"Oh my God." I whispered, receiver clutched in hand. Tears sprang to my eyes as I made my way to a chair. A pause. My birth mother started to speak, her voice soft and shaky, but forthright. She didn't sound like a New Yorker, an uptight urban dweller; underneath the surface unease, I sensed a core of calmness.

"I'm sorry to startle you by calling you on the phone." Hannah hesitantly began, "but I worried that if I sent a letter and got no answer, I wouldn't know if you had gotten the letter and didn't want to write back, or if you hadn't gotten the letter, because I'd written to the wrong person."

"Mm hm." I answered, reduced for a while to one-word or one-sound responses. I was so preoccupied with the fact that we were speaking at all, it was difficult to concentrate on what we were speaking about. To ground myself, I grabbed a scrap of notepaper off my desk and scribbled down key facts while we talked?

"I have another shock for you," she said. "I'm married to your birth father, and we have three other children." Renee, age 14, Lucy, 10, and Samuel, 6 -- my full biological siblings?

I carefully returned the receiver to its cradle and fixated on it for a beat. Still sitting, I took a deep breath and switched my gaze to a point on the wall for several seconds. The room was very quiet, in that palpable way that comes after there has been a loud noise. Unclear of my own emotions in this moment -- shock? confusion? loss? -- I nonetheless felt them physically, tingling through me. After several minutes, not knowing what else to do, I wiped my eyes, pulled on my backpack and headed out into the cold bright day.



I watched with a mix of envy and amazement the people bustling past, shower-fresh hair still glistening, hands balancing hot paper coffee cups bearing the Greek-lettered declaration "We are happy to serve you"--on their way to work, to appointments, to a normal end of a normal week. Once at the office, I said a quick, perfunctory "good morning" as I made my way to my desk, where I sat and stared at the articles to be fact-checked, letters turning into hieroglyphics, text blurring into two fuzzy, distant columns before my unfocusing eyes. I finally broke through my trance and called my father, who was home for the day. At the first sound of his voice, all at once I began to cry in earnest. Between sobs I told him about Hannah's phone call, and he said to come right over.

I pleaded "family emergency" to my editor -- the emergency being my new found confusion about the concept of family -- and rushed out. As I walked from the subway to my parents' house, I was surprised that their block, the stoop, the tree in front of their brownstone, all looked a bit different, as though I were seeing them for the first time. Through a kitchen window, I saw Dad sitting, waiting. Noticing me, he smiled and got up to let me in. Relief flowed through me as we hugged and I breathed in his warm, fatherly smell of soap and coffee and cigarettes. I sat down at the table, running my hands along its butcher-block solidity, and gradually began to feel oriented again, in these familiar -- familial -- surroundings.

--From the book, Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found. Copyright 1998 by Sarah Saffian. Reprinted by permission of Perseus Publishing. All rights reserved.
Hardcover: Basic Books,
November 1998
ISBN 0-465-03618-X
Price: $23.00

Paperback: Delta, October 1999
ISBN 0-385-33451-6
Price: $12.95
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