On Thanksgiving with my birth family: The story of adoption and addiction that led me her

I was born a child of Sellers Home for Unwed Mothers, the longtime Baptist adoption agency on Peniston Street in New Orleans. When I was 2 months old, I was adopted by an Ole Miss professor and his wife. They’d met at First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge while he was getting a doctoral degree in microbiology at LSU. He was the church organist, and she was the church secretary — a match made in heaven, but it never really felt that way in our Oxford, Mississippi, home.

Most days, it felt like someone dropped me off at a strange babysitter’s house but never came to get me.

A native of Bogalusa, my father was the nicest, making cakes for students on their birthdays, taking their pictures in the front yard under the oak tree. But if students weren’t around, his mood deflated and dimmed with the sunset. My mother tried to patch me into the family quilt, along with my older sister, also adopted. But the threads didn’t hold……….