Words cast their powerful spell on me when I was a month old. They changed me from one person into another.
One moment I bore the last name of the man who fathered me, and though I had no first name recorded, the name of my mother, written in her own hand, was also there on my birth certificate.
The next moment, court papers decreed I was Lucia Anne Winegar, carrying the first name of my adoptive mother (which she shared with her mother, and her grandmother, all related by blood) and the last name she’d taken when she married my adoptive father. My birth certificate was amended, my adoptive parents’ names swapped in as my mother and father. A tectonic shift in the bedrock of me. A fault line.
I was nearly 60 years old when Arizona changed the law that prevented adopted people from seeing their own birth certificate and I finally saw my own origin document. By then, I’d known the names of my birth parents for a few years, but I thrilled to see my first mother’s neat handwriting in the “Parent’s signature” box.
A reminder of the fault line between my two lives — the one I lost and the one I was given — runs diagonally across my original birth certificate, from the bottom left corner up to the top right corner. “Not to be used for legal purposes” repeated over and over and over.
Words on paper, more powerful than the blood ties evidenced by the still-healing mark left by the umbilical cord that had made my mother and me a single being, until it was cut and we parted. One became two, and as these two lives — one lived, one imagined — lurched past one another the landscape of my life would be shaped and reshaped by the lingering aftershocks.
I’ve learned to build my life to withstand them, created habits and internal structures that flex as needed. But I sometimes wonder what life I could have built if I hadn’t needed to put so many resources toward shoring up my frameworks. The life not lived rubbing up against the life I’ve made. Both pulling against the center.