I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls

Travel across the years in a unique hybrid collage, I Must Have Wandered. Rendered in personal letters, lyrical prose, fragments, and photos, the memoir begins with an imaginative framing of a post-World War II South Carolina infant relinquishment and her closed adoption by a military couple. Family separations and transience frustrate the girl's early childhood. Her father's demands for model behavior and religious piety deepen the primal distress of abandonment. She comes of age in the turbulent 1960s, amid an atmosphere of heightened anxiety: the culture of confidentiality of his Air Force Intelligence career, Cold War fear, and the Southeast Asian conflicts. School transfers, vague guidance, and identity bewilderment threaten her choices through her twenties.. When the need to know her origins surfaces at forty, adoptee advocates help her to break the barrier of sealed birth records, and she launches the search for her natural mother. Decades later, DNA testing sets her on a parallel journey of self-discovery, and she begins to reconcile the loss and privilege of her adopted life; gaining a wealth of biological family and her true heritage.. The second edition features a new cover and format, an updated bibliography, notes, and resources, a new epilogue, an expanded photo gallery in the e-book, with a link tin the softcover to the photo archive.