Biological Connections, NaBloPoMo/NAAM—Meet Rebecca

With seventeen years of reunion experience under my belt, it’s difficult to know where to begin with this topic. Do I tell you how I look almost identical to my mother in certain pictures, or how my aunt noticed the first time she met me that my mother and I make the same gesture with our hand when we are talking? Do I tell you that the shape of that hand is eerily similar to that of my brother, but that my feet clearly came from my father? Or should I focus instead on the similar life choices? How my father and I participated in the same high-school sports and have the same college major. How my mother and I were both working in the publishing industry when we began our reunion. Or, even more subtle: the bookish, essentially introverted personality that I share with both of them.

I lived the first three decades of my life without genetic mirroring. How important is it to me, now that I have it? I can hardly put that into words. I am like a person who could not see color and then acquired that ability. I have the heightened appreciation of someone who has known the lack of something and therefore does not take its presence for granted. I value it in a way that non-adopted people sometimes cannot fully understand. It brings me peace of mind, a sense of belonging, an understanding of self.

I am thankful that this is one of the ways that my adopted daughter’s childhood is different from my own. We know that her soccer ability and her academic learning style come from her biological family, as does her habit of licking the salt off pretzels. Yes, that’s right — pretzels! I suspect it will be quite some time before scientists identify the pretzel-licking gene, but given that her other mother has the exact same habit, I have drawn my own conclusions. All of this information is helpful to me, as the mother who is raising her. The pretzel knowledge, for example, helps me to be a little more tolerant than I might otherwise have been of a habit that I don’t share or, really, quite understand. The learning-style knowledge helps me guide her education. But more important than the benefit to me is the benefit to her. She is able to craft her understanding of self in the ordinary way, using the most basic of tools that nature gives to us: the mirror of family.