The past and family legacy as an adoptee

I didn't know until it was too late that my past was disappearing. It hit me when I was in my late 20s. I was married with two young children and we were living in Salt Lake City in a red brick bungalow.

People tell you to make sure you ask your grandparents the questions, listen to the stories and write them down, soak up your history and capture it before the tellers are gone. But all my grandparents were already gone, my father had died unexpectedly a month after walking me down the aisle, and my mother was starting to show early signs of dementia. 

I was finally old enough to care about the stories and now watched them slip through my hands like hourglass sand. There was nothing I could do to get them back. 

It also hit me at about that same time what I had lost in being adopted. I have always held on to the narrative of gratefulness like most adoptees. Be grateful for having a family who loves you. Be grateful for having a privileged life. 

But having my own children had brought to the surface the loss of having elderly adoptive parents, the loss of my own birth family and heritage and culture, and the loss of a rich legacy for my children. It was an avalanche of grief, accelerating and mounting higher and deeper. 

An unexpected bright spot came into my life after I got married. I realized at some point during our engagement that I was as excited to marry him as I was to gain more family. The Conroys welcomed me in with open arms - I even call his grandmother “Grandma” and it doesn’t feel awkward at all. I found a new legacy with my in-laws.

When we were in a Detroit suburb to visit my husband’s grandparents, we got a full tour of the family cemetery from my father-in-law. That might sound a little morose but I gobbled it up, memorizing the names and trying to picture these ancient butchers, insurance salesmen, good fathers, and fathers who left something to be desired. 

Inheriting this family wasn’t like I imagined because it didn’t fill in the void of information about either my birth parents, who I may never know, and it didn’t make up for the loss of my elderly adoptive parents’ history.

But it did fill in a new blank, like new branches drawn and filled in on my family tree. And that counts for something, doesn’t it? 

I still grieve my other familial losses, but choose to recognize that I am rich for getting the chance to draw into a family like theirs.