Writing from the intersection of two identities
November is National Adoption Month
I’m writing a memoir from a place few people ever stand, and that’s at the intersection of two identities at opposite ends of an adoption story. I was adopted in May 1979, three months after I was born.
I was my birth mother’s age when I placed my first child for adoption. What I’m writing about is neither a confession nor reconciliation. I think of it as a conversation between my two selves shaped by defining events: the child who was given, and the mother who gave.
Rather than separating these narratives into before and after, I wanted them to speak to each other, much like the thoughts in my head do. I spent a good portion of my life wishing I could just sit down for ten minutes with my birth mother.
It’s not a spoiler to say I have met her. I’m almost 47, and I have found everyone linked to my origin story. Despite this, it continues to unfold. And it’s a lot to unpack.
It feels wrong to say this memoir is about one voice recalling what it felt like to enter a family through absence, while the other grapples with the ache of creating absence for someone else. It’s a bit more complicated. Instead, I hope you’ll find and understand is how these two perspectives meet, diverge, and return to each other in a way that reflects how memory actually works. It’s nonlinear and often unwilling to stay in its assigned pile.
This is not a memoir about answers. In this moment I consider this is a memoir about recognition and transformation. It explores how identity is shaped by what is withheld, how love survives across time, in silence, and how a we can carry both the wound and be a person who inflicts it. To inflict this type of pain is to do it intentionally and unknowingly, but always honestly. Something to consider — adoptee, birth parent, or not — is that two opposite or conflicting ideas, feelings or things can be true at the same time. To sit with this understanding and acceptance brings me incredible peace.
I sometimes think my approach to this writing is rare. As an adoptee and a birth mom, I don’t think we talk enough about how it affects us, and I have found that to be an incredibly isolating way to live. However, now that I have found my biological family and talked to my adoptive family, and other adoptees, I have found all of it to be equally deeply personal and unmistakably universal. It’s been an interesting journey to think about what it means to belong, and what it costs to become someone else’s beginning.
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Sending you much love and light as you work through reading my work. It’s tough to write, tough to read, but it’s written from a place of love and understanding. Peace.
Hello! I’m Sarah Scull — a former journalist and columnist, honored with multiple Iowa Newspaper Association awards. I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative and a featured speaker with the Iowa Storytellers Project. Beyond the page and the stage, I’m a band mom, quilter, historic preservationist, and arts advocate working to keep creativity and community thriving in Southwest Iowa.
Where to find me: The Iowa Writers Collaborative Weekly Roundup Flipside, where stories go to breathe. That’s where you’ll find the heart and soul behind the headlines and Iowa life.
Wow, Sarah 💙 Your story feels extraordinarily rare and important.