Looking Like Me: Tara on Birthdays

As usual, Kathleen, you give me food for thought.
I was adopted, and this is too long and too complex a story to go into here, but suffice it to say, that in the last eight years, I have learned the story, and what a story, it is.
So my own birth story was always even less than a mystery to me-it was a void. A black hole.
I could inject a bunch of info. here to let you know how blessed and lucky I was to have the family I have raise me. How wonderful they are even now, as grandparents to a gaggle of natural born and otherwise acquired granddaughters that I’ve presented them with.
But that’s not the point.
My point is, that my own childrens’ arrivals were therefore infused with an extra layer of meaning and weight for me, as I finally had…and I don’t mean this in any way or shape a trivial matter…people who looked.like.me. I am endlessly fascinated by how their eyes are shaped or their hair falls alternately straight or curly. How their voices sound and how they’ve developed the same problem with “esses” I had, or how they run fast, too. How they look like each other, or their dad, or…and here is where the big pause, the big suck of air inward occurrs…my dad. Or my mom, or numerous unknown siblings, grandparents, uncles.
But of course, in the end, they are themselves, and a part of me separate from their birth family or our immeasurably fortuitous adoptive family.
They are mine. For the first time, ever, these girls are here in this life. And they and I can go on from here, to see how their sons and daughters…
look.like.me.
Their birthdays will forever be so much my own. My birthday as part of my very own family.
Thanks for making me think about it. Take care, best wishes, Tara

This piece originally appeared as a comment on Happy Birthday Calder Mac: My Life’s Work.