I get an email from Ancestry.com. I leave it unread in my inbox, at first. I think about deleting it. I think, for the hundredth time, about unsubscribing and blocking. I think about canceling the account, which was a gift from my adoptive mother almost ten years ago.
Every six months or so, I stare out the window instead of working. My skin itches for days. I eventually scratch, open the email, click on the site link. I need to see how the map of my people has changed. How the company’s methodology has improved, the microscope lens tightened, the details clarified. The tiny little men, my ancestors, come into view as they march across the map. There once was a large swath of blue across eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi Jews clocking in at 87% of my genetic makeup; now it appears to have shrunk to 65%. Now Scotland and Sweden make an appearance. Lithuania and Turkey. A variety of bands painted across Europe and Asia. This is who I am and where I come from, according to the map. This is the only clue to my identity, outside of the single typed page I received from Jewish Social Services on my eighteenth birthday and the questionable narrative from my biological father, who I no longer have a relationship with.
Every six months or so, I think I’ve grown past this anxiety, this weight in and on my chest. I click on the link and examine the map. I ignore the flashing messages in my website inbox, including the ones from my biological aunt who didn’t know I existed.
“You should speak with your brother,” I wrote to her just once. “I don’t think it’s right for me to answer these questions on his behalf.”
“Oh sweetie,” she answered. “You’re so thoughtful to consider your father’s feelings like this.”
There are more emails from a series of strangers. They have questions. They’re confused by my branch on their family tree. My name isn’t visible, not that it would matter. As an adoptee, my name is meaningless to them.
“Do you know Jim?” one man asks. “Jim’s great. He’s my cousin and you share 40% of your DNA with him.”
“So odd. Why haven’t I ever heard of you?” another man writes.
“I haven’t even heard of me,” I want to tell him, to tell all of them. But I never write back, not since that one email to my aunt. I feel profoundly lonely every time I log in, lonelier than I ever did before creating this account, lonelier even than the day my biological father misspelled my name as he wished me a happy birthday a week too early, then went back to not knowing me.
The push-and-pull of this loneliness is addictive. Perhaps that’s what it means to be an adoptee: to be unbearably lonely and yet unable to stop reaching.
I block then unblock Ancestry.com. I send it to my spam folder.
I google my biological mother for the third time this week, the three photos I know so well popping up as if I haven’t already downloaded them multiple times. As if I haven’t expanded them over and over, these pictures taken years apart, to examine her eyes, her widening body, her graying hair. As if seeing the young man next to her for the first time, this person who is almost definitely my biological brother and who might look just a little like my son. Especially in the shoulders, in how tall he is.
I call up to my son’s bedroom and ask him to empty the dishwasher. I touch his sleeve as he enters the kitchen. I turn his face toward me. He might favor his uncle, but he is comprised mostly of his father and I, and of his sisters, reflected in his eyes and cheekbones. We are one thorny branch of a tree, our roots buried and unseen. Our soil is here, not on a distant map.
“Mom, what are you doing?” he asks, not unkindly.
I reach, and my fingers march up his arms, onto his cheeks, holding his face in place while I stare.
