It stung. She seemed to assume I wasn’t grateful, which was unfair, and she also seemed to assume my life was some kind of fairy tale, like adoptees’ lives are all rainbows and unicorns. Happy endings. But her words — unwanted children — echo in my head to this day. And of course there is the guilt whenever I feel anything besides gratitude. There is also at times resentment of my friends — they are not obligated to be grateful. They can just be.

I’m suddenly self-conscious of my babbling to Sam, about how I must look to her. I rush to say, “Not that I would trade! My family is amazing. I just . . . sometimes I wonder what the other forks in the road looked like.” I chance a peek at her. “Terrible, right?”

But her expression is kind, understanding. “I don’t think it’s terrible to think about if things were different.”

“It feels terrible,” I say. “Especially now that my mom . . .” I hesitate. It’s hard to talk about my mom. It’s real enough, and yet somehow talking about it makes it seem even realer. “She has cancer,” I finally say. When I see Sam’s concerned expression, I rush on to say, “She’s okay. She had treatment and surgery, and she’s in what’s called a ‘partial remission.’ Meaning she’s better and it seems to be stable, but there’s still cancer there.”

“That doesn’t sound very reassuring,” Sam says gently. The calm, utterly transparent compassion on her face makes me feel so completely understood, and it’s such a relief. It feels so much better than the usual responses, which range from the uncomfortable-backing-away-slowly to the overdramatic show of sympathy.

“Exactly! That’s exactly it. Like, I don’t want this reality.” I gesture in frustration. “We did everything, so why is it still there? I just want to stop worrying.”

She nods.

“So, anyway. That’s another reason I feel bad for wishing I knew about my birth mother.”

“What do you mean?”

I struggle to articulate it. “It feels disloyal somehow. Like, how can I be thinking about finding another mother when my own mother might be . . . ?”

Her brow crinkles with concern. “I understand why you’d feel that way,” she says. “But I don’t think wondering about where you came from means you don’t love your mom, or aren’t grateful, or whatever. It’s hard to live with unanswerable questions.” She looks down for a minute, then scoops up her M&M’s. “To be honest, sometimes I wish I were adopted.”

I’ve heard people say that before, and it always makes me bristle. You have no idea what you’re talking about, I usually find myself thinking. But with Sam, I know there’s something more than ignorance behind it, so I ask her why she feels that way.

“I worry about the genetic thing,” she says.