My adoptive mother told me on the way to church one morning that when an ewe dies and isn’t able to take care of a lamb, the sheepherder will put the wool from the lamb’s real mother on another ewe, so that the lamb will be adopted by that new ewe. I was four or five years old.
This was the first differentiation I can remember, this was how it was first relayed. Pinning down a memory that longs to be repressed is a quiet victory in the noise that is my mind. When I push to recall thoughts I had, or instances where the awareness that there were others out there who knew me, who knew I was alive and living alongside their own social circles broke into my world, I was somehow repressing that knowledge and it manifested as increasingly self-destructive patterns and paranoid moments. I later learned this myth of sheep was inherently flawed, and remarkably reductive.
When I was at the end of sixth grade, attending Twin Falls Christian Academy, there was a book fair. The parent church of the Christian school was Grace Baptist Church, and the church turned out to support the book fair, raising money for the new gymnasium that had been built behind the church, expanding the classrooms for the school. I was at a table filled with books, and my maternal grandmother approached me, clearly struck by my appearance. She asked me what books I liked, and I told her I was obsessed with Encyclopedia Brown. I may also have mentioned Star Trek, of which I was a bit of an evangelist at the time. She started to say something, then left abruptly. I remember she asked me if I knew who she was, and I felt immediately like I should know. She never told me who she was, just turned and left. I remember turning to someone next to me and asking who she was, and not getting a reply.
I remember this sensation, this moment, this clear longing to recall, most keenly when I rewatch the 1998 film “The Truman Show,” and the scenes of people trying to wake Truman up to his constructed reality play out. Looking back, I feel as if my life was designed to play out as a performance for that family whose presence I somehow escaped. Years later I learned from my biological mother’s brother’s wife that my biological grandmother did indeed approach me, that she was aware that I was her grandson, and that I was attending Christian school in the same church that had arranged for my private adoption in early 1974. As I learned more about the circumstances around my adoption, I realized that the details of my life were known by a significant number of adults in my world. I am a legal fiction.
I explore this theme of adoptee as occultist and also as an occulted object, in this podcast. Spoiler… I am real, and this world is absurd.