The Family You Lost Before You Had This Name by A.J. Van Belle
1800 words, ~9 minutes reading time
Issue 4 (Spring 2024)
The day I arrived in Berlin last November, I followed my adult adopted daughter between tall, concrete buildings onto the playground of their child’s elementary school. A few snowflakes swirled through the air.
My adopted grandchild saw me across the schoolyard before I saw them. By the time I spotted them, they were already a blur of metallic-gold winter jacket and pale hair flying in the wind. With a joyful cry of “Oma!” they launched themself into the air, trusting me to catch them. They wrapped their legs around my waist, and I spun all sixty-ish pounds of just-turned-nine-year-old in a circle.
If you’d told me five years ago that today I would have a daughter and grandchild in Berlin, that I’d have visited Germany several times, that I would hold conversations in German regularly, that my teenage biological daughter would talk fondly of her older sister, and that my grandchild would record silly songs for me every year on my birthday, I’d have laughed—the sort of laugh that comes not from humor but from painful resignation to keeping one’s life limited. I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of giving strangers the love they needed, nor that anyone could ever see in me the family member they were missing. That was a fantasy, something to stay between the pages of books.
The day my future adopted daughter was born, I didn’t know they existed. I was in my late teens, living with a Québecois host family as part of a French exchange program. I had no idea there was a baby on the other side of the ocean who would one day call me Mom. Nearly three decades later, in the spring of 2019, I met a writer on Twitter who happened to be quite a few years younger than I was. Like me, they were nonbinary/transmasculine, and we were both on fire with excitement for the sci-fi novels we were working on. They were also a lifelong orphan who was raising a nonbinary/transfeminine child.
Over the next several months, we grew close by talking about our novel-writing adventures. I didn’t know I viewed this new close friend as my child until the day they tweeted that they’d always wished to find someone to adopt them. A friendly mutual replied to the post, “Aw, honey! I’ll adopt you!” Without meaning to, I caught myself automatically thinking this was quite nice of the woman who’d replied, but that she wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of adopting, because I already had it covered. There was no competitive spirit, just matter-of-fact knowledge, calm and certain.
It took us the better part of a year from that point to find the words for our complicated, painful, gorgeous connection and understand that we were mother and daughter. The discovery did not feel like forging a new bond with a stranger. It felt like finding a child I’d long ago lost.
Another six months after that, my husband accepted our new family members as his own and said, “Now we have two daughters. And a granddaughter.” He doesn’t speak German and our grandchild is just beginning to learn English in school, but I often find the two of them cuddling as if they were made for each other.
When I tell people the short version of how my family gained an adult daughter and elementary-aged granddaughter, they think I’m generous. That I’m doing something “nice” for a young adult and their child who didn’t previously have much extended family. But the people who look at it this way are seeing only a tiny fraction of the picture. They don’t see how my new family members have carried me beyond the boundaries of what I thought I could be, how they’ve transformed my life into something freer, more expansive, more full of love than I ever dared to hope for. They don’t see how much the trust of a brilliant, traumatized, blazingly loving younger adult, and an accepting squeeze from the small hand of their child, have shattered the limitations around what I believe I can do or be.
When people hear the breezy declaration that my daughter and granddaughter will be visiting from Berlin, they don’t see the fears, the knots I tied myself into, the bone-deep “not good enough” feelings, the times I swore to an empty room I’m not the one, I’m not strong enough to be a parent to someone who survived for thirty years in a life devoid of parental love.
I tried, at first, to run away from the relationship we were building. In the beginning, I couldn’t see ahead to family Christmases or kid crafts or vacations. I only knew my soul was bound up with another person’s so tightly it hurt. We were an ocean apart and we were each wounded in the exact way that poked at the other one’s scabs. I knew I was in over my head, that this was terrifying, that I was taking on a task no one in their right mind would accept. It would be no small thing to adopt a child and love them; anyone would be a fool to take that lightly. And to presume to be the parent of an orphaned adult? That was another level of hubris altogether. Here I was accepting a grown-ass person as my child—a person with more grit and charisma in their tattooed arm than most people have in their entire bodies. And yet I was doing this, because something in me refused to turn away and because they knew, beyond all doubt, that I was the only mom for them.
I knew, too. Despite the times I tried to refuse the call, I knew from the start, before it was ever said aloud, before I ever met my found daughter in person, that I am their mother and always will be. As surely as my biological daughter has been given to me as a gift, and I to her, and we cannot be replaced in each other’s lives, I knew I’d found my other child, the one I’d always been missing.
Not to mention that every time I whined I couldn’t do it, the empty room said back to me, “Really? Well, it’s up to you, honey. But look around: ya see anyone else who can do it better?”
Every time, I sighed back to the empty room, “Point taken.”
I don’t argue with empty rooms anymore. I’m in this for the long haul. But sometimes I still sense tendrils of self-doubt in my own shadows. This found-family path is one of holiday gatherings, negotiating Monopoly alliances with a kid who plays the board game as if it were Survivor, and giggling and ducking behind the kitchen counter while shooting each other with Nerf guns. But it’s also doubt that twines around your spine like a vine around a tree trunk, doubt that’s still there when you buy plane tickets, when you find each other again in the games section of the amusement park, and when you have a sad cuddle because it’s time to say goodbye until the next visit. It’s doubt that haunts you at night but blows away like fog in the morning light, only to creep back in again when you’re not expecting it.
When you look at the whole picture, you see that even while you’re doubting the true tale, actions are telling the real story: your grandkid chooses the sweater you knit them as the one thing they want to wear for a special occasion. Your grown-up kid texts you in the middle of the night when they’re scared or sad or hopeful. At your father-in-law’s funeral, your brother-in-law reads statements of remembrance from all the immediate family members. Your adopted daughter’s statement says your father-in-law and your grandchild didn’t share a language but bonded in their own special way because the little one was shy and wouldn’t say anything to Great-Grandpa besides “Quack,” and quack turned out to say “I love you” perfectly well. And then, somehow, doubt has twined all the way around to become a warm certainty again.
Maybe finding each other as family is a gift that comes especially to those of us who know what it is to feel forgotten, who believe every relationship is a fleeting firefly light, who don’t trust the ground we stand on. Because we’re broken open and the ineffable stuff that’s us, beneath the language and the glamour of humanness, seeps out and finds itself in kind, bleeding from another broken-open self.
The family you find when you thought you were nothing, or thought you were a bag of pieces that don’t fit together, are the people who show you who you’ve been all along. They turn you to face yourself. You hide your eyes and try to look away, but with the gentlest words, they force you to look at yourself. And when your tired, dark-adjusted eyes see what’s there—a beautiful spirit who’s worth loving, worth choosing—you don’t know if you can bear the light.
When you say yes to these people becoming part of your life and your spirit for always, you think you’re only rewriting the future—until you glance behind and see you’ve also rewritten the past, because when you’re forced to see your present self as eminently lovable, you realize Past You wasn’t so bad, either. You recast past failures as the path that led you to find the mother, the sister, or the child you lost somewhere in the darkness before this life began, before you had this body or this name.
The day I met my adopted daughter’s brother and his young daughter, I played with the kids until my grandchild headed to join the adults in the kitchen. I found myself alone with my five-year-old grandniece in the sun-filled living room of what used to be a standard East German family apartment, with 10-foot ceilings and a tall, glass door opening onto a garden balcony. I’d only met this child half an hour earlier, and now she blinked into my eyes, waiting for me to make conversation. I seized on the first thing that came to mind. “In Germany, frogs say quack, right?” I said in my then-tentative German. “Did you know that in English, they say ribbit?”
“I didn’t know that,” she replied. “Quack!”
Encouraged, I moved on to another animal. “Can you believe that in English, roosters don’t say kikeriki—they say cockadoodledoo?”
Although she grinned at the silly English rooster sound, I figured she must think I was a few cards short of a deck, since all I could manage to talk to her about were animal sounds. But, whether or not she thought the conversation was silly, something must have gone right—because I heard later that once she was alone with her dad on the way home, my little grandniece gave her father a solemn prescription. “Papa,” she told him, as if it were the most obvious, most sensible thing in the world, “you need to find yourself new parents, too.”