mistake

I've grown up knowing that my life, as it is, is the product of mistakes.  One big mistake -- two teenagers getting pregnant.  One nature's mistake -- a married couple with infertility and a desire to be parents.  And the solution to those two problems was adoption.

When I was about 9, I was watching some nature documentary with my mom and grandma.  We were in the kitchen, sitting around the kitchen table, watching the small television (which likely means the male half of the family was watching something "more important" in the den on the normal-sized tv).  There were snakes slithering across the screen, creatures that inspired only a bit of revulsion.

"He's a slimy bastard," I said of the big snake.

"What?" yelled my mom and grandma, shocked but nearly in unison.

"What?  He's a slimy bastard."  I said, somewhat confused.

"Honey," my mother said slowly, re-gaining her equilibrium, "Do you know what that word means?"

"Well, yeah," my 9 year old, dictionary-loving self replied.  "It's someone bad or nasty.  Not nice."  Mistake.  Probably should have used a dictionary.

So my mother explained.  Impartially, undramatically, clinically.  That a "bastard" is someone whose parents were not married when they were born.

"Oh!" I said.  "Like me!"

My poor mother.  It took her a few beats.  Not as many as I think it might take me.  And then she told me about "connotations" or common meanings, about how words that technically mean X might actually be used to mean Y in context.  And how I shouldn't use words unless I was sure what they meant, which was increasingly becoming a problem as I read voraciously but relied on context rather than the beloved dictionary a little too often.

She did confirm that, yes, technically, I was a bastard, but that my parents (adoptive) were married when I was born, and since I was now their child, I was not a bastard.

Except that she's wrong -- I am.  It's another fact of my existence, and I think that knowing it doesn't feel awkward the way denying it does.  Knowing that I wasn't meant to be doesn't change that I am, or that life has been, overall, pretty privileged and decent.  I am finding that reunion is stirring up a lot of confusion about how I feel about things, but not much about who I am.  It's as though the framework will never change -- just the details.  If a life is like a house, getting to know my birth mother and my origin story is finishing the basement -- the foundation that has always been there, but closed off and unfinished.