Somewhere out there…. that was a running theme in my childhood. I felt a lot of internal angst as a child that I just didn’t know how to express so I kept it inside. I never cried to others because they wouldn’t understand why I was crying. Hell, I didn’t understand. If you’ve read my memoir, you’ll know that around12 or 13 is when I really rebelled against my mom. We did not/could not relate to each other. She had her quirks and would hurt my feelings unknowingly. I should’ve told her but I didn’t know how so I would hold it in or write in my diary about it. I felt so alone in those moments. It is also at age 12 that the movie, An American Tail, was released. As you may know, this is an animated film about a mouse family that emigrates to the US and their son gets lost and must find his way back home to reunite with his family. I actually don’t remember if I ever even watched the film but the song that was released with it, Somewhere Out There, deeply affected me. It became the theme song of my life. When I began to feel sad and alone, I would go outside, look up at the sky and sing that song to myself. “Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone’s thinking of me, and loving me tonight”. God, it consumes my soul even now; remembering how I would sing that and think of my first mother. “Somewhere out there, someone’s saying a prayer that we’ll find one another, in that big somewhere out there”. I imagined in that moment that she was thinking of me, too. Like somehow, telepathically, she would feel a poke that would cause her to be thinking of me at the same time I was thinking of her. “And even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star, and when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we’re sleeping underneath the same big sky”. I hoped and prayed that she missed me as much as I missed her. “Somewhere out there, if love can see us through, then we’ll be together, somewhere out there, out where dreams come true”. My dream came true when I found her 18 years after that song came out.

I never told a soul about this, before now.