Growing up, there were things about my life that held no sense: a static noise surrounding a courtroom memory, a strangely emotional attachment to an old softball jersey that didn’t even have my own last name on it, and a haze of sadness in regards to my grandmother, who never sent me holiday cards. Even now, I can picture a landscape of snow in a room with a judge and with a box filled with cell-phones, and I can hear the man in the black robe asking if I’m nervous. Nervous about what? Maybe I never understood, or maybe I simply can no longer recall.  In the bottom of my t-shirt drawer, there is an XXS youth jersey with “SCHROEDER” inscribed on the back. This is my mother’s maiden name, and I never quite knew why this lonely shirt carried more meaning to me than my several others adorned with “JOHNSTON.” My father’s mother sent a card (and sometimes even money) to my two older sisters on every birthday, every Christmas, every Easter. My mother used to tell me that mine must have been “lost in the mail.” I began to realize this wasn’t true. I began to question the aspects of my childhood that simply didn’t add up, the things that made me sad.

Flash forward to 2017, my (middle) sister’s college graduation open house. Here, my family took our first photo together in years.  I was a carbon copy of my mother–I had her eyes, her cheekbones, her smile, and her face shape. My sisters bore my father’s squinted eyes and his round, happy cheeks, though they also managed to steal my mother’s nose and her eyebrows. Somehow, unlike my sisters, I inherited all of my mother and seemingly nothing from my father.

Because I hadn’t.

When I was 17 years old, I started to put the puzzle pieces of my life together. First I found the corners, and then the edges, and then my parents sat me down and connected the rest.

My mother and father were married, and together they had my two older sisters. My mother–who I candidly hold some contempt towards–cheated on my father. They got a divorce, and my mother got a new boyfriend. My parents told me now that this boyfriend was, biologically, my father. In other words:  I am adopted.

When my mother told her boyfriend she was pregnant with me, he pushed her down a flight of stairs in an attempt to kill me.

I should not be alive.

My mother left said boyfriend and told my father, and I suppose the boyfriend went to jail. They told me in this conversation that he eventually died; I don’t know if I believe them. Perhaps, he really did, or maybe they were trying to protect me from a decision I had yet to make.

There was an ongoing joke in my family that I was my father’s favorite kid, but I’ll never forget what he told me that night. “You may not be my first child, but you were the first kid I got to choose.”

My mother is a hard person to get along with; she is irrational, stubborn, mean, and selfish. My mother is the worst parts of myself, and we never liked each other much because of that. We fought, and we fought, and we fought. By this time in my life, I had no respect for her. She spent my father’s hard-earned money on alcohol and cigarettes, wouldn’t drive in the winter, told me I needed to lose weight, and refused to hold down a job. (That being said, I have always possessed an amount of love for my mother–albeit strained and sometimes forced.) My father told me a few months later in a sole conversation that I was his reason for remarrying my mother. He said, “It seemed as if I never chose the right girls, so I decided that she was the mother to my children and that I loved you, and that was going to be enough for me.”

The court wouldn’t let him adopt me unless he and my mother were legally married. So, he married her. He gave up his chance at a happy life for me. My dad loves me in a more immense way than I could ever have imagined–and I’m not even his.

My father and I are not blood. We are so much more. He showed up to every one of my softball games and practices, even when we both knew that I would not see the field. He stood up for me when my mother refused to trust me. He carried me to bed every night I fell asleep on him, and he carried me off of the softball field when I was too weak to walk. My freshman year, when I decided that I no longer wanted to live, he had enough strength to live for the both of us.  He patiently drove me to college visits all over the midwest (Bloomington, West Lafayette, Evanston, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Lincoln, Urbana-Champaign) until I fell in love with the black squirrels and glass buildings at Nebraska. He has always believed in me in every aspect in my life, whether it be standardized test scores, or my AP Composition test, or my talent level in softball. He believes I can, and so I can. He puts up with my foibles and flaws. He lets me sing in the car, even though I’ve never been able to hit the right notes. He buys my favorite chocolate when he knows I’ve had a rough week, and he sends me silly GIFs just because he can.

I know that he loves me, and I know that we don’t need a DNA test to prove it.