29

Until I was in my mid-thirties—I met Michael at thirty-four, and Jacob was born days after I turned thirty-seven—my inner world was defined and shaped by longing. This longing was vast, wide, and I was not able to put words to it. All I knew was what I felt, which was a constant, interior ache that propelled me. At times, I felt like a sleepwalker in my own life, moving to a strange choreography whose steps I knew by heart. I have now read interview after interview with donor-conceived people—particularly those whose origins were not disclosed to them—who describe this longing. This sense of being trapped on the other side of an invisible wall: separate, alone, cut off, and—worst of all—not knowing why.

During my childhood, this ache took on two forms: first, I snooped. Whenever my parents were out of the house, as my bored babysitter watched television or talked on the phone with her boyfriend, I would stealthily climb the stairs to my parents’ bedroom and open their drawers and closets. Many children are curious about their parents’ private lives, but my ritual bordered on obsession. I ran my fingertips over my mother’s chiffon scarves folded delicately in tissue. Her scent—rather, a mélange of scents—wafted up from inside each drawer: gardenia, jasmine, orchid, sandalwood, oakmoss, vetiver. Beneath her bathroom sink, she stored dozens of unopened boxes of L’Air du Temps and Calèche, as if she was afraid of ever running out. Her jewelry drawer was locked, but I had located the key and explored her necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and pins whenever I could, as if clues to who my mother really was might be found amid the gems.

My parents slept, according to Orthodox tradition, in single beds that were pushed together and attached to one headboard but made separately, each with its own set of sheets and blankets. The religious reason for this had to do with the belief that a woman is unclean during her menstrual cycle and the couple shouldn’t touch at all during this time. I would sit on the sea of my parents’ two beds and look around their room. The heavy silk curtains, their bedside tables with their twin clocks, the needlepoint pillows with their tiny stitches, all seemed to hold some sort of elusive truth. Then, if I still had time, I would walk into each of their offices and rifle through the papers covering their desks, careful to leave no trace. It wasn’t anything specific I was after. It was just a sense that something was out of reach—and if I could only find it, this terrible feeling of longing would go away. I’d have my answer to a question I couldn’t even formulate.

My second response to the constant ache was to look for a new family. I didn’t realize that this was what I was doing, of course. We had a small dog, a poodle, and I walked that dog around our neighborhood every chance I got. I took the same route each afternoon, and longer walks on weekends. The neighborhood streets were named after English locales: Exeter Way, Surrey Court, Westminster Avenue. But it was the identity of each family in each home that consumed me. The Quentzels had four kids, the youngest of whom was my age. The dad was a dentist. The Markowitzes also were a family of six. The dad was a builder, and the mom was young—the mothers were all a lot younger than mine, I came to realize. The Wilfs, Pantirers, and Kushners were among the community of Holocaust survivors. The Topilows had three mostly grown children. The dad was an ophthalmologist. The boys were already in college. Lawns were littered with swings, jungle gyms, plastic recliners. Sprinklers sprayed gentle arcs back and forth. I knew the neighbors’ cars and made a study of the patterns of their comings and goings. Once school let out each day, it seemed like the moms and kids gathered at home. The dads pulled into the driveways at dusk. As I lurked and watched, I was like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Another form of life was going on behind the closed doors of these homes—a different, easier, more comfortable life than what was happening in mine.

As a grown woman, a mother myself, I received a phone call one day from our across-the-street neighbor from long ago. She felt compelled to share a memory about my childhood. I took notes as I listened: Alarm went off. Babysitter in the basement, didn’t hear. You came running across the street. Scared, alone. As she recounted the story, I remembered the loud clanging, my confusion, and running in my nightgown across the lawn to their house. I recalled the grass beneath my bare feet, the strangeness of being outside all by myself in my nightclothes. The entirety of my childhood formed around the memory, and I felt a sudden cavernous emptiness. The next day I stopped your mother to tell her what had happened. She was always leaving. Going to the city. Parade of babysitters. I told her you had been frightened. She needed to be home more. Or at least hire someone more caring. She screamed at me, furious. How dare I tell her how to raise her child?

I did everything I could to flee my parents. It pains me to write these words. They were all I knew of the world. And yet, I walked that poor dog up and down those unfortunately named suburban streets in search of a family who would open their door and take me in. I now wonder what those people thought; whether they were curious about why I was always circling their block, pausing by their front walks—why I always seemed to be hanging around. Once invited in, I ate cookies at their kitchen tables, watched television in their dens, drank soda on their porches, quietly desperate to belong to what seemed a warm, enchanted circle.

Eventually, the sky would begin to darken and it would be time for me to go home. I’d let myself in through the back door and make my way upstairs to my room. There was no one to ask me why I had been gone so long, or where I had been. The antiseptic silence was suffocating in contrast to the messy, noisy world outside. By the time night fell, either my mother would have returned from whatever she did during the day or a babysitter would make me dinner to my mother’s specifications.

Later, the garage door would open, my father returning from his job in the city. That was the sound I waited for—the electronic rumble of my father returning, then the brief bear hug that seemed to contain within it his warm and beautiful heart. I was afraid of my mother and wanted very little to do with her. She was not the locus of my longing. It wasn’t another mother I was after when I went from house to house like a stray kitten. It wasn’t siblings, either. I was a girl in search of a father—not because I didn’t love my father but because my love couldn’t save him. That younger man on the train to Philadelphia had become a middle-aged man crushed by an accumulation of secrets, losses, and the unsaid. My father was already gone.