My biological father is married to a lovely woman named Pat. She is his second wife and is shy and pretty and a bit quiet. My father is like me, loud, gregarious, a talker. Pat observes. She has opened her heart to me which I find beautiful, as neither of us were involved in the creating of me, or in the decisions around my birth, relinquishment, and adoption. My father had told her about my existence when they were dating, the only person he ever told, but the realness of me, that’s quite different than the idea of me.

When I met Pat for the first time, she observed the tattoo I have on my right forearm. It is a tree, full and reaching, with five of its leaves colored in. “Those leaves are for me, my husband, and my three children,” I told her. My tree tattoo has no roots, as I didn’t. She was quiet. What could she say, really?

That same year, I went to my biological father’s family annual Christmas party. Everyone comes from all over to be together because they are all “so close,” “such a special family” who “love to be together.” My father picked me up like a boyfriend would. We were dressed up. We were nervous. I needed him and his/my family to like me. I hoped I looked pretty enough. When we walked in, people came toward me, gathering around to see the remarkable orphan girl. They were kind and curious and had faces that looked like mine. On one of the tables near the doorway I saw a canvas printed with a naked tree with sprawling bare branches. Everyone was to take his or her thumb, roll it in green ink, and put their print on one of the branches, creating a family tree. Only a few had put their thumb prints on the canvas so far. I certainly didn’t think I should put mine, and I had a terrible feeling that this was ultimately for me. Eventually, my father asked me to walk over there with him and he placed his green thumbprint on a branch. He asked me to put mine on it as well, maybe right under his. I did because I’m a good girl and he is my father. I walked to the bathroom to wash my hands and cry.

After dinner, my father got up and formally introduced me and presented me with the canvas, now filled with family’s fingerprints, saying, “This is who you are, where you came from, we love you.” It was so kind and welcoming and an adoptee’s dream, right? Best case reunion. I walked up, hugged him, and returned to my seat, but wanted to run out. I wanted to throw it at him. I wanted to yell and scream at these people who had no idea. But I didn’t. I took it on a plane with me and had it framed. But it is still in bubble wrap, sitting in my closet next to a pair of Uggs and some high heels I never wear. I guess I’m not used to having roots. 

I always felt like an untethered balloon in my life, plastic bones, paper mache skin, no root system, floating in the ether of the unknown and the unwanted. I don’t know how to be in a family that shares blood and a root system that I didn’t grow from. Their tree flourished in summers and turned orange and red in autumns and lay bare in winters, the cycles shared. I felt like a preschooler had made a leaf out of construction paper and tried to glue it to the real thing, but it would never look the same. It would never be the same. I would never be of their tree. I long for them but push them away. The straddling wrecks me. I’ve never had roots, my childhood family tree felt like it was built as a set piece for a play I wasn’t even the star of. Yet the set piece was more familiar than the integrated root system of my biology. I was desperate to be a real leaf on that tree, to have always been there, but trying to put me there now felt impossible. I’m no one’s real daughter, sister, niece. 

While the framed canvas still lies in bubble wrap on my closet floor, my tattoo is worn on my skin. I am a real woman, mother, wife, friend. Rootless and full.