It was another woman who gave me life. Though physically absent, her constant presence came by way of persistent reminders that I was of someone else, from someplace else, an import, brought to the United States to a new, another Greek family.

I was labeled an orphan. An orphan. That was me all my life. But I wasn’t an orphan at all. I had a mother, who knew me, touched me, held me. And I had a father, too, who might be out there somewhere. But I wasn’t an orphan. I was left. Abandoned. And then signed away to other people. Wasn’t I lucky? She loved me so much that she chose for me a better life.

She didn’t want to leave me. She had to leave me. Is that even true?

She.

Whoever she was, she was with me, if only for a few precious, painful days, weeks, months. She was with me. She still is.

With me.

My story achieved folk legend status in Gary, Indiana, where I grew up. Not because it was so important, or that I was so important, but because it had been told and repeated over and over again by someone, anyone, who knew the story or was in our lives when I arrived from Greece. I was “special” because I was adopted and I was the adopted child throughout my life. “A souvenir baby,” one local newspaper article said about me.

I was left in an orphanage in Athens. Dozens and dozens of babies. Overcrowded. Dirty. Two, sometimes three to a crib, they said. I was the only one awake when a Greek couple had come looking for a baby for their American-born daughter and son-in-law, who could not afford the trip themselves.

They were looking for a baby girl. Up and down the cramped aisles of cribs with steel bars, they gingerly stepped, staring at tiny sleeping faces. But every time they passed where I could catch of glimpse of them, I raised myself up on my two, small, stiffened arms and followed them as if to say “what about me?”