except for the few hours when the sun was more or less directly overhead, despite its only being big enough for one person. It was never lonely. It was where I fit.

Although no one could hear me from the hole, if I chose to speak (which I didn’t often do), I could hear murmuring voices, softened by distance, hushed by the loamy earth. Freud would tell me this hole, with a cozy spot for one small girl, represents the womb itself. He, and a lot of other people, want to tell me what it means—a longing to return, a desire for safety, a thirst for origins.

But I see the hole as where adoption placed me. There, I embodied a happy story of redemption, and everybody got exactly what they wanted. I was the key to the entire story. I was the lodestone; I was the foundation. I had to stay quiet, still, satisfied, for the fiction to work. I had to stay small, to fit the role. I had to remain an infant. 

And for a long time, I stayed small and silent. I had no need of words; my story was already written. 

The problem was, I couldn’t stay small forever. I grew, but I stayed in my hole; my limbs became crooked and useless. My head drooped from my neck like an apple ready to fall. Meanwhile, my happy adoption story replayed many times, to the delight of both my families. I was fed on it; it was my only nourishment. Without it I had nothing.

But then there came from deep within myself a bubble, like the gas of a baby bounced on a knee. From the bubble came words, and the words became sentences, and then I saw that the scratches made along the walls by my ragged fingernails were stories—my stories, the stories of a lifetime, and I emerged, singing.