That doesn’t mean I stopped looking for my other family. Left alone in other people’s houses, I opened wardrobe doors and checked the backs for snow-filled woodlands. I stared into mirrors for hours to see if I could fall in. Every trip to the city was a chance to possibly glimpse them or their trail, and if we’re being honest, finding them was becoming more and more about finding her. My. Real. Mom. She could be anyone, anywhere! The lady with the cool beehive in line at the bank. The one with the pixie cut and the bicycle who rode alongside our station wagon and waved back at me when I waved to her. Other real-mom-crushes included, in no particular order, Anna Devayne, a character on General Hospital played by Finola Hughes, Natalie Jacobson, a local newscaster, and Jennifer Beals’ character from Flashdance who needed to give me away so she could follow her dreams and be a dancer, just like I was gonna be, wearing my bathing suit as a leotard and executing sexy dances with my four-poster bed as a ballet barre/stripper pole. My imaginary real dad in all of these scenarios was Peter Jennings, anchor of World News Tonight.

This all reached a fever pitch in 1985, when Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was chosen to ride the Challenger space shuttle on a mission. I fell completely in love with her. She was a mousy brunette with brown eyes, like me. She was from New England, like me. Yeah, so she had a husband and other kids and was nowhere near Leominster, Massachusetts in 1974, but don’t bother me with facts. As The New York Times wrote, she ”emphasized the impact of ordinary people on history, saying they were as important to the historical record as kings, politicians or generals.” Ordinary people, like me and Christa, my real mom, ordinary women, we were as important to the historical records as kings, politicians, and generals. I watched all of her TV appearances. I got my hair cut and permed so it would look like hers, and I learned to imitate how she sat and spoke. I brought her up in every single conversation. I studied photos of her to see if I could see her hands, because I have weird bent pinkies and I’ve always thought that if I’m ever in the same room as my birth mom, that’s how I’ll know for sure. I stared also at her husband, Steven, and her children, Scott and Caroline, looking for a resemblance and wondering if they’d like me when they knew the truth about Christa’s long-ago fling with Peter Jennings.

My chance came when my 6th grade class wrote letters to congratulate her for being chosen for the space program. For months, all of my diary entries had been addressed to her, so it was tough to boil all the information down to fit on an index card sized cut-out of the space shuttle. In the end I went with: “Dear Christa McAuliffe, you are my hero and my favorite woman on earth (and in space.) Love, Jennifer P.S. Please write back I have something very important to ask you. P.P.S. My home address is on the back of this card. P.P.P.S. Thank you.”

I don’t know if she ever read my letter. I do know that she never wrote back. On January 28, 1986, my twelfth birthday, she got into the space shuttle with six other astronauts. My classmates and I ate the birthday cupcakes my mom had baked for everyone and watched the launch on a TV that had been wheeled into the classroom for just this occasion. High on sugar and on the rush of seeing the greatest person in the entire world do the coolest thing that had ever happened, for exactly 73 seconds I was (secretly) THE happiest and proudest person on the planet. My heart nearly exploded. Seventy-four seconds after launch, the shuttle exploded. Everyone on board was killed. The newscaster narrating the launch talked calmly about “a possible malfunction.” But our teacher had seen what we had seen. She got up and stood awkwardly in front of the TV, blocking our view, and all of us did what any human would do in that moment; we tilted our heads and tried to see around her. The wailing came later. I heard it dimly, at first, as if it came from outside the classroom, from outside of space and time. I have had to take other people’s word that it was coming from me.

That night I took all the pictures of Christa down from the bulletin board near my desk, and, for good measure, ripped out all of the pages from all of my diaries and tore them into tiny pieces. My mom found me doing that and tried to stop me, and I yelled at her that she wasn’t my Real Mom and what did she know, anyway? This is the nuclear option in adopted kid-adoptive parent fights, one of those things that is both true and not true in a way that makes it the worst thing you can possibly say. I’m not a monster — I had done my best to keep my constant Are You My Real Mommy? auditions incredibly secret from my MOM-mom, whom I loved — but in that moment she clearly knew that I needed to destroy something. She backed slowly out of the room so that it wouldn’t be her.