Ancestor Admiration

           Looking at my ancestor photos, one of my great grandparents with their son and another with my grandmother and a child and her mother, I am flabbergasted at how I can pinpoint exactly how my nose was made up- the width from great grandmother and the stickoutness from my greatgrandfather, which I share with my great uncle. It shocked me how this basic genetic marking of features of my face I was lacking, and how things feel so different now that I know them. It's like I finally belong in this universe, like I know where I come from. It's wonderfully grounding, and everyone now that knows your features' sources, enjoy that fuzziness of belonging because so many adoptees and others who never knew their true parent/s do not have it.

         I also wonder if they knew the cost of their giving up their child. If they knew the loss they experienced, or the loss they caused two generations so far. I only wish they would have known how much they mean to me. Maybe we would still be a family. Instead of me standing on the outside, looking at their black and white photos like a lifeboat, desperate for that belonging. Yet hesitant of wanting to join their family because I did so well alone, I learned to survive and even found hidden talents and self-understanding that most of them never dreamed of discovering, so locked in their own images were they. That was why they ignored their child's pain and suffering, and allowed her child to be given up for adoption in secrecy never to be searched for. According to the little I know.

         Mystery makes me love them, as though they were an infatuation for me that I do not know the flaws of. We are family but strangers. It is the oddest feeling. The idiosyncrasies of an adoptee, sigh.