The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 DUTTON BOOKS
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
 
 
 
 First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023
 Copyright © 2023 by Shannon Gibney
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 Ebook ISBN 9780593112007
 Cover art © 2023 by Max Reed
 Cover design by Anna Booth
 Design by Anna Booth, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero
 This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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 For Erin Powersand for Boisey Collins Jr.,both on the other side of something just beyond view.
 
 
 
 
 “. . . narratives . . . pull us through to the next realm, or the parallel universe, or the future in which we are the protagonists.”
 —adrienne maree brown
 “I had been an empty space, and now I was finding a language, a story to shape myself by. I had been alone and now there were others.”
 —Linda Hogan
 “Since 1975 I too had many hopes, wishes, wonderings, imaginings, etc. etc., re: Shannon (who I still know as Erin).”
 —Patricia Powers
 
 
 
 Prologue
 I was born January 30, 1975, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
 The name on my birth certificate is Shannon Gibney, and my parents are listed as Jim and Susan Gibney. These are my white adoptive parents, who raised me. They gave me the loafers I remember wearing almost forty years ago. The backyard woods where my imagination first grew roots was theirs.
 The woman who gave birth to me and subsequently relinquished me was named Patricia Powers. She was a white, working-class Irish American woman who had a short relationship with my African American birth father, Boisey Collins Jr. My birth mother named me Erin Powers after I was born, but I didn’t find that out until I was nineteen. I possess no childhood memories of either of them.
 I grew up with my white adoptive parents in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with two white brothers, who were biologically related to my parents. When I was nineteen and no longer a child in the eyes of the state, I embarked on a search for my possible birth siblings and my birth parents. I found my birth mother, Patricia Powers, who then still lived in her hometown of Utica, New York. We had a complicated, on-again, off-again relationship from the mid-nineties until her death from cancer in 2014. She was fifty-eight when she passed.
 Through my search, I also discovered that my birth father, Boisey Collins Jr., died from complications due to injuries he sustained during a high-speed police chase in Palo Alto, California, in 1981, when I was six. He was thirty-five at the time of his death.
 I discovered many other things through my search and reunion experiences. I did not discover many things, as well. (I keep that particular hunger at bay with scraps of 
 November 1994.
 Letter from Patricia Powers to Shannon Gibney.
 
 
 
 
 Shannon, I must inform you of the following [illegible]: you must be diligent in your own self-breast exam (do it monthly), and for you to obtain a baseline mammogram (even though you’re in your 20’s)—don’t let your primary healthcare provider tell you otherwise. As you may or may not recall your biological grandmother had breast cancer for which she underwent left mastectomy 2 years ago (yes, she is now considered “a survivor”—however the 5-year mark is still considered monumental). Since your biological grandmother was orphaned @ 12 yrs of age, we have no family history pre–your grandmother (this is important in assessing women’s risk. However, I, over the years, have undergone 3 surgical breast biopsies—the pathology reports from these biopsies and the fact that my mother had breast cancer places me @ a higher risk for breast cancer. [. . .]
 The consequence of this information for you is:
 
 
 You must do monthly self-breast exams to get to know your breasts so-to-speak, and assess any abnormalities early. (If you do not know how to do this or feel uncomfortable about it, I can send you a teaching pamphlet and/or verbally discuss it with you.)
 
 
 Obtain a Baseline Mammography: Your primary care MD or Nurse Practitioner must order this. Do not let them tell you are too young (many MD’s remain uninformed and misinformed about this). My first breast lump was discovered when I was 22 years old. Mammographies are slightly uncomfortable, but expose you to less radiation than an x-ray. Just make sure wherever you go, they use what is called low-dose mammography.
 
 
 Family History to tell your health provider:
 
 
 Biological Grandmother with breast cancer