by Hannah Andrews

The song played like a sad trombone in my brain. I sat, nibbling sushi, drinking a giant Diet Coke, and flipping through photographs in a mother-son memory book with my newly found fully grown 32-year-old baby brother. It was January 2020, and I was having a reunion with someone I’d never even known existed. Is that a thing? It is in my world.

By Rebecca Cohen
Three years ago, I declared myself my own mother. Nobody else had mothered me and it didn’t look like anybody was going to. The horde of clamoring children inside me needed somebody. I was the mother of last resort.
How did I get into this pickle? Let’s start by saying it wasn’t my idea.

by Leslie Ferguson
As a kid, I would’ve loved to see one. Hell, I’d still love to see one. But unicorns aren’t real, so I wish for more practical things like reverse aging and zero-calorie cookies.

As a memoirist, I have spent countless hours contemplating my childhood and searching for truth and meaning in trauma. My birth mom was a paranoid schizophrenic who put my life in danger repeatedly because she believed she was protecting me, an irony that filled me with confusion, doubt, and fear. She uprooted my childhood, and we never got a chance to have a healthy mother-daughter relationship. I was too busy trying to win her love, and she was too preoccupied with navigating the terrifying and contradictory demands of her illness.

by Hannah Andrews
Both of my mothers are dead.

My first mother died in 2009.
My adoptive mother died in 2017.

To further complicate things, that is not the order in which I experienced it. I never got to meet my first mother, so in my alternate adoptee timeline, I experienced the death of my adoptive mother first. Two years later, I confirmed the name of my birth mother and spent the next year searching, only to learn she’d already passed.
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