I began to write this story when the pandemic was raging and I was caring for my mother. Her dementia was severe and I found that as her mind faded, she became affectionate and warm. This newfound closeness felt tender and yet grief consumed me as I realized how barren and defended our shared life had been prior to this moment.

In a ceramics class during this time, I found myself shaping a clay baby with a chain growing out of her umbilicus. I became aware that the chain was how I imagined my relationship to my family’s bloodline, especially my mother’s. The brittle links symbolized the estrangement I had always felt with my mother as she had with her mother, and so on back through the generations.

I remembered the story of my grandmother being orphaned as a toddler, and then it all made sense; my hands had made the hollowed out form of Orphan Girl. She was my grandmother, my mother and she was me. As my mother lay dying, I felt the renewed urgency to write our shared story. I hoped to not only find my own voice, finally, but the home in my heart where we could all belong.

This story celebrates the journey from the orphanage and asylum to the embrace of a strong mother’s love, found in the arms of her daughter.