I used to believe that being adopted meant someone had chosen you.
I thought that was supposed to make you feel wanted.
But after twenty years with Gwendolyn, I began to wonder whether my brother and I had ever been wanted at all.
Still, I kept trying.
That was probably my biggest mistake.
The morning of her sixtieth birthday, I placed a bouquet of white lilies on the passenger seat and drove toward the house where I had spent most of my childhood.
I had also bought her a present.
Nothing expensive.
Just a beautiful silver bracelet I had seen in a jewelry store a few days earlier.
I imagined her opening it and smiling.
Maybe she would hug me.
Maybe she would finally say something that didn't make me feel like I owed her my entire existence.
I knew how unlikely that was.
But hope had always been difficult for me to abandon.
My brother Grant thought I was being foolish.
When I told him about my plans, he stared at me as though I had announced that I intended to walk into a burning building.
"You're really going to visit her?"
"It's her birthday."
"That's not what I asked."
I looked down at the gift box in my hands.
Grant shook his head.
"After everything she's said to us, you still want to make her happy?"
I didn't have a good answer.
"She's the person who raised us."
"Raymond raised us. She just made sure we remembered how much she resented it."
That hurt because it was true.
I changed the subject.
Grant didn't.
He had always been better at accepting unpleasant truths than I was.
We had been three years old when Gwendolyn and her husband, Raymond, adopted us.
We were too young to remember much about the process.
What we remembered came from photographs, stories, and the explanations our parents gave us.
According to Gwendolyn, our biological mother had left us behind.
She had supposedly disappeared from our lives and never attempted to return.
We had no reason to question that story.
At three years old, you believe whatever the adults tell you.
At six, you start asking questions.
At ten, you learn which questions make people angry.
Raymond was the person who made our childhood bearable.
He never treated us like children who needed to earn their place in his home.
He simply treated us like his sons.
He came to our school performances, even when he had to leave work early.
He remembered which snacks we liked.
He bought Grant a little construction truck for Christmas one year and gave me a box of drawing pencils because I had started filling notebooks with pictures.
I still remembered the smell of the wooden pencils.
I remembered sitting beside him at the kitchen table while he watched me draw.
"That's pretty good, Wesley."
"It's just a house."
"Then why does it look like somewhere I'd want to live?"
I laughed.
He laughed too.
Those moments stayed with me long after everything else changed.
Raymond had a way of making us feel safe.
He also had a habit of telling us something whenever we worried about being different from other children.
"You're my boys," he would say. "That's all that matters."
I believed him.
Grant believed him too.
Gwendolyn never spoke that way.
She rarely called us her sons unless someone else was listening.
At home, she preferred reminding us that she and Raymond had taken responsibility for two children who weren't theirs.
If we forgot to put our plates away, she complained.
If we made noise while watching television, she complained.
If we asked for something new, she reminded us how much money she spent raising us.
One afternoon, when I was seven, I accidentally knocked a glass of orange juice off the kitchen counter.
It shattered on the floor.
I froze.
Before I could even reach for a towel, Gwendolyn appeared in the doorway.
"Do you have any idea how much things cost in this house?"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry doesn't pay for anything."
Grant came running from the living room.
"It was an accident."
She turned toward him.
"Nobody asked you."
I remember staring at the orange juice spreading across the tiles.
I wanted to cry, but I didn't.
I had already learned that crying usually made things worse.
Grant eventually helped me clean up.
Later, he told me not to worry.
But I did.
I worried about almost everything.
I worried about making noise.
I worried about asking for food.
I worried that one day Gwendolyn would decide she had done enough for us.
At the time, I didn't understand that children shouldn't have to live with those fears.
Then Raymond died.
I was ten years old.
It happened so suddenly that I couldn't understand why everyone kept telling us he wasn't coming home.
One day, he was sitting in his favorite chair.
The next day, the chair was empty.
I remember his old brown jacket hanging behind the bedroom door.
Nobody moved it for months.
Grant and I waited for him to return.
We waited through the funeral.
We waited through the relatives visiting.
We waited even after the house became quiet again.
But Raymond never came back.
And something inside our home disappeared with him.
Gwendolyn became colder.
She stopped buying birthday cakes.
Christmas became a day when we received practical things instead of toys.
Our school events went unattended.
Whenever we mentioned Raymond, she usually told us to stop living in the past.
I missed him terribly.
Grant rarely talked about it.
He simply became more protective of me.
If Gwendolyn raised her voice, he stepped between us.
If I apologized for something I hadn't done, he would look at me afterward and remind me that I didn't need to accept every accusation.
I wish I had listened more.
As the years passed, we learned to manage without her affection.
We studied.
We worked.
We made plans.
Grant eventually became an engineer.
I discovered that I loved design and turned that interest into a career.
We left home as soon as we could afford to support ourselves.
Our relationship with Gwendolyn became little more than occasional phone calls.
Usually, she contacted us when she needed something.
Sometimes she called to complain about bills.
Other times, she reminded us that raising two adopted boys had cost her years of her life.
I used to finish those conversations feeling guilty.
Grant usually finished them by turning off his phone.
He had stopped expecting anything from her.
I hadn't.
When our high school graduation approached, I made one final attempt to include her in something important.
I called and asked whether she would attend.
There was a long pause.
Then she answered.
"You're grown men now, Wesley."
"I know."
"Then why should I still be expected to attend every little event?"
"It's graduation."
"You don't need me there."
I stood beside my bedroom window, holding the phone.
"It would mean something to us."
She sighed.
"I've done enough."
The conversation ended shortly afterward.
Grant and I attended the ceremony without her.
We took photographs together.
We congratulated each other.
And we promised ourselves that our lives would not be defined by the things we had never received.
I thought I had finally accepted that.
Apparently, I hadn't.
Because twenty years after our adoption, I was driving toward Gwendolyn's house with birthday flowers and a silver bracelet.
I told myself that perhaps age had softened her.
Perhaps losing Raymond had changed her in ways I hadn't understood.
Perhaps she had simply never learned how to show love.
I wanted to believe there was still something good between us.
When I reached her driveway, I turned off the engine and looked at the flowers.
The white lilies were wrapped in pale paper.
I adjusted the ribbon.
Then I picked up the gift box.
The front door was unlocked.
That surprised me.
Gwendolyn usually kept it locked, even during the day.
I stepped inside quietly.
The house smelled familiar.
Furniture polish.
Old curtains.
The faint scent of coffee.
I removed my shoes near the entrance, just as we had been required to do when we were children.
For a moment, I felt like I was ten years old again.
I was about to call her name when I heard someone speaking from the kitchen.
It was Gwendolyn.
I recognized her voice immediately.
Then I heard another woman laughing.
Grandma Opal.
Gwendolyn's mother.
I stopped walking.
I didn't want to interrupt their conversation.
I was holding the flowers in one hand and the gift in the other when Gwendolyn said something that made my stomach tighten.
"They still haven't figured it out, Mom."
Grandma Opal said something too quietly for me to understand.
Then Gwendolyn laughed.
"Twenty years, and they believed every word I gave them."
I stopped breathing for a moment.
Every word?
I looked toward the kitchen.
The flowers were beginning to slip from my fingers.
Gwendolyn continued talking.
And I realized that whatever she was discussing had something to do with Grant and me.
I had entered that house hoping to give her a birthday present.
Instead, I was standing in the hallway wondering whether the entire story of my childhood had been a lie.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: The Conversation Behind the Kitchen Door Made Me Question Everything I Remembered About Being Adopted
I Thought Bringing Her Birthday Flowers Might Finally Make Her See Me as Her Son
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