Carry Me With You
The world needs you in it, and you will come to savor every minute of your life.
Themed Months
34 posts
A few times a year, The Rumpus spotlights a specific issue or theme that our editors are passionate about. Some of our past themes include Disability in Education, Adoptee Awareness, and Mental Health Awareness. These efforts are led by an editor who has a personal connection with the issue and is interested in bringing new voices into the conversation.
Letter to My Dad
I wonder if the adoption agency thought they were clever, or if they thought both adoptive parents and adoptee having brown hair was enough to signal we belonged to each other.
To My Third Father
I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.
Mayonnaise
I don’t know which herbs, spices, or ice cream flavors you like because 23&Me won’t tell me, and neither will you.
Ghosts in the Mirror
My adoptive mother tells me I was precocious enough as a toddler to ask if I came from her belly. She says this was a sign I comprehended my adoption so early she never had to explain it to me.
Debtors to a Mercy We Never Begged For
No, home is not as simple as the heart-shaped sandwiches Ma placed into my lunch bag on Valentine’s Day or the way my father confessed to listening to me sing shower showtunes or washing a car beside my brother as the summer sun beat down.
The Mothership
Most of all, I hoped they’d see how well I turned out and regret ever sending me away.
The Beat Goes On
If the average lifespan is roughly 76 years, then that one muscle, the size of a fist, beats 2,796,192,000 times. It never quits, until it quits.
What She Kept
I hand-wrote my mother a letter entirely in hangul. It looked like a child wrote it, which was because a child wrote it.