Before We Were Yours

by Lisa Wingate

The Seviers were good people––patient and kind. They taught me to find the music.”

Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn’t suit the moment.

This music of old age…it isn’t made for dancing. It’s so…lonely. You’re a burden to everyone.”

“People don’t come into our lives by accident.”

“A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she chooses. Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking. To herself, I mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.”

All week long, I’ve gone back and forth between taking the secret to the grave with me…and setting the truth free, come what may. In the end, it boils down to this: My father deserves to know who he is. My grandmother deserves whatever time she has left to spend with her sister.

But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.

babies and children, no matter what corner of the world they hail from, are not commodities, or objects, or blank slates, as Georgia Tann so often represented her wards; they are human beings with histories, and needs, and hopes, and dreams of their own.