39 years

I'm sure you've heard before that birthdays are weird for adoptees.

This one is hitting me especially weird.

I'm starting to enter the phase of life where I think a lot about what has happened to me. About what will happen to my son in his life.

I don't know if it's because I'm feeling weird about the exit of my youth and the beginning of this middle-phase.

Maybe I'm afraid the loss of youth means I'm less precious.

It seems my worth was stamped on my foot like the ink pad at the hospital marking my entrance in this world, and I've been depreciating ever since.

The only ground I stand on is ground that other people have excavated, re-packed, seeded with grass, and plopped me onto – like the cold steel of the hospital scale as I was being measured up.

Is this a normal phase to enter as an infant adoptee? The one where you start to wonder if you've aged out of being wanted?

And then I also think - at least three times a week - that I would rather fade out from other people's awareness than exist in this space of either/or: examined or invisible. I don't want either, but what else is there? If you're a marketed commodity one moment and an aging relic the next, what are you underneath that?

At one point I must have decided that life was meant for living -even if it started with florescent hospital lights and leaving- but so many things were decided for me before that, most without them knowing the ripples they'd cause. It's like the ripples have made themselves visible now, like the little wrinkles that sit by my eyes.

I'm not good at crafting stories that feel complete.

I mostly understand beginnings and endings - often I think they're the same thing - but what to do with this part in the middle?

Am I midway through a patchwork life that won't ever fit? (Have I passed the time for alterations?)

Am I too old for this many questions?