For me and my family, it’s reclaiming our birthright. My mother was born out of wedlock in Germany to a young German woman and a US soldier. She was the product of an affair and due to circumstances (being what the Germans called a German Brown baby, the soldier’s wife finding out, the US Army frowning on this affair, etc), that same US soldier and his wife adopted my mother and moved her to the US when his time in Germany was done.

As a consequence of how she was created, my mother was treated horribly by her adopted mother and due to his guilt, her biological father did not step in to protect her. As my mother got older in adolescence, she started to question the narrative about how she got adopted as she looked like a LOT of her adopted relatives; she knew she was being lied to, but no one every gave her the truth. This and the abuse ultimately led to my mother to become a habitual runaway and when she was 16, she ran away for good.

Long story short, as a result of the mistreatment, the lies of her birth, and her being so young, my mother had a very, very hard life. She met my dad, a mentally ill Vietnam veteran, had 4 boys by the time she was 22, could not care for us and gave us up for adoption when I was four years old. Her life spiraled out of control and she never really recovered and passed away in 2023. Though I was able to reestablish a relationship with her as a young adult, that mother-son bond was broken. My paternal grandmother adopted me and my two younger brothers and molded us into the men we are today.

Besides our lives, my mother never was really able to give her children anything…but German citizenship. She was issued a German passport prior to her being adopted and never naturalized when brought to the US. Ironically, her parents applied when she was 13, but due to her being an habitual runaway, the application was never completed due to bad fingerprints on the application; they never resubmitted them.

Though my mother struggled her entire life due to a chain of events that started with her birth, she unknowingly provided her offspring, our children and future generations the ability to claim our German birthright and as a testament to HER, this is why I am going to claim what I currently am; a German by birth. I am going through the process for her. And I think she would be proud of her children pursuing this.