On The Word “Lucky”

People have called me lucky more times than I can count — lucky to have been adopted, lucky to have found my foster family again after forty-one years, lucky the ending worked out the way it did. I understand why they say it. I also flinch a little every time.

"Lucky" implies I won something, and winning implies there was a game with a loser. If I'm lucky, what does that make the baby who was left in a field? What does it make the two families who spent decades not knowing where I was? Luck isn't really the word for any of that. It's closer to a string of people — a stranger who found me, a couple willing to foster an infant they might not keep, a family willing to adopt, a small group of search volunteers, a mother who kept dialing a phone number even after it got hung up on twice — deciding, one after another, not to let the story end where it could have.

I don't think adoptees owe anyone a performance of gratitude for existing the way we do, and I don't think foster or adoptive parents owe anyone a performance of selflessness for loving the way they do. "Lucky" flattens a story that's actually made of a lot of specific, ordinary choices by a lot of specific, ordinary people.

If you want a word for what happened to me, I'd reach for something like "held." Held by more people than I can name, at more points than I know about, in more than one direction. That feels truer than lucky. It also feels like something I can say without flinching.