The author as a baby with both of her birth parents.
When I was 3 and a half and still living in the country of my birth, Bulgaria, I watched as my birth father, an Iraqi immigrant, killed my birth mother, a Bulgarian national, and then himself in a crime of passion characterized as a result of his Muslim identity by the news outlet that covered their deaths.
Due to unresolved grief, the international adoption and white American upbringing that followed, I did not begin to form a coherent cultural identity until I was old enough to ask and answer my own questions about what had happened.
Growing up, the scaffolding of my identity was built according to what I had access to at the time. That included seeing a very good childhood therapist, who was American and specialized in adoption, until I was 15, and the local Turkish Muslim hairdresser my blonde, blue-eyed mother brought me to twice around the same time — once on accident, then once on purpose.
Which is to say that it wasn’t enough.
What little I knew of my national origin was complicated by the fact that I didn’t look Bulgarian. After three months in the United States, I no longer spoke the language, either. The birth mother with whom I had shared an inseparable bond was a beautiful Bulgarian woman with model-grade looks, billowy hair,, and a fair complexion. In comparison, I had dark eyebrows and thick tufts of curly hair and warm-colored baby skin, which, over time, became sand-toned — like my birth father’s.
My adoptive mother and father knew little about my Iraqi heritage and took a mostly “colorblind” approach to parenting. Therefore, much about my birth father — his reasons for killing my mother, the relative influence of culture and religion over his actions — went largely unexamined.
After all, my birth mother had sought — and was granted — a divorce from my birth father. “Even the most educated Muslim man,” our Bulgarian contacts said, “would not allow his wife to leave without retaliation.”
When it came to my Bulgarian side, my adoptive mother lamented that she could not “compete” with my memory of my birth mother. Consequently, my connection to the country of my birth slowly waned as I grieved and wondered, often in silence, about my birth mother and the past we shared.
The author's birth mother.
Growing up in the United States, I sensed that my curly hair and olive skin tone made me stand out in a way that I did not want, and in an effort to fit in, I did what I could to smooth away any ethnic difference.
I did all I could to conform to the narrow beauty standards I absorbed from magazines and television. I wore Abercrombie and Fitch, straightened my hair, and vigilantly removed any body hair that looked too dark or out of place. I also tried not to mention where I was from at school, especially after my parents advised me not to following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
I was desperate to belong, not yet understanding that real belonging is a byproduct of both knowing and having who you are seen and reflected back to you. My desire to fit in only thwarted my attempts at self-discovery.
Despite wanting to blend in, the urgent and oftentimes confusing need to know who I was took the form of a curiosity that I could not quell — about my past, my birth mother and the only living family I knew I had — my paternal birth family in Iraq. With so many unanswered questions, I did not often think of my birth father.
Alone in my bedroom, I routinely pored over the 30 or so pictures I had of my life in Bulgaria, a life I remembered and spoke rarely about with my adoptive family. I arranged the photos in chronological order, compared my features to each birth parent, and searched within the frame of those prints for clues about who my birth parents were — and by extension, who I was.
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The author with her mother, at approximately 3 years of age.
The summer before high school, I flew to Chicago, where I spent two weeks with one of my birth mother’s best friends — the woman she had appointed to be my godmother years ago, on a sunny day in Sofia at the Sveti Sedmochislenitsi, or the Church of Seven Saints, where I was baptized. During my visit, I savored feta in brine and a traditional Bulgarian spread called lutenitsa as I learned about my birth mother’s socialist upbringing and how it drew her to all things foreign, including my birth father and the life he represented.
In the year following my visit to Chicago, the United States invaded Iraq, and I wondered about my Iraqi family — whether they were alive, and to what extent they had been affected. I searched intermittently for relatives online, surreptitiously entering the names I knew and the surnames listed in the adoption documents contained in the red three-ring binder my dad kept on the lower right-hand side of the bookshelf in our den. I looked in secret, often when no one else was home, but my searches never turned up any meaningful results.
By my first year of college, more concerned with my professional identity than my personal one, I enrolled in Arabic language classes because Bulgarian classes were not offered; though, looking back, I can see how my desire to make peace with my past played a larger role in the decision than I comprehended at the time.
When I walked onto campus to inquire about registration, the adviser told me space was limited, but then encouraged me to apply when I told her I was half Iraqi.
The application asked whether I was of Arabic or Middle Eastern descent. Checking the box that read “Yes” gave me pause. It felt strange to claim this identity on the basis of a connection to the man who was biologically my father, but whom I rarely thought of on purpose.
Two years of Arabic later, I accepted a scholarship to study the language abroad in Morocco the summer before graduation. By then, I had made a handful of friends from class, I’d gone to multiple “Peace in the Middle East”-themed parties and declared a major in Near Eastern Language & Civilization alongside the degree I was already pursuing in International Studies.
The author during a study abroad program in Morocco.
Rather than triggering traumatic memories of my birth father, these experiences offered a safe harbor from which to embrace a part of my identity that had been complicated by Islamophobia, “colorblind” parenting and the questions, too many questions, that went unanswered throughout my childhood.
Following the study abroad program in Morocco, I crossed the Strait of Gibraltar by boat and took a commuter flight to Bulgaria, my first time there in over a decade.
The first day of my visit, I toured the ancient city of my birth, Sofia. Emulating my birth mother in the images I had scrutinized hundreds of times throughout my childhood, I posed for pictures at various cultural sites where I’d seen her stand years before.
That day, I also met with another one of my birth mother’s best friends in the lobby of the Sheraton — the hotel where my birth mother used to work. But instead of asking about the woman I had spent years quietly grieving, who I already knew so much about, I asked about the man who had been her husband, my father, and in the end, my birth mother’s killer.
In all of the years I spent thinking and not thinking about my birth father, there had always been details I’d failed to reconcile, including fragments of sweet memories that contradicted what I and my adoptive family had been told at the time of my adoption.
I knew my birth father immigrated from Iraq in the ’80s to escape conscription into the war with Iran. I knew he was unconcerned with whether I was raised Muslim and didn’t object when my birth mother decided to have me baptized. I also knew that he left for Sweden shortly after my first birthday to build a life for us abroad.
My birth father killed my birth mother and himself because she divorced him while he was out of the country. This, I also knew.
What I didn’t know — that to extricate my birth mother from her marriage, my grandmother persuaded her to claim abandonment through the State Gazette, knowing that a divorce would be finalized when the notice went unanswered for 90 days.
Despite their ongoing contact, my birth mother used my birth father’s absence to achieve a legal separation without his knowledge or consent. I tried to imagine him returning from a country where he would never be seen as anything more than an outsider, only to learn that he had been divorced by the woman for whom he’d left in the first place.
While knowing the truth never changed the way I felt about my birth mother, and while it certainly was no excuse for my father’s violence, the explanation complicated the narrative that I had come to understand throughout my upbringing — the one that had kept me from wanting to know more about him, and in turn, from knowing more about myself.
My birth father made a terrible, irreversible mistake. But I now believe that the tidy cultural narrative surrounding my parents’ deaths, the one that tied my birth father’s actions to his religious beliefs, was based upon unexamined stereotypes. Bulgarian or Iraqi, victim or perpetrator, my parents were so much more than any one identity. So am I.
People often assume I could never forgive my birth father for what he did, but I have found forgiveness, in part, because I learned to humanize him. I recognize this isn’t possible or right for everyone, but choosing to forgive was a decision I made for myself and was, in the end, largely to my benefit. Doing so required me to look beyond the stereotypes that came to define my birth father’s life. That process began with my cultural immersion in college — a process that allowed me to lay the groundwork not only for forgiveness of the person whose actions irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life, but also for my own self-discovery and acceptance.
The year following college graduation, I moved abroad to work as a grant writer for a global refugee rights nonprofit, where, after nearly two decades of straightening my hair, I began to wear it curly. I returned to the United States the following year, entered graduate school, and with a wonderfully skilled therapist, began to do the work of coming into my own racial consciousness and defining myself on my own terms.
The author began wearing her hair curly while living abroad in Ecuador.
That summer, I made a chance discovery that led me to locate my Iraqi birth family. After corresponding for a few weeks, I met a few of my relatives in person. An emotional event, being in their physical presence reinforced that I could hold my own identity and sense of cultural belonging separate from the narrative and the caricature of my birth father that had so shaped my past. Our reunion might not have been successful had I not found some semblance of reconciliation with that particular interpretation of events.
Twelve years later, I am a therapist who walks alongside others on their own journeys. What I’ve discovered through my own personal and professional experiences is that we have far more to gain from turning toward, rather than from judging, what we do not understand. And that we are each complicated beyond measure — not one, but many things.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in July 2025.
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