I was sitting on the couch the other night watching TV with my husband when a rogue wave of grief rose up and threatened to swamp my heart. I could feel the weight of it in my chest, a cold unrelenting squeeze where there should have been a warm pulse of blood. 

It wasn’t what we were watching—Ted Lasso or Grantchester or something equally innocuous. It may have been a delayed reaction to reading my adoptive mother’s handwritten description of my baby shower and her thoughts on my infant behavior, all just a week after my arrival to her home at the age of one month. It may have been the weekend of work done on my adoptive mother’s messy estate. It may have been something else entirely. Or nothing at all. 

My emotions change like one of those cardboard kaleidoscopes we used to get as cheap party favors when we were kids. The ones with brightly colored beads that created ever-changing patterns as you twisted the tubes.

I could hold my history up, put my eye to it, and watch the colored crystals of my families shape shift and form new patterns as I turned the handle of time and perspective.

There’s the couple who created me—each married to another when they’d meet in secret. That secret grew and grew until it became me and it burst the bubble of their lives and reshaped them. The part that was me slid into another turn of the kaleidoscope. 

In this frame, a new family picked up where the first one left off. No names, no faces, just a relinquished newborn in a “receiving home”—Catholic Charities’ way of dodging the term “foster care” and government oversight.  

Another twist of the kaleidoscope and the glittering pieces move around with a soft rattle until a mother, a father, and a month-old baby come into view. Give the handle another twist and watch the father slide away and the mother’s parents come into view. 

Another twist, and new family colors join the collection. A pair of half-sisters and two full brothers. The first two parents come into view briefly, then disappear as the pieces settle into place with a whoosh. 

None of it is real. Only my hands, holding the imaginary kaleidoscope, are real. So I put it down, put my hands over the keyboard, and begin to create my own scenes. I meet with others who are adopted. I listen, and share, and the scenes begin to take shape as essays, stories, poems. All of this comes into play as I sit on that couch, my heart caught in a rogue wave of grief. 

There was a time when I would have fought that wave until I was exhausted and let myself be carried away. But my connections with other adopted people and my new collections of words offer an alternative.  

Instead of pretending everything is fine, I ask my husband to pause the TV show. I tell him only that I need a moment. I close my eyes and let the wave pass through me with no resistance. I feel it rise above my heart. It crests in my throat, tightening around my vocal cords so I can’t speak for a minute. And then it’s gone, leaving only a trail of salty tears to mark its departure. I let my husband know I’m okay, and we go back to watching the show, back to our evening, back to the life I’ve claimed as my own.