It’s a lot.
I’m sitting at the breakfast table absentmindedly stirring my oatmeal and staring out the window at the big maple tree in front of our house. The leaves have all turned. Fallen. There’s a cold, steady wind blowing, rattling the bare branches. The sun’s peeking up. It’s one of those quiet, pretty mornings, the kind where I like to walk to the bus stop even though it’s cold.
But this morning I’m sitting here thinking. I’m sleep deprived. I was up half the night scouring the non-identifying information form Dad gave me. I read it like fifty times.
“You okay, Boo?” My dad appears in the doorway, dressed for school. He doesn’t look like he slept much, either.
“Yeah, I’m . . . processing. Thanks for giving me that stuff,” I manage.
“You’re welcome.”
I eat a bite of oatmeal. It’s cold. This is why I don’t do breakfast.
“You know the part I like the best?” he asks.
I blink up at him. “What?”
“The part with the sexually transmitted diseases.”
“Uh, Dad. What?”
“For that section, she writes: ‘Gross. I really hope not!’ I can almost hear her voice when I read that. She’s funny.”
I have to admit, I didn’t read that and come away with the notion that my birth mother had some great sense of humor. If I’m being honest, I’m disappointed in what she wrote. Especially that last part, where she was given the space to free write a little. She really didn’t tell me anything important. It felt like a summary of all the boxes she’d checked. She had one page to fill, and she couldn’t find anything meaningful to say.
Maybe she’s not into writing, I tell myself. Not everybody communicates that way.
“Talk to me,” Dad says. “Don’t hold back.”
“It’s just . . . when I was little I used to picture my birth mother as a cartoon princess,” I say. “She wore a purple dress and had long, flowing dark hair, and she was beautiful.”
“Of course she was,” he says. “Like you.”
“Dad, please stop with the ‘you’re so special’ talk.” I give up on the oatmeal and take my bowl to the sink. “For some reason I always imagined my birth mother at the top of a white stone tower, locked away, and one day she lowered a basket down from the window, and inside that basket was me.”
“Maybe we did make it sound too much like a fairy tale,” Dad admits. “I liked the alien story better, myself.”
“I wanted there to be a locket that she put around my neck, or a note, explaining how much I meant to her, but she had to let me go, because she was always going to be trapped in the tower. She had no other choice.”
“She wanted you to have the life you deserve,” Dad says. “That’s what she wrote.”
I shrug. “Well, that image of the girl in the tower is kind of clashing with the one of her at a party drinking vodka and smoking a joint.”
Dad snorts and pours himself a bowl of cereal. “The thing is, your birth mother is a real person.”
“Right,” I murmur. “I know.”
“She’s got flaws. Like everybody else. She made mistakes. She’s still out there, making mistakes, as we speak.”
I flash back to the last page of the form.
I always seem to fall for the wrong guy, but that’s why I’m here, I guess.
“Her mistakes aren’t what defines her,” Dad continues. “It’s what she did with those mistakes, and she did something incredibly hard and incredibly giving and brave. And I’m always going to admire her for that, no matter what she did at some party when she was sixteen. And I’m going love her. Because she’s part of you.”
I feel tears coming on. I shake my head. I need to change the subject. I focus on giving my dad crap about his cereal choice instead. “Fruity Pebbles, Dad? Seriously? Mom would never let me eat that crap for breakfast. A snack, maybe. But not breakfast. It’s pure sugar.”
“While the cat’s away—” he says, but his eyes get a little sad the way they do when he thinks about Mom being away from us. She’s locked in her own version of a tower now. “Anyway. Give your bio mom some slack. She did the right thing. It worked out.” He pats my shoulder. “You belong with us.”