At My 30th Birthday Dinner, My Mom Said I Was Adopted for a Tax Break

about the word Patricia had used at the Sterling. Tax benefit. A phrase designed to reduce a human being to a line item, to strip thirty years of love and longing and desperate, unreciprocated devotion down to its crudest possible interpretation. I thought about how long I had believed her—how many years I had spent auditioning for acceptance, performing,continue reading …