My life began with a question, a mystery at its core, and I have been pushing against that mystery ever since, feeling rebellious and frustrated without knowing why. I suspect this is true for many adoptees, especially those of my generation.

I was adopted in the fifties, when adoption was confidential, anonymous, and any contact of any kind between any of the parties was totally firewalled and practically impossible without legal action. For much of my life, I thought I didn’t care, that it was irrelevant, and that didn’t start to change until I had children of my own, with their own questions about their history.

Apparently, based on anecdotal evidence, it is common among adoptees to feel outside of their environment, to feel like we don’t belong, guests in someone else’s tribe, and I can attest to that, it’s something I have felt all my life but couldn’t even identify until I was in my forties, when someone asked me if I felt a “pervasive sense of not belonging” and I experienced the sudden shock of recognizing something I felt but had never faced.

Four years ago, through a twist of fate and the magic of genetic testing and DNA analysis, I discovered that I am the oldest of four brothers, which was a complete surprise and frankly, a miracle. Connecting to them has changed my life. At the time, my wife asked me what I felt, and I thought about it, and my answer was “relief”. It was as if there was a weight I had been carrying, but I was so used to it I stopped realizing it was there, as if it was a suitcase that suddenly I was given permission to put down.

I was one of the fortunate ones in that I was adopted into a wealthy family and raised in a privileged environment, but I was a Holden Caulfield kind of kid, preternaturally tuned in to the vacuous hypocrisies of East Coast boarding schools and Upper East Side New York parents, and the late sixties gave me both justification and opportunity to act out that rebellion. Even though I was a top student, I still managed to get thrown out of two boarding schools, Choate and Pomfret, in the same year, and reject the Ivy League to go to university in the Midwest.

Rejecting, as well, the classic East Coast establishment career paths of finance or business, I started my career at an ad agency in Paris and segued into a film production career, first in TV commercial production and then in feature films.

Although I have experienced significant success and recognition in my life, I was somehow never able to feel satisfied or totally comfortable, and eventually my marriage blew up, and a successful film production career crashed and burned as well.

Out of the wreckage I was able to build a new life, a new marriage, and a new extended family with three kids, two step kids, three new brothers, their wives, and six new nieces.

In hindsight, it was finding my family, my history, and the immediate connection I found with my brothers that released me from the tangled knot of frustration, the story I didn’t know, the enigma I couldn’t solve. That sudden freedom from the weight and frustration of the mystery, is what allowed me to write this memoir. If it helps other adoptees, birth parents, adopted parents, or anyone else involved in the adoption process to understand some of the issues and questions, and more importantly, cope with the emotional landscape, I’m satisfied.

In 1955, the year I was born, approximately 93,000 children were adopted; there are between 4.5M and 5M adoptees living in this country today. The average number of people in the extended American family is between ten and fifteen people, so allowing for parents, siblings, relatives, and extended families, it’s not hard to imagine that the population of people with a connection to this story could easily be anywhere from 50M to 75M Americans or more. The ascendance of 23andMe and Ancestry over the last ten years has only supercharged interest in this subject as well.