(Read Adoption 1 first, if you haven’t already.)

The concept of “home” has always been my Holy Grail. I have spent my whole existence focused on obtaining a home, even though I technically had one. Why did I feel this way?

My mother says that I was told I was adopted “all along.” But this is not true. I remember the first time I heard it. I remember the day because it was also the first day I realized that my mother could lie to me. So if you’re expecting a touching Hallmark moment, where the parent tells the child with a tear in their eye that adoption day was “the day the family became complete”, you are about to be disappointed.

I remember I was in kindergarten. My younger brothers weren’t in school yet. I looked like my brothers, except for the eyes. Mine were brown, theirs were blue-gray; a good blend for my mothers’ hazel eyes. My father had brown eyes, but we were all brunette. I was the only ugly one in the family, which is important because my mother very much cared about the opinions of others. But I didn’t realize that I was ugly yet. Looking at just skin and hair coloring, I blended.

One afternoon, my mother had our baby books and was showing us pictures and locks of hair from our infanthood. The cover of my baby book had writing on it, and I asked my mom to read it to me. She read: “Our Adopted Baby.” I remember the sensation of all the blood draining out of my head in shock, and blurted out in surprise and distress, “I was adopted?!”

She was incredulous and inexplicably snotty. “Yes, we’ve always told you that you were adopted!” she snapped at me angrily. I was unprepared for this sudden anger and it scared me. It was obvious that I had done something wrong in her eyes. Then she got even more pissed and said some stuff in a glaringly hateful tone. (I don’t remember the words, but I remember the tone, and can even see her and the chair she was sitting in, the incident so impressed me at the time.) Then she dismissed any questions I had and changed the subject.

I may have only been six years old, but I knew bullshit when I heard it, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it. I knew that my parents had never told me I was adopted.

But yet, mom just said they had told me “all along”.

Either she was lying, or I was mistaken and had “forgotten” I was adopted. Parents don’t lie, so it had to be my fault, my mistake. That was my first lesson. Tis’ far better to accept responsibility for situations for which you are not culpable, than it is to admit that you can rely on no one around you. I decided I must have forgotten. But, how does a child “forget” they were adopted?

Even at that young age, as my mother sat in her tacky green ’70s chair surrounded by three children hanging on her every word and dying to have their sticky fingers touch the black and white photographs — even then, as I made the decision to accept her hint that I was somehow feeble-minded for forgetting such a fact, I knew somewhere deep down that I had never heard that I was adopted until that day.

That has always been my family’s way of handling things. Or one of the top five ways:

• Deny, deny, deny
• Find a way to shake any responsibility
• Quickly change the subject
• Refuse to admit anything is “wrong”
• When caught in a lie, stick with it and accuse the other person of needing “psychological help” (that one rang big from my mother in my teenage years)

I came out of the proverbial adoption closet on the playground the next day, telling all my friends about me being adopted as I swung on the swingset. I remember one kid saying, “that means your real parents didn’t want you!” but comments didn’t phase me. I just said, “Get off my case, toilet face!” and kept swinging.

I was happy and full of hope. I felt special. Not special to my parents, but special as in different than my classmates. At that young age I couldn’t understand why, but I felt like finally knowing I wasn’t born part of that family… well, it explained everything I had always felt but my young mind couldn’t pin down. I had always felt it wasn’t a family of five in that house, it was a family of four and I just kind of hung around, like the houseguest they had to be nice to, but that they wished would just go away.

Just an aside question from the adult me: What kind of attention-seeking fuck buys a baby album with the title “Our ADOPTED Baby”? Danger, danger, Will Robinson!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Misc..You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.