'I had not only lost my birth father, but all of his stories and all of the stories from that side of the family — which was Black, like me. ... This was a kind of racial and cultural damage I hadn’t anticipated.'
ByWhen all you have are pieces of your story, do you have a story at all? And if you don’t have a story, what do you have? And how does it affect who you are internally, and out in the world?
Growing up, I had sometimes asked my adoptive parents for various details about my background. Invariably, my mother pulled out a small file folder and extracted from it a page-long document entitled, “Non-Identifying Information.” This is a document that agencies are allowed to give to adoptees and adoptive families providing information about birth parents while keeping them anonymous.
So began my sheet of “Non-Identifying Information,” which went on to list various facts about my white Irish-American birth mother and her family members. It contained almost no information about my Black birth father or his relatives. I remember staring at this sheet of paper on many occasions as a child, some of it making sense and finding a place in my consciousness, some of it disappearing from my mind as quickly as it entered.
I started seeing a therapist who specializes in adoption issues around this time, and she was able to track down material on my birth father. She discovered he had died from injuries he had sustained from a high speed police chase in Palo Alto, California, in 1981, when I was 6. This revelation was hard for me to process, since it was a loss, but one that felt simultaneously distant and immediate.
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