Meet our new columnist, Kristina Schaffhausen. This column is an introduction to Schaffhausen and her personal views. Every column written by Schaffhausen will begin with her name.

When half of your family lives halfway across the globe, you look at the world a little differently. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and birthdays take on whole new meanings when you’ve known for as long as you can remember that you’re not from here, but rather you’re from there.

There is a place I’ll never know, even though I can see it on a map of Google Earth. Chances are, I’ll never visit or even begin to scratch the surface as to how I got here, but all I know is that it was a flip of a coin.

While some may think of their lives as stories, I like to think of mine as a coin. On one side lies my life before adoption, and on the other lies life afterward. I could be living anywhere, calling different parents my own, fluently speaking a completely different language, but I landed smack dab in the middle of the United States at 14 months.

At times, it’s hard to accept the fact that the people who are physically a part of me don’t even know me. I simply cannot come to grips with the fact that we live in a world where if you don’t want your kid then you don’t have to have it. On the other hand, it sounds selfish and ungrateful to complain about such a positive life changing event. What most people gloss over is how sobering it is to acknowledge how different life could have been.

It took me 16 years to grasp an understanding of who I am. My parents were about to shred a box of copied adoption papers, but I snatched them when they left the room and began researching myself. It came to my attention that I was my mom’s second pregnancy when she was 33, and I was diagnosed with psychic disorder called oligophrenia.

With such a mysterious past, a day hasn’t gone by where I haven’t wondered why they thought relinquishing me at birth would provide us both with the best possible outcome. Accepting facts that most kids don’t have to do so shapes you into a curious, pragmatic and slightly negative person.

To this day, I’ve never sat down with my parents and discussed anything. Figuring everything out in secrecy was alright with me because it’s just as awkward for them as it is for me, and some words are better left unsaid.

Truth be told, I don’t know my biological parents’ names, hobbies, interests, occupations, or if they’re even alive; however, I do know my adopted family and I’m proud to call them home. If my biological parents could see me today, I hope they’d be proud or at least interested.

They’d see an 18-year-old college student who’s had her hiccups along the way, but has enjoyed the ride nevertheless. I hope they’d notice which features I received from which parent along with the habits and interests that I’ve gathered over the years.

They would learn that I prefer waffles over pancakes, blue over green, outdoors over indoors, and that I’m not half bad at math. Though I would struggle with how I would pitch myself to them, if given the opportunity I wouldn’t mind saying “hello.”