Denene Millner has an article about her book in Pop Sugar that was published in September. LINK>How a Real-Life Adoption Secret Inspired Denene Millner’s Latest Novel. It’s a novel inspired by the questions Millner was asking herself, as she parsed her own story — having figured out at 12 that she was adopted, and keeping it a secret for years. Here is her story in her own words –

I was 12 years old when I found my adoption certificate in my parents’ room. They used to lock their bedroom door — I’m not sure why. Probably to keep us nosy kids out of their private, grown-up things. But my brother and I quickly figured out that if you tapped the door in just the right way with your hip — just a quick little aggressive bump — the door would pop open. I liked having access to my mom’s lipstick and her perfume, but what I was most interested in was this little gray, steel box my dad kept his bills and paperwork in. I was just naturally nosy and I wanted to know what was on all those little papers.

So one afternoon after school, I popped the door open and sprayed some of my mom’s perfume on my wrists, then dove into the metal box. There were mostly bills — Sears, Macy’s, the light bill, the mortgage, my parents’ marriage certificate, their birth certificates. And then at the very bottom were papers that I could tell held some kind of importance. By the weight of them. And the color. And how old they appeared to be.

When I unfolded the papers and read what they said — one was my adoption certificate, the other was a letter from a lawyer congratulating my parents on my adoption and letting them know my birth certificate was on the way — I was stunned. Like my heart felt like it had been dropped off the side of a skyscraper and hit the sidewalk with a big, explosive boom. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to react. I know I was scared. I was learning that my parents weren’t my birth parents — and in my 12-year-old mind, they were going to be mad I was snooping in their room and mad that I knew their secret and maybe my standing in our family was precarious and not so rock solid and permanent. I quickly put the papers back in the box and slammed it close and pushed it back underneath my parents’ bed and locked the door and never looked in that box again. I never spoke of it to my parents or brother until the day we buried my mom. That’s when I confided to my dad that I knew.

When she was still a child, she believed that – confronting the secret, and maybe making my parents upset, which could make them maybe want to give me up like my birth mother did. Doing so would mean I’d have to really confront what led my birth mom to give me up, and who my family or origin was and whether they were good or bad people and what of them I carried in me. 

It would always irk me when I would go to doctor’s visits and I’d have to leave my entire health history on my medical chart completely blank because I didn’t know anything about my birth family — what ran in my blood. I would just explain that I was adopted, and then suffer through the awkward bumbling the doctors would inevitably reduce themselves to, I think perhaps understanding how stupid it is that adoptees don’t have access to their health histories.

Blogger’s note – been there, done that.

When she became pregnant, her feelings about that changed. Giving birth, allowed her to consider just what kind of sacrifice her birth mother had to make – to carry her child for nine months and then give that child away. She says that “I just couldn’t imagine the heartbreak of that decision.” Contemplating the whole thing also led her to consider what not being able to have kids meant for her mother — that desire and how she had to translate that into love for her, a child not of her mother’s blood but hers all the same. She admits – “My feelings on it are ever evolving.”

Blogger’s note – I understand. Learning the origin stories of my two adoptee parents set me back in some of my feelings for the family that was mine only because of adoption – grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins. So, yes, the complicated, conflicted feelings do evolve as the new information is integrated into a person’s being.

I understand how important this was for Denene – I stumbled on information that led me directly to my full birth certificate, which had my birth mother’s full name, her address at the time she gave birth to me, the town and state she was born in, and precious information I didn’t have — the time of my birth, the name she gave me when I was born. She says – that allowed me to trace her and her family all the way back to pre-Civil War. Blogger’s note – I know how it feels as I traced my family’s back once I had the information to do so.

Therefore, her reasons for writing the book, she says – I wrote “One Blood” because I had questions — questions that I’d always wanted to ask my mother but never got the chance to because the relationship we had didn’t make room for me to ask her about her life and the choices she made as a woman in a time when we had very little power. 

Blogger’s note – Even with as much information as I have now, after knowing nothing for over 60 years, I still have questions that can never be answered.

Denene’s book is a novel she says because “without access to my mothers and the information I longed for, I asked those questions of my characters.” It is true – “their pasts greatly informed who I am. And so it was a really emotional journey for me to ask the question and listen to the answers my characters gave me — some of them rooted in history, yes, but also some embedded in the struggle for Black lives, particularly those of Black women. I am convinced that both of my mothers were present as I wrote; I could feel their energy around me and I know that they embedded ideas in my dreams and in my subconscious, even when I was awake.”