About a Boy

Every adoptee has this sick fantasy that our biological mums and dads have gone on to accomplish great things after giving us up. And the hope against hope is that one day they will show up to rescue us from our humdrum lives, and all of the holes in our lives that we always attributed to being torn from the bosom of our genetic family will be magically patched up (with no unsightly scars or weight gain)!

In high school, I thought I looked a little like Dustin Hoffman and actually carried around a picture of him cut out from the paper in my wallet. (Daddy?) I’d see promo clips for the movie Wargames (“Do you want to play Thermonuclear War?”) and thought that in certain shots, I looked an awful lot like Matthew Broderick -- something in the eyes and eyebrows. (Are we cousins?) And since my parents and I simply did not get along during my teen years, the fact that we were not connected by blood pleased me to no end.

The ugly open-the-drapes-and-let-the-daylight-in truth is that we were given up for adoption because the "home" situation was not good (read this article from The New Yorker and weep). My biological mother was 19, in college, and slept with a senior guy she dated for a month or two, and then they broke up. Realizing she was pregnant with me, she took the next semester off, and moved in with a brother who lived in Boston while I gestated. I was born on the 5th of November in the year of our Lord 1966, and handed over to the adoption agency right after birth. My story is not that sordid (no tales of drugs, prostitution, etc.), but certain to cause shame. Enough so that all the records are sealed up tight, and my birth certificate officially faked by the State of Massachusetts. I'm illegitimate, baby. Says so right here...

I later found out that my biological mom did return to college and graduated. After that is a mystery. Do I want to unravel it...or will it unravel me? Or does any of it really matter?