I can identify the exact moment when I became a card-carrying member of the human race, the moment when I understood that the 99.5% (or 99.9% depending on the study you look at) of genetic material I share with most people is vastly more important than the .5% (or .1%) that I might not share.

We were in the birthing room of a Denver hospital—my husband, Richard; our newborn son, Benjamin; his birthmother, Karla; his birth grandmother, Mickie. We took turns holding this five-and-a-half-pound baby, born six weeks early but nevertheless in perfect health. After the anxiety of a premature birth, we were all nearly speechless with relief, with his beauty, with the wonder and exhaustion of childbirth, with the fact that we really were going to go through with this exchange. Karla would exit the hospital without the baby she’d just birthed. Richard and I would take Baby Ben back to California, vowing to raise him as well as we could.

At the moment of Ben’s birth Richard and I had known Karla and Mickie for only three months, and those months were like a courtship. We shared family photos, medical information, confidences. We fell in love. While it was always intended to be an “open” adoption (we had met the birthfather too), we had no idea we would like each other so much and that we would visit each other regularly in the years that followed.

I am thinking of all this because my son will be graduating from high school in less than a week. His birth family will be coming to celebrate the occasion. Not just Mickie and Karla and their respective spouses, but Karla’s father and his wife, and Karla’s father’s sister and her husband. Our extended family. We will all lavish attention and praise on the beautiful bright boy (give me a break—I brag for all of us!) who brought us together. I am sure I will cry—we will all cry?— with joy and amazement.

There is so much more to say on this subject, but I fear I might sink into sentimentality. Now I will simply say that, thinking back to the day of his birth, I suspect my entanglement with the idea of entanglement really began back then.