I’m really not sure when my mom and dad were going to tell me I was adopted. I’m sure it would have been in good time.

But I found out another way. I was at the house of a good friend. They had a daughter who was their foster child. We used to play for hours with our Barbie dolls. One day we went to the kitchen for a snack. I must have been about five or six years old and her mother looked at me and said, “You know you were adopted, don’t you?”

When I got home, I ran up to my mom and pointed to her stomach and said, “I didn’t come from your stomach?” I remember she just looked at me and said, “No, you didn’t come from my stomach. It’s true. You are adopted.” She began to explain saying, “Greece cried out to America and to all the countries of the world that they had starving babies that needed to be adopted. We wanted to adopt a child. We looked through thousands of pictures of all the babies and we found you. We chose you.”

This information and the way it was delivered to me changed the trajectory of my life, how I looked at the world, how I felt about my parents. My life was my life, but with a twist. There was so much unknown about me.

After the news broke, my nights in bed were spent thinking about the parents I had in Greece, not knowing anything about them and they not knowing anything about me. I began crying myself to sleep at night, saying over and over to no one there, “I’m here, I’m here now.”

My adoptive parents were both Jewish. My father’s parents came from Russia and escaped Stalin and communism. He grew up in New York and had a sister, who had two children.

My mother’s family was from Minnesota. She was the baby of the family and had two sisters and a brother. My two aunts lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, near to us in the city.

I would not describe us as a typical Jewish family. We didn’t go to temple, but we celebrated both Hanukkah and Passover with one of my aunts and her family.