To my mother,
All my life I have wanted to meet you, but not enough to violate your privacy. I’m not sure where I got that idea, but it seems that as long as I can remember, I’ve keenly felt what a painful thing it must have been to give up a child, and how that pain would only be revived were that “child” to reappear unexpectedly in your life. I imagined how the whole fabric of the life that you had constructed since then would be altered, disturbed beyond repair by the person it was structured to forget. But not until almost this very moment, as I write this — my first communication with you of any kind — has any other point of view seemed real or possible to me. For the first time, it dawns on me that you could have wondered all these years, “Is she well? Is she alive or dead? What does she look like? Could I ever see her? Does she ever think of us?”