Adoption Story - What My Life Might Have Been - Modern Love - NYTimes.com FOUR years ago, when I was 24, my mother handed me a case file on myself. I had long known that I was adopted as an infant and that my birth mother had died in a car accident several years after I was born. But this case file was new to me. Growing up, I had internalized my parents" matter-of-fact approach to the subject, and by the time I was in elementary school, being adopted hardly seemed worth mentioning. Even so, when a classmate and I came across a book called "Why Was I Adopted?" one day during reading time, I said to him happily, "I'm adopted!" "No you're not," he replied. You're lying. "I really am," I said, bursting into tears. I told the teacher's aide, and within minutes I was already over it, but the aide apparently saw the chance for a teachable moment. "Do you know why you were adopted?" she asked. I told her it was because when I was a baby, my biological mother didn't want to take care of me anymore. "Didn't want to, or couldn't?" she asked pointedly. I was taken aback, then said I guessed it was because she couldn't, though the distinction hardly seemed important. Who cared if she could or couldn't, didn't want to or simply didn't care? I was a bubbly, smart child who insisted on wearing only dresses to school and who commanded the room during Christmas parties by standing on a folding chair and belting out carols. I was delightful. As far as I was concerned, if this mysterious woman didn't want me, it was her loss. A couple of years later I came home from school and my parents looked worried. "We thought this might happen," they said. But we didn't think it would happen this soon. My mind immediately leapt to divorce, since that was the only thing I could imagine warranting such seriousness. Instead, they sat me down and told me that my half sister had called and left a message. They had mentioned before that she existed, but for the first time they told me more. She and I had the same mother, they explained, and she was interested in meeting me. She was only 18 and had just had a baby. I don't remember the conversation very clearly, but I gathered they felt the timing was a little suspect. They were concerned she might be after money. They said the decision to talk to her was up to me, and I told them no, I didn't want to. It was hard to ignore their expressions of relief. It wasn't until several years after I had graduated from college that I thought more about the biological relatives I never knew. Out of the blue, my half sister had contacted me via Facebook, introducing herself, and I wrote back, which led one winter day to my going to visit her and her daughter in the sleepy Vermont town where she grew up and still lived with her paternal grandmother. As I drove my car up the icy driveway to their run-down whitewashed house, I realized just how different our worlds really were. She was out of work, other than the odd house-painting gig. She had enrolled in college briefly but dropped out after less than a year. She drank too much. She told me she had been fired by every employer in town, or else had worked there once already and quit. She had no car, and said she felt trapped. The next summer my half sister invited me to a family reunion where I would meet my grandmother and several aunts and uncles. Over an outdoor picnic lunch, with pained smiles, they told me a little about my birth mother. "As a child she was good at everything without even trying," one of her sisters said. Dancing, painting, riding a unicycle. Apparently, however, she was also naturally attracted to trouble and had a history of drug addiction and alcohol abuse, though she avoided it while pregnant, they assured me. It was dark when I returned home that night. I was staying with my parents, and after months of living in close quarters tensions among us were high. "How was it?" my mother asked in a wobbly voice. Fine. I had a good time. "Do you consider them your family?" she asked. I told her I did. "Of course, you're my family, too," I added, though it should have gone without saying. The next day I was reading a book in the living room when she sat down next to me and handed me the file. Jaime Cone is a graduate student in journalism at New York University.