For years – since my early childhood – my mother has recounted for me the story of my birth. On my birthday, of course, but also, sometimes, on her birthday, and always, always on Mother’s Day. The day of my birth, she would tell me, was her true birth day, her true Mother’s Day, the day that she became who she was, who she was meant to be: a mother. My mother. 

I did not know then that she’d already had a Mother’s Day, a birth day, a birth before my own.

My own birth story, I knew by heart. She’d told me countless times about how she hadn’t known that she was in labor with me (a ‘silent labor,’ she said the doctors called it), about how my dad had gotten suspicious when she became unusually cranky one afternoon and called the doctor and described her state and then spent hours with his hands on her belly, timing the contractions by what he felt rather than by what she felt. She told me about how it really felt, for her, as if they’d brought me into this world together. She hadn’t been alone during my birth. She’d been surrounded by love. What I never knew was, there’d been another birth, a birth before mine, a birth far less happy. And so I never knew that she clung to the happy story of my birth as though to a life-raft, something to keep her afloat whenever she felt swamped by the dark waves of the memory of that other birth.

Last year, she told me the story of that other birth when she finally told me that I had – that I have – a brother, somewhere, a brother who was given up for adoption. She told me that story, and it broke my heart into a million pieces. Then she started her own blog, and told the story to the world, and, I’m sure, broke more than a few more hearts:

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