gotcha tender_square when brea and i were kids, candi and terri used to tease that we’d been found in the k-mart dumpster and adopted—that’s why there was such an age difference between us and them, that’s why we didn’t resemble one another. “gotcha!” they’d say whenever we started to cry, when the story became too rich with detail for us to reject. brea and i didn’t know then that they had, in fact, been adopted: november 1, 1983 is candi and terri's “gotcha day.” mom signed the paperwork with the courts to become their legal guardian, joining the father we all share. our family never talked about carol, or what terri and candi may have remembered from those early years of their lives with her. i was too stunned and incredulous at tender ten to learn that the woman we all called mother was not the same woman who carried them in her womb; i felt that i had been lied to for years. recently, my therapist wondered if my older sisters ran with this dumpster joke because it was the only way for them to talk about what happened without actually talking about what happened, that the pain of being unloved is a wound they’ve never recovered from. she said my older sisters may have been threatened by two young blonde girls being born when they had been our parent’s only two blonde girls for several years. i’ve often looked back to see if terri and candi resented caring for brea and i when we were kids; their annoyance cropped up whenever we asked for a cup of juice, more water in our cooling tub, or comfort for our nightmares. we were precocious kids who kept ourselves entertained and tried not to be a nuisance, we tried to make ourselves scarce because we sensed this quiet anger beneath the surface of every interaction we shared. but the thing i can’t get past is that brea and i never asked to be born. 211101 what's it to you? who go blather from