Yes, I was adopted. No, I’m not lying. You can ask my mom, and no she isn’t “in on the joke.” I constantly have this conversation; it is something that happens to me even as a college sophomore. People are shocked; I think they’re stuck on the idea that if you’re adopted, you must be from some far away land and not just upstate.

Then I hit them with the real “shocker.” I know who my birth parents are and have been in communication with them my entire life. We’re friends on social media where I can see their beautiful families grow. I forget that it isn’t like this for other people, that they don’t have a birth mom and birth dad and don’t use these terms that are so familiar to me.

I fit into my family like a glove; at least I like to think. My dad used to say we have the same eyes, and we do, but it doesn’t really mean the same thing that it would, right? I’ve never felt like I didn’t fit in with my family, not just because we look alike. We are one in the same, all of us. That doesn’t mean I don’t think about my birth family all the time.

I think of every little detail that makes me who I am and how incredible it is that there are all of these people they could come from. My taste in music, which has become so important to me, the love I have for teaching children or even the way I look at the sky when a cloud stands out to me.

There are many things I am unsure if I believe in, but I can say that I believe that I was born to be a McTague, and born to have the relationships with my birth mom and birth dad that I have now. I have been blessed with an unbelievable amount of love for the people that made me who I am, whether they’ve raised me or not. I would go to the ends of the earth for any part of my family, and they are all my family.