Today marks four years since Mama (my adoptive mother) passed away. She was 94. I loved her with my whole heart, but our relationship had many complexities, and we were nothing alike.

I could see in my daughter’s eyes that she was on the verge of tears when she called to FaceTime me on a Sunday morning. I asked, “What’s wrong?” She said she was sad and didn’t know why. She thought it was just hormones, but I sensed the underlying cause…

I’ve read that inner-child work, a technique to help resolve repressed emotions can be a powerful tool for healing trauma. Over the years, I’ve repeated the same patterns and attracted similar experiences and people, many of whom did not have my best…

Looking back at my adoptee reunion and the few times my birth father and I connected, I wish I would’ve asked him more questions. I know he never held me before I was relinquished because he didn’t come to the hospital when I was born, but I…

When I hung up the phone after my 40-minute radio interview with Valerie Okunami, host of KCOR’s Bizi Yogi show I had a sinking feeling. I had talked about my shame on the air. I knew what I’d be discussing when I agreed to be a guest—the day’s…

Forty-five years ago today, I gave birth to the first person in the whole wide world who I knew to be a flesh-and-blood part of me. (I was adopted, so this was a huge deal.) Like today, it was a Sunday. The labor was long, and I was exhausted but elated…

Change sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention. For example: What triggered the writing slump I’ve been in for the last few months? When, exactly, did my shins turn to lizard skin? And when was I appointed as the matriarch of my family to…

When I met a former English professor in Seattle last summer, she said to me, “Why are you writing your memoir? What has caused you to take this journey?” I didn’t have an immediate answer. Initially, I’d started writing to share my story of being…

A few months ago, I was going through a box of keepsakes from 1973—the year I gave my baby up for adoption. Inside were the treasures I carted first from Alaska to California and then through eleven additional moves over the last 44 years…

One of my coworkers is a middle-aged screenwriter, a former sports editor, and a nice enough guy with a dry sense of humor and sarcastic wit. Let’s call him Ben. Great life, great wife. You know the type. During the fifteen years that we’ve worked out of…

We’ve all known people who go on and on about the drama in their lives (aka trauma survivor), getting so wound up talking about it that it makes you wish you could pole vault into another state. I don’t ever want to be that person. Unfortunately, I…