Last week, I went for a morning walk along the trail that runs through the grounds of Haverford College. Sometimes, there is a question or a worry nagging me at the start, but that day I was open to whatever thoughts worked their way to the surface. My focus narrowed to pondering the essay about my failed Guatemalan adoption, which was scheduled for publication in Hippocampus Magazine in a few days.  Truth is a Foreign Object is the part of the experience I held in shadow the longest. By the end of the hour, a question had lodged in my mind. What comes after silence?

I grew up in a family that expected me to tell the truth but keep my thoughts to myself. At meal time, I was urged to clean my plate and stop stuffing my mouth. My parents expected me to get not just good grades, but the best, yet scolded me for being too smart for my own good. Trying to think my way out of so many double binds made me cautious and shy. Even my daydreams were conflicted. If I was teased for being fat or chased home after beating the boys in multiplication table competitions, I yearned to race into the patch of woods at the corner of my street and vanish. During choir practice, I wished I could startle everyone by singing with a passionate voice like Barbra Streisand’s rather than my creaky alto. I wanted to stand out and needed to be invisible.

In the decades since then, I have moved in and out of silence many times. As a teenager in a Catholic school uniform, I was groped by strangers on a crowded bus and in a quiet library nook. I learned to move quickly and quietly. My first jobs were secretarial. The work demanded discretion and penalized opinions. As a lawyer, I became adept at speaking up for others, but kept the secrets of my first marriage until I bought a copybook and wrote my way out of one life and into another. In my thirties, I found a voice in work I loved and happiness with my second husband. Then I went to Guatemala to adopt an infant. I was arrested and spent several days in the women’s prison there. I came home hyper- vigilant and numb. Six weeks later, another baby, the one who stayed, came to us when he was 16 days old. There was little time to make sense of the past when the demands of the present were all-consuming.

Unfinished business has a way of making itself known. About ten years ago, a dream sent me back to the page, this time to tell the story of Luis, the Guatemalan baby I left behind. At first, there was relief in writing about what had been a sharp weight on my heart. Before long, moving back and forth in time was not so easy. I gave up the effort for months at a stretch. Every emotion I had denied clamored for attention. Rage and fear, heartache and deep sorrow, guilt and shame—I had to learn to feel them all. Eventually, words themselves were what carried me through. I spent less time brooding about what happened and more time searching for stronger verbs and more precise nouns, learning to delete excess adjectives and “I’s.” The meaning of what happened emerged much later, along with the ability to tell the truth with some compassion for myself and those around me.

The story of how I lost Luis is in the world now. The choices I made, the ways I failed, are down on paper or up on a screen. Best of all, there is an answer to my question about what comes next. After silence, finally, there is peace.