Hecate, Museo Chiaramonti, Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Hekate waits where the official story fails: at the courthouse, the agency file, the locked archive, the name I was given and the name I may have carried. She comes with torches and keys, but no promise that every door will open. Her gift is illumination.
For an adoptee, a sealed record is permissions. The state determines who may know, which account is official, and what an adult must prove to seek the first record of her life.
After my adoption, Michigan created an amended birth certificate showing my adopted name and new, legal parents. The original was nullified and sealed away. Decades later, I am still asking permission to view it.
My father told me he wanted to name me Sarah. I do not know whether Sarah, another name, or a blank appears on the original certificate, or whether my father was acknowledged. His absence, if he is absent, would not explain itself. It might reflect what the law recognized or an institution chose to record.
The state possesses the page that may distinguish written fact from intended future and family memory. It calls the record confidential. From the threshold, it feels like identity held in custody.
Hekate is called Keeper of Keys, but keys do not guarantee entrance. They mark a threshold. Before a sealed record, I understood that belonging and permission are not the same. The state possesses the document, not the life from which it emerged.
I did not need adoption to make me real. I needed adults and institutions to preserve relationships, protect history, and make it possible for my father to attempt to raise the daughter he said he wanted. What that life might have become cannot be known. Adoption foreclosed the possibility.
Other countries now acknowledge that official systems did not merely record family separation. They often authorized it. Australia apologized for forced-adoption practices. Ireland apologized for harms connected to mother-and-baby and county homes. These histories do not establish the circumstances of my adoption, but they show that official records can preserve the account institutions found most acceptable.
I may never get over what adoption took. That does not mean I failed to heal. Healing is not forgetting, approving, or giving consent backward in time. I can build a life and refuse the claim that adoption was what I needed.
I was never less human. I was treated as though my humanity carried fewer documentary rights.
That sentence has a history in my life.
During a psychiatric crisis in the winter of 2006–2007, I sought emergency help on two consecutive nights. In a Michigan emergency room, I told a physician, “You’re a real person.” I pointed toward my adoptive mother. “She’s a real person. But I am not a real person.”
The physician told me I was real. I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for twenty-one days.
I cannot know how much of that sentence belonged to psychiatric illness, adoption, family history, or accumulated loss. The sealed record did not cause the crisis. Yet when institutions later required me to prove who I was to seek documents about who I had been, documentary exclusion gave administrative form to an old feeling.
I called myself unreal. The process confronted me with another possibility: some lives are granted easier access to documentary recognition than others.
Because my adoption falls within Michigan’s restricted period, I petitioned the Genesee County Circuit Court for information and authorization to pursue the original record. The court requested identification, my amended certificate, and proof of name changes. To seek the first record, I had to mail the replacement one.
Another envelope. Another fee. Another threshold.
Ancient crossroads rarely look ancient while we stand within them. Sometimes they look like a post office in Fletcher, North Carolina, and the gatekeeper carries a government seal. Hekate’s presence is not magical access. It is recognition of ordinary places where power decides who may pass.
The postal clerk assumed the court would mail my certificate. I explained that it would first determine what it held and what I was allowed to receive. A judge might still decide.
“I’m fifty years old,” I said, “and I’ve been asking for thirty years.”
The clerk paused. “As an adult they still won’t let you see it? I never knew that.”
Most people assume the record of their birth belongs to them. Public silence conceals unequal access and lets the restriction continue without scrutiny.
The envelope was marked delivered to a front desk, reception area, or mail room. The notice did not confirm that anyone had opened it or matched it to my petition. Recognition was not access.
A county caseworker said the Michigan Central Adoption Registry would determine what I was “allowed” to receive. Then I might pay another fee and appear before a judge to explain why I needed my original certificate.
Waiting is administrative labor: monitoring, interpretation, emotional regulation, and repeated decisions about when to act. Popular spirituality often treats waiting as sacred. Hekate has taught me something less comforting. An imposed wait is not wisdom. Sometimes it is standing before a gate maintained by those with authority over the threshold.
The Church taught me to find salvation in sacrifice. Applied to unmarried mothers and their children, that theology could rename separation as rescue, grief as penitence, and transfer as spiritual redemption. Hekate does not ask me to accept it. She illuminates institutions that helped make the wound and claimed authority to explain its meaning.
Her torch does not erase the sealed record. It illuminates the structure around it.
The judge may say yes or no. The record may contain Sarah, my father’s name, or blanks I must confront. Whatever it contains, it cannot create or revoke the humanity that preceded it.
Before there was a petition, there was a child. Before there was an amended certificate, there was a life. Before there was a sealed file, there was a history already unfolding.
The threshold may remain locked.
But identity was never created by the lock.
And I am no longer silent before the door.