The Questions That Don’t Go Away

Somewhere around age six, I asked my mom why I didn't look like anyone in our family photos. I don't remember her answer, but I remember that the question didn't go away after I asked it once. It just came back, in different forms, for the next thirty-some years.

Who do I look like. Where did my laugh come from. Whether anyone else out there hums the way I do without thinking about it. These aren't dramatic questions. They're small, and they show up at strange times — in a grocery store line behind someone with your same nose, in the pediatrician's office filling out a family history form with more blanks than answers.

I've talked to enough other adoptees to know these questions aren't a sign that something is wrong with your life or your family. They're just what happens when part of your own information is genuinely missing. Curiosity about where you come from isn't a betrayal of the people who raised you. It's a pretty ordinary human instinct, running into an ordinary human gap.

I don't think every question needs an answer to be worth asking. Some of mine still don't have one, and I've made a kind of peace with that — not by deciding the question doesn't matter, but by deciding I can carry an unanswered question without it running my life. It just gets to be one of the true things about me: a person who wonders, sometimes, about a version of the story I'll never fully see.