I’ve always known I was adopted. 

From earliest memory, my adoptive parents so normalized it, it was just what it was. Why think more? Or maybe it was a guy thing. In her twenties, my also-adopted sister searched for her bio parents and found them. Was a brief, unfulfilling encounter, yet when my life imploded in my thirties, I put a waiver in my file at the agency that would release my identity if my bio parents did the same. Was a passive nod to a deeper need I was finally beginning to feel.

Three years ago, my oldest daughter did a DNA test. Found she had 19% Indian blood, which could only have come from me—a new ethnic identity beckoning. She asked if I could get more on my/her bio family, so I spent $163 to get all the “non-identifying” information I could. One document, the social worker’s narrative, riveted me.

My mother was a 23-year-old Hispanic girl in 1955, oldest of 13 siblings with a stay at home mother and father who was a barber by day and gigging musician at night. He couldn’t fully support his family, so my mother went to work, bringing home what she could. Deeply religious and pregnant, she and her mother kept the secret from her father, telling him she had decided to become a nun, but instead of convent, entered a Catholic home for unwed mothers. The social worker detailed her anguish that December, away from home at Christmas for the first time, how her eyes filled but she didn’t break down when deciding adoption was her only, best option for her baby and a family that couldn’t afford another mouth.

It was like a movie playing in my mind. I could see her and for the first time ached to meet her. But for her choice, grown up in a radically different family with a dozen aunts and uncles my own age…who am I really? Not that child...but how much the one I became? I know that who I most deeply am has nothing to do with family of origin, but this story, this unmooring of who I’ve always thought I was, is helping cut a path to identity like a machete in a rain forest. We don’t need a new origin story to begin remembering who we are, but we do need to learn to cling less to the one we have.

Remembering Who We Are

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.