In Between

I was adopted.

              What people would normally imagine is that I was put into an orphanage or the like, but my case is somewhat different, thus a little hard to understand.

              I happened to be a product of unsafe sex during my mother’s early college years. Even though my mother, at a young age, wanted to keep me, my father, whom I only know by name, wanted to abort me. Obviously, my mother chose to keep me. Because of this, she had been through tough times, following the abuse of her mother-in-law, the later separation from my father, and then she eventually got kicked out of her own home. She resorted to working as a housekeeper in a household in San Juan city, circa 1997, the same year I was born.

              The family she had worked for was kind and considerate enough to have her work there despite still being pregnant with me. My mother had a close, filial relationship with the family to the point that, when I was born and issued a birth certificate, she had agreed to use the family’s name—including the parents’—on the birth certificate.

              From what I know, she had not “given” me to them, but it was due to the fact that she cannot raise me on her own. For whatever reason it really was, I am alright with it.

              Maybe a year or so of continuing to work for the family, and numerous attempts of my mother to take me and run away from them, my mother had finally decided to completely put me under their care. She had left the household to live a new life, and a few years after, formed a family of her own, just without me.

              I lived most of my life with my new family, although more than half of that life, I had been taking them for granted. Oftentimes I found myself imagining what my life would have been if I was raised by my real mother and my father. I was hooked up into the past that never was; it was always an illusion I made to fill out the shallow gaps I had.

              With the death of my adoptive mother, I had realized how unloving a “child” I was to her, and to my adoptive family. I gave up comforting myself with an imagined past and instead embraced what I have right now: a family that chose to love and care for me even though they had the option not to.

              My mother has been into problems of her own, but up to now I still keep in touch with her. Even if I sometimes feel empty because of her absence all throughout my 18 years of living, I can never leave the person who chose to sacrifice a lot for the sake of keeping me alive.