 On his birthday, Ivan accidentally finds out he s been adopted. He has a terrible internal conflict between his feelings for the only parents he s ever known and his desire to find out as much as possible about his past. In his emotional confusion, he decides he was abandoned and that he needs to leave "home" to discover his true identity. Itse tries to explain to Ivan that parents sometimes don t know the best way to share difficult information with their children. He needs to understand that his mother and father are the two people who raised him. Ivan eventually traces the story of his birth parents to a village but feels bittersweet satisfaction about this discovery. He does, however, realize that parents are those people who love and take care of you.