Partly on thinking about Eve Sturges’ journal question “How Has This Experience Changed the Way You See the People Who Raised You?” In early 2018, Kathy, a newly identified maternal cousin Ancestry match, sent a message asking whether I might be able to answer some questions about her mother’s 1934 birth or adoption, maybe even about the person listed as birth mother. I could help … Continue reading On (Not) Going Missing

[O]ne thing we all have in common as humans is the need to connect with others… even if the discovery only [leads] to being able to look into eyes that looked like mine for a minute. I felt this need to connect on a cellular level and the reason was indefinable to me. – Annette L Becklund, Ancestry Discoveries (2023, p. 8) My parents had … Continue reading On the Nose

I reached a significant milestone today in finalising the payoff of the loan on my flat – nine years and a month ahead of the 30-year mortgage deadline. And I celebrate that, as I did when Donna and Dave, my parents, paid off our home in 1981, four years early. They accomplished the early payoff by shifting their work lives starting with my high school … Continue reading Today Donna and Dave paid off a second home

Feeling spurred on once again simply by reading the dedication opening the “misattributed paternity” dissertation I’ve just started reading: To everyone who is searching. I hope you find what you seek. And in the process, I hope you are seen. We all live this NPE experience in such different ways, and share the hope of being seen, of feeling seen, throughout the journey. For me, … Continue reading “I hope you are seen”

A bit of a writing-in-semi-public-forum-as-mind-purging exercise – something I promised to do in as part of setting goals with three writers who are also doing the hard, stumbling, inarticulate work of generative writing right now. Four years ago on April 4th, what would have been Pops’ 88th birthday, I learned that my paternal DNA comes from another person. I refer to him as biodude. This … Continue reading Playlist for “One to Grow On” – the music as I stumble toward an essay

I was invited to write 4-book review essay for the The Lesbian Review of Books. This post reflects on my right-now-in-2021 re-reading of that 31 January 1996 essay, which is one of the several 1990s pieces I wrote that identified lesbian as my identity – more correctly, as the public identity that I let exist even as the personal, pedagogical, and gene-particled parts of me … Continue reading On (Re-)Reading “The Queer Sounds of Teacher Talk”

I’m still writing trying to sort out what might become a base for that book I have in mind – the first part of it ignoring the surprise DNA discovery, the second part opening with it. The last couple of weeks I’ve been mulling and drafting and talking through what might be(come) parts of that decidedly longer section/chapter/essay. This post is the start of working … Continue reading This Is Going to Hurt: What Would The Doctor Do?

Decode Emojis It’s been a weekend of doing writing work at home, to give shape to a scholarly essay I will propose as the project for a Fall 2022 academic leave. In short, the project will focus on bringing together completed research, decades of teaching notes, and new archival research on Septima Clark and Raymond Williams as adult educators. The culminating task will be “writing … Continue reading Decode emojis. Eat waffles. Do scholarship

You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well… But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior: A Girlhood Among Ghosts and her aunt, the “No Name Woman” of … Continue reading These silences

The red buoy must be a mile out. Were I to stand at the edge of water-beach rather than on this hillside of rosehips and rocks higher up, where now-white driftwood slammed up to fashion a fence, I’d have a better sense of shore to water span, a clearer calculation of traveling-from-here-to-the-buoy space. But I’m here, here where I have landed – at the edge … Continue reading On (Not) Traveling