Us: In Theory
December 1st 2022
Dear LaDonna,
I have no conscious memory of us, but I know you gave birth to me. You become more real as I salvage the wreck of our separation, a mother-child history relying mostly on theories. You, Captain LaDonna, took the helm of our womb-ship, capsizing me, Marasha, your first-mate. Or was I the ship? A wise captain knows to abandon a vessel sabotaged with our kind of damage—the devastation of drugs and sex work—submerging our primal connection, sunken and sealed off for far too long. Difficulties be damned, I’m resolved to revive us.
Our misadventures exist in a real file, buried by the Texas Department of Vital Statistics (DVS), legally unobtainable to me. I’ve been working to bust our file out of the broken bureaucracy of Texas’ social welfare system since 2005, when I turned 18.
I thought I’d get information about you and me within six to eight weeks, the time record-requests normally take, not fully understanding the impact of Texas’ sealed adoption laws on us. I had received nothing by the time I’d left for college, so I called DVS my first week there. They explained they could send my adoptive birth certificate, but there were no redacted files to send. Supposedly, “The Texas Derecho” tornado in ‘89 meant social workers from Tarrant and Dallas Counties re-typed the reports but never sent the paperwork to Austin—to “The Vault”—the tomb for families’ stories like ours. Our records were lost. Allegedly.
Still, I steadily mined DVS for 17 years—filing, calling, emailing—until she cracked on September 11th this year. I’d listened to the usual computer-synth hold music while a DVS operator transferred me to an available “records specialist.” I waited and my pelvis tightened. I was 35, and it’d been a month since I’d undergone a dilation & curettage to remove a suspected molar pregnancy. The growth had survived nine envelopes of misoprostol I’d been prescribed since April—right as women all over the US were losing access to the drug. I hadn’t had a period for seven years thanks to premature menopause at 28. But my body, seemingly confused from hormone replacement therapy, painfully cramped and bled out while simultaneously thinking it was pregnant. Each time I bled, I wondered why I didn’t seep out of you, even though I sometimes wish I had. The hold-music stopped and a voice with an Oklahaman twang identified herself as B—. My files had been located in Tarrant County, were being redacted, needed to be scanned into “The Vault,” and then they’d email them.
“These are the files for Marasha DePew?” I asked, thinking there was some mistake, perhaps B— was talking to the wrong person.
“Well, no...” B— said. My pelvis cramped again. “...these are for Jennifer Love. That isn’t you, sweetheart?”
“I’m Jennifer.”
She snorted a little, “You haven’t been Marsha for a long time, darlin’.”
I thought to correct her: MA-RAH-SHA. I needed B— though and didn’t want to scare her off. I wanted to ask her to spill everything she could tell me about you from the files. I knew she couldn’t.
“The ones like you are why I keep coming to this job after all these years. You won the lottery.” Even if I disagreed with her perception of my adoption, B— was our Saint of Social Services. She emphasized that the encrypted PDF I’d receive would only open for up to seven days after it was sent.
I checked my inbox and junk folders as an hourly ritual for two days. B— didn’t disappoint: the file came. I recalled her self-destruction instructions. I took screenshots of all 129 pages of mostly black, redacted legal mumbo jumbo documenting the existence and dissolution of you and me, LaDonna and Marasha.
Dozens of pages of questions were blank, including all 21 questions on two different investigative reports. They didn’t even try to fill the spaces. I can’t imagine blank investigative reports would hold up in a court of law, but in the late 80s, it didn’t matter for a homeless bastard baby.
I inferred facts from fill-ins they had taken the time to counterfeit. Some pages are dated “1981”—even though you know I was born in ‘87—and label my gender as “male.” The words surviving redactive obliteration left only a silhouette of us. I sifted through the rubble of legal revisions containing what they left about us, weaving theories, wanting proofs. Salvageable wreckage lay underneath the black lines they created.
I read the Decree of Termination for the first time. It appointed Tarrant County Child Protective Services as my Conservator, stating you:
knowingly placed and knowingly allowed the Child to remain in conditions and surroundings which endangered the physical and emotional well-being of the Child
The file redacted everything about you, even your name, with the exception of “IV-drug user” and “prostitute.” Doctor’s scribble documented my living in a G-tube for the first 10 days of my life. Perhaps the state assumed a doctor’s handwriting might as well be a redaction. Having worked with middle school boys with learning disabilities for a decade, I discerned the writing like Robert Langdon in the DaVinci Code. After being released from the hospital, I went to a foster home. Those fosters could tell me if I was a fussy baby or a dream baby who slept a lot. They could tell me when I started crawling and holding my own bottle. We both know I wasn’t breastfed. I noticed several pages where my foster family missed required social services and even medical check-ups.
72 mostly empty pages of the first 15 months of my life tell me little to nothing about myself except I lived in foster care with the Manns, who I cannot remember but who may remember me. People who called me “Marasha.” A Marasha is still a Marasha even if called by another name, right, LaDonna?
On page 72, I was transferred to foster care with Ma and Pops. The reports of my fosterhood with the Loves are relatively well-documented. Lost in a tornado, my ass. The 17 years of work to get these files was worth resuscitating some truth about my first year and a half. Especially since living with the Loves was a vacuum where the past was rarely brought up.
Ma and Pops Love only told me I was adopted because of a school project. They might have told me later. My kindergarten teacher required us to bring a baby photo to class for a wall, where we were each a branch of some ugly, unrealistic looking tree. There were no baby photos of me in our house and when I asked Ma and Pops for one, they handed over a picture from when I was probably three.
At school, we put our photos on a table, and Mrs. Smith sent me out to the hall while everyone else glued their photos to construction paper cards. I was in the hell-hall at least every other day. She was teaching my fellow kinder-comrades their ABCs while I was already reading (beginner) chapter books on my own. I was constantly bored—talking and singing to myself. She hadn’t told me why I had to go to the hall until she brought me back in to join her crappy class.
“This isn’t a baby photo.” Her breath smelled like duck carcass, and she loved to put her face real close to mine.
She sent a note home in my tattered red folder: Jennifer needs a B-A-B-Y photo. Also, she needs a new folder. Mrs. Smith’s notes usually meant Ma was going to pull out a belt with the rodeo buckle. I handed the note over to Ma when I got home, knowing the consequences would be worse if she found I hadn’t given Mrs. Smith’s reprimand to her.
Sure enough, Ma was pissed, but instead of a dozen pelts to my butt and back before Pops got home, she kissed her teeth, and said, “That bitch don’t know nothing. She don’t teach shit.” Ma even let me watch cartoons after I finished dusting and polishing her collection of porcelain plates with Princess Diana’s face on them.
Pops got home, and they whispered in the kitchen. We sat at the table, ate Ma’s Jamaican curry chicken which Pops hated. “Coolie potpourri chicken,” he called it, using a derogatory term to refer to East Indians. He put his fork down. He was barely eating anyway and said, “We don’t have baby pictures of you...” he was agitated, already on his third Miller Lite, even though I usually saw him only drink two, “...because you’re adopted.”
“What’s adopted?” I could read but I was only six.
“Means you’re special,” he said.
Ma stopped chomping her chicken and said, “You didn’t come out of me, the way other babies come from their mommas.”
“Who did I come out of?”
They looked at each other. “She was sick and is in heaven now,” Pops said.
“Maybe,” Ma said.
“Sick?” I asked.
“So sick she couldn’t keep you,” Pops said.
“Your name was Marasha DePew,” Ma said. She’d stopped eating and may have even been smiling at me.
Pops glared at Ma, “Dammit, Josie, I told you she don’t need to know that.” He looked at me, “No one ever said that name right. It’s a made-up name. No one’s hiring no Marasha.” Pops took the last sip of his beer. “That’s enough. Clean your plate, Jennifer.”
All I knew was Pops said I was special, and Ma seemed to be on my side as I finished my green chicken. Adoption-reveal night felt as good as eating at someone else’s house.
Anytime I asked more questions about you to Ma and Pops, Pops said they’d told me everything they knew. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d say. You didn’t matter to them.
Going through our files, I learned what they had not said, had withheld, over our curry chicken adoption-reveal night. On page 107 is a petition for an HIV test before moving forward with adoption. And a request for a second test on the next page. I believe you were HIV-positive when you were pregnant. The paperwork shows my negative HIV test at 17 months:
The Loves state they are fully aware and understand Marasha’s medical history and still want to move forward with adoption
The Loves are then described as “good Catholics.” On page 108, I read they couldn’t legally adopt after the test results because they were having “financial hardships” (with “nothing serious” in parentheses).
The adoption was delayed again because my adopted brother—Pops’ biological son and Ma’s step-son—pulled my arm out of socket and the incident was investigated:
Marasha has bonded with her foster brother, J—, and there is no indication of malice toward Marasha from J—
I adored Jimbo, but he was 12 years older than me and at the house for holidays or when he needed money. I watched Jimbo and Pops punch each other and roll on the ground more than I saw them hug. Ma and Jimbo only ever argued, slammed doors, and threw random objects at each other. Jimbo also punched many holes in the walls. After they argued and Jimbo left, Ma usually turned to me with his rodeo belts and her frustrations.
According to the files, legally, this is my family.
The pages with the least redactions are written by doctors. As I read through the litany of evaluations, I wonder about babies with issues passed through the umbilical cord or divergent genetics, crying alone in a plastic tube or makeshift crib, institutionalized without even foster homes. Some dying alone, embraced only by the earth, returning to the ether.
I worked through black holes and splotches dominating the pages of us. I tried to unseal the records and remove these redactions—to get my original birth certificate—which might list a biological father’s name on it. The state of Texas, however, favors the adoptive family, not the birth mother or child. Sealing birth certificates and files erases the origin of “illegitimate” births. Some lawmakers believe we bond better with our adoptive families by eliminating, in all forms, biological parents. Adoptees can’t access the record unsealed without a biological parent of record’s consent. We cannot seem to gain access to the identities of our biological parents without an unadulterated record.
The parts of you and me they didn’t abort include the CPS Investigation Report. Text names “Marasha L. Depew, victim,” with “RACE: UNABLE TO DETERMINE,” and “ETHNICITY: UNABLE TO DETERMINE.” Now, I have in writing validation for the ambiguity of my race. Checking “other” and writing “adopted: mixed race unknown” in boxes on applications does me no favors, gets me no scholarships, but that’s all a cigarette burn compared to the wildfire of having no race to claim.
When I respond to people asking, “What are you?” they predictably follow up with, “Have you tried one of those DNA tests?”
Asking me, an adopted person whose racial box is legally checked as “undetermined” pokes at the ancestors I’ve been carrying my whole life but can’t see through the rubble of mess that is you and me. Learning your ancestry through DNA tests has brought me no closer to knowing you—no closer to a resolution between us. The John you incidentally created me with comes from a people, a race, invisible on DNA tests. Several countries ban DNA tests, and many peoples, understandably, don’t trust strangers with their blood.
Pops’ advice was always the same, “Just say human race.” He’s a guy ashamed to admit his white great-grandfather raped his great-grandmother as she was forced from her homeland on The Trail of Tears. He ignores his history the way he ignored knowing my body took the violent expressions of Ma’s fear and shame. She thought her tools of discipline would make me what she wasn’t. She couldn’t change her tiny frame, webbed neck, and other irreversible effects of Turner Syndrome, her inability to drive or get a job paying more than minimum wage, her Caribbean upbringing and accent, or being molested and raped multiple times. Ma and Pops thought love could coexist with an abusive form of discipline for my own good, perhaps to kill the parts of you they thought were dark and dirty. Without them, I might still have advanced osteo-arthiritis in my early 30s. Their desire for the middle class and acceptance distilled miserably. Their attempt to homogenize me began with changing my name, sweeping our story away, so you and I would evaporate.
Ma called me a lot of names, although never the name you gave me. When she was feeling particularly feisty and aggressive, she’d say, “You little bitch,” and spit, “I never should’ve adopted you.” Once, she added, “They should’ve let you rot on the black market.” Her insult was worth that revelation—nothing visible in the files of you and me confirms (or denies) your trying to sell me. Perhaps that’s how you and I floated into the sea of Texas CPS.
I long assumed I became a ward of the state at birth, and we never saw each other again. Our newly acquired files confirm what I had been told about you and me over a decade before by a man I found, Wendall Jacobs, who knew you. At some point in my infancy, while in foster care, the state gave me back to you, despite your flaws and shady history. I imagine you holding me, singing Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You, telling me you’d only be in my way if you stayed.
When I was a senior in college, I got Wendall’s name from a friend’s mom, a former cop and social worker in Texas, who’d offered to help find you. She used the name the Loves tried to bury—Marasha DePew—to locate your criminal record. That record circumstantially reinforces the black market theory and identifies you: LaDonna Jo DePew, born on February 6th 1964, with convictions of grand larceny, drug possession, solicitation, and exploitation of a child.
I finally had your name, or a name you used. Your incomplete record states you were uncooperative with authorities. Perhaps anarchy is in our blood. I have doubts about your real name being LaDonna. I’ve searched it dozens of times, trying every people-search database available with no results. That name, or another, is completely redacted in our records. Conceivably, you used LaDonna as an alias, the way strippers have names like Cherry or Cubanita. The other clue the cop-social worker found was a man listed on your criminal record, Wendall Jacobs: the only reliable witness I’ve found to our existence.
Using the same databases with no record of you, I found his address in Akron, OH and sent a letter with my phone number. On October 13th 2009—I’d just lit a candle in memory of Jimbo’s best friend who’d been stabbed and died exactly 14 years before on Friday the 13th, in Fort Worth—when Wendall called me. It was my first year teaching Special Education students at Thoreau Middle School on the Navajo reservation. Instead of working on the next day’s lesson plans, I held my phone close while Wendall resurrected you from an idea to a person. I drank directly from my bottle of Glenlivet 12 and wrote as much as I could on manifold post-it notes I still have in an envelope labeled “LaDonna and Marasha”.
“I last saw you 22 years ago,” he said. He couldn’t remember exactly how old I was when CPS returned me to you. I bet my life savings you do.
He’d piloted private planes from California to Texas, but his wife went back to the Philippines when she found out about you, so he stayed in Texas for a time. A few months after you gave birth to me, you were released from jail under his supervision, and we were reunited. He said you still used cocaine but not heroin. You talked to yourself more and more—he suspected schizophrenia.
I’ve never used those drugs you loved. I have been asked for cocaine many times, though, likely because I talk rapidly and move quickly. I walk fast but rarely run. When I was a professor at a Tribal College, some of my students called me “hummingbird.” To some Diné, Dahiitį́hí (hummingbirds) are a symbol of wisdom teachers of pollen-gathering. I harvest lessons from one world to the next, walking between places like Dr. Strange through the multiverse, carrying you with me: from my first tutoring job in Khayamandi, South Africa; to middle schoolers in Thoreau, NM; to middle, high school, and college students in Santa Fe; to university students in Bujumbura, Burundi; to high schoolers in the Chihuahuan desert. In each place, students ask what I am, wondering to which clan I belong. Our clan drowned somewhere in Texas.
Wendall told me on the third or fourth day you had me, he went for groceries and when he returned, you were drowning me. I hope it was a bathtub and not the kitchen sink. A sink feels very claustrophobic. I consider your filicidal attempt one of mercy. My captain saving her trusty first mate from the abyss of an unforgiving Texas sea. You knew life wouldn’t always treat us kindly, like Dolly sings. To this day, when my body flares up—from hormones, arthritis inflammation, my first three COVID vaccines—I break out in a purple rash on my neck that looks like a hand. People ask if someone choked me.
Yes, I should say, someone did.
Wendall said, “Keep going forward. Don’t let this void upset you. Don’t look back.” His statement echoed the Love family’s repression. The void sits with me every day, but that void is all I have of you. Its presence keeps you alive.
He seemed in awe that I'd completed college. I was the first person to receive a four-year degree in my adopted family. Jimbo dropped out of high school. I found education and school, even bad teachers, the key to independence. Going to college while working full-time was a justifiable excuse to stay away from home. I have to catch up on schoolwork. I’m busy working, is easier than saying, I don’t want to be around you.
I lived over two decades not consciously knowing your face. Ma once told me you were a blonde, so I pictured you as Dolly Parton. After I spoke with Wendall, he sent a photo of you, a mugshot. He attempted to cut the placard you’re holding but the black line of it is still evident as you look directly at the camera. Your strawberry blonde hair curls in ways mine never will. You might have an ’80s perm. You’re wearing a Mondrian-striped blouse I would’ve borrowed from your closet. My eyes are many shades darker than your hazel ones, or maybe they’re green. Your skin’s clear, make-up bright, and you look like Dolly’s more subtly-featured cousin.
In my third year of teaching on the rez, I acquired a second photo of you, when, without warning, Ma dropped dead at 55 on President’s Day 2012. I flew to Houston immediately. Once I got to my adopted parents’ house, Pops’ cousin’s ex-wife was already there, and he seemed preoccupied with her. She’d soon become his next wife. Pops let me take charge of the funeral arrangements, and he wanted me to remove all Ma’s belongings before I went back to New Mexico. I went through Ma’s underwear drawer, deciding what one does with a dead person’s panties. Underneath her pre-teen sized undergarments, I found a polaroid of a woman holding a baby with “LaDonna and Marasha 1987” written in cursive at the bottom. I could have used this photo for the ugly kindergarten-comrade tree, I thought. This picture would have sparked questions Ma and Pops didn’t want to answer—only those closest to our family knew I was adopted. To them, you and I were dissolved; unless I did something wrong, my transgressions were always biological. Pops and I hardly spoke by the time Ma died, and two years after her death, I completely cut him out of my life.
The polaroid proved Wendall’s story and resurrected us—you and me. In the photo, you’re wearing a pant-suit as white as your face, gold bangles on both wrists. Your hair is frizzier, less curly than in the mugshot Wendall sent. Your jawline’s machete sharp, the only discernible facial feature we share other than a pouty bottom lip. I am sitting up in your lap, even though I can’t be more than a few months old. Your breasts must be supporting my neck since your hands aren’t. Your right hand gestures to the camera. Go ahead, it beckons. Your attention’s on me, your left hand under my armpit and ribs, supporting me sitting on your lap—an emaciated-looking infant looking straight at the camera, arms up, cheering for us. I’m a shade darker than your salmon-colored nail polish. I can’t tell if you have an overbite or if your bottom teeth are crooked like mine underneath your rosy lipstick. Your hands look as big as Uma Thurman’s. You both come from Scottish, German, Irish, Swedish, and Danish folks. At least, that’s what our DNA results say.
Those same results identified all of Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and the Pacific Islands for my paternal side. Their Western European-centric results of you, pinpointing specific regions of Britain and Scandinavia, highlight their incompetence at doing the same for my paternal side.
The recent receipt of our file, though, learning about you, possessed me to further futz around on my paternal side with the DNA databases: 3rd and 4th cousins in a last-ditch effort to find my birth father, or at least his people and my race. I used the vague paternal DNA matches, reactivated my Facebook account, and compared the pictures to those on their DNA profiles. I found Azizzah and Mustufa, who each kindly responded to my messages almost immediately.
“I’m Chăm,” they said synchronously in separate message boxes. They didn’t know one another. Both were born to at least one refugee parent from Châu Đốc, in the An Giang Province of Việt Nam, bordering Cambodia in the Mekong Delta.
“There aren’t many people who know about us outside our own community,” Mustafa said. “Welcome to your roots! Take pride in being from the Chămpa.”
We expressed frustration with Ancestry.com labeling us as “Việt Namese” and “Cambodian” despite surviving those groups, not being from or of them.
I was a dormant Chăm. Knowing and naming that unknown half of myself recovered an essential page from the data log of our shipwreck. This knowledge didn’t mean the hyper-invisible, highly insular Chăm would embrace me with open arms and encourage me to convert to Islam. Now I hypothesize, during the days of selling your body (and maybe a baby), you slept with a Chăm man. Is my only chance to identify him, to name him, to find you? I suspect, despite the many clients you likely had, you know exactly who my birth father is.
A few months before she died, Ma and I talked on the phone, in between one of the three jobs she was working. She was hosting and bussing tables at three French cafes in the Houston suburbs. I’d started calling her every other week or so in the last year of her life, not knowing she’d soon be forever-gone from this world. Her death, though, allowed me to say all I couldn’t to her, to work through her resilience and lack of fulfillment as an immigrant, with ignored pain from her childhood in Jamaica, so I could finally understand and forgive her for all she’d inflicted upon me when I was little. When I’d settled in New Mexico, I’d only visited her and Pops (as briefly as possible) occasionally in the summers, but it became increasingly difficult to go through the motions with them, pretending as though all our open wounds were miraculously healed. I think she felt that too because she cried every time I left. Those tears confessed and apologized to me.
After we made telephone small-talk, she asked, “Are you okay?”
I told her I’d failed to get my CPS records again. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate you,” I said, “but I need to know.”
She sighed, “LaDonna sent an envelope after the adoption. $13 all in change or something, in an envelope addressed to Marasha Love. Probably all she had.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Your dad said not to keep it.”
“He told you not to vote for Obama,” I said, “but you did.” Pops had taken the envelope and that was that. I told Ma I wished I could have seen your handwriting.
She said it didn’t matter. That envelope meant you remembered me and probably loved me. Those words, hard as they were for her to admit, meant she loved me.
When I found our polaroid in her underwear drawer, I looked for that envelope. It wasn’t there. She didn’t tell me what she’d done with the coins. We probably used them for bus fare, or Jimbo might’ve stolen them off the nightstand when he was going through his pawn anything-worth-something-in-the-house phase. I would’ve liked to have kept those tokens you sent after your parental rights were terminated (the legal dissolution of you and me) when I was almost three, to touch something you touched. I hope those coins didn’t stretch your budget. Maybe you weren’t working on the streets anymore, or maybe business there was booming.
I hope life’s weighing you with less struggle than our days together, and you’re making your way in this world. Maybe we’ll meet and drink tea together until the sun sets, then we’ll light a cigarette and drink scotch neat until we’re silly.
It’s more likely you have passed on. You had HIV in the late 80s.
At least I have our polaroid, that mugshot, and our redacted files.
Perhaps this letter will reach you some brilliant day; although, it is more likely it’ll end up like the envelope of coins you sent me, floating in the wreckage of us. Still, we float, hoping quietly, not yet submerged.
Love,
Marasha