She’s Just Like Me
I met my biological mother after forty-nine years of searching for myself
“I’d never forget,” my father said when I asked him what my mother looked like. He remembered the way the sun illuminated the gold in her brown hair, the depth of her gaze, and the way she crinkled her nose when she laughed. As I stood at his doorstep with my two daughters to meet him for the first time, he gave me the kind of bear hug that dads give their daughters. Since I hadn’t ever had that sort of hug in my life, it brought me home to an inner peace I’d never known before.
My father didn’t know if I was a girl or a boy. He was a teenager back then, not a grown man yet, but obviously, enough of a man to make a baby with his girlfriend. In 1969, it wasn’t like today, with the internet and text messages and geo-tracking apps, and genetic testing kits you can buy online, of course. If you called someone, the phone was stuck to a wall with a rotary dial. If there were two sets of parents who didn’t want their kids together, that was that. When my mom’s father answered the phone, he told my dad she wasn’t there and to never call again or else.
My father graduated from boarding school, went to college, found work, got married, had a daughter and a son, moved to Texas, got divorced, moved back to California, got married again, went on the…
