Archive for the “Personal” Category

Man, I’ve been busy this week!

Good news: I finally found a part-time job. I’m going to help with chart reviews for a medical study.

Bad news: They’ve given me so much work at my main job that I’ll have to work all this weekend and every evening as well.

If I can make it through this week, I’ll be all right. Say it with me, “If we can just make it through this week, we’ll be all right.”

As mentioned before, over the years I’ve heard comments. You wouldn’t believe the crap some people say. Like my neighbor back when I lived in a different state. I had just located my biological family and was telling her about it and she said, “Oh, I could never love an adopted kid like my own. In fact, my grandson is adopting a child, and I don’t even want the kid over here. I don’t consider it my grandchild.”

This from a lady who I knew for five years and considered “nice”. Hey, at least she admits her heart is closed to, um… “it”.

Sometimes, even well-meaning comments were over the top.

In the 5th grade, I was getting ready for a talent show. Me and my friend Laura were dressing up like cats and singing “We are Siamese.” I was in the bathroom applying my whiskers with eyebrow pencil when our teacher Mrs. Rush came bursting through the ladies room door. All the girls crowding around the mirrors stopped what they were doing, sensing something was horribly wrong due to Mrs. Rush’s demeanor.

Spying me, she hurried over and grabbed my shoulders. Wide-eyed and upset, she said, “I just heard you were adopted. Is this true?!”

Bewildered, I said, “Uh… yeah?”

With tears in her eyes, she pulled me to her bosom and held me tight. “That just means you were SPECIAL. You were CHOSEN!”

Poor, well-meaning Mrs. Rush. You could tell she felt sorry for me, an emotion I’m wholly uncomfortable with. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t FEEL “chosen”. Hell, I didn’t even remember the goddamn audition!

Besides, I wasn’t chosen. It was the throw of the dice, the luck of the draw. If I had been born a few days earlier or a few days later, I would have gone to a different family. In fact, if my adoptive parents had the ability to choose a baby, I would have been the LAST one they chose. As mentioned before, I was far from a perfect, pretty baby. And I was not a boy. Back then, it was an unspoken rule that if you asked to adopt a certain sex, or refuse to adopt a baby with cosmetic problems (which I had), then you probably would be turned down as a prospective adoptive parent. (Nowdays, you’re allowed to be much more specific on your “baby order” when adopting. People have become more open-minded about adopting different races, but they still want that baby to be a pretty and perfect one.) Bottom line: my parents had to agree to take what they were handed, or they wouldn’t make the list of suitable parents. And they certainly couldn’t take one look at me and say, “Uh, thanks but no thanks!” because they would have looked like assholes. They had already bragged to family, friends, and church members about the adoption process, and let everyone know when they got the call from the adoption agency that they had a baby for them. My parents had to take me; there was no backing out.

At the time of the fifth grade incident, we lived in a small town in Oklahoma. I used to walk home from school, since the bus took just as long, and I was getting bad headaches by then.

One day, my mother’s car was parked outside of my elementary school. I thought it was a treat; maybe she wanted to take me somewhere and do something, just the two of us. As she started driving, she threw a letter in my lap. It was a letter I had written to the advice lady of Seventeen magazine. I don’t recall what it said, but it spoke of trying to find my “real” mother. My mom had dug deep in my dresser drawers to find the hiding place I had for that letter.

I don’t remember what my mother told me, but I do remember she pretty much went off. It was basically a speech to burst my bubble about any romantic notions of replacing the mother I currently had. That if my bio mom had wanted me, she would have kept me, and she didn’t want me now, and I couldn’t find her, etc. She made me feel like a criminal for being curious.

She grudgingly told me as much as she could remember about what the adoption agency said about my biological mother. Hair color, etc. Apparently, she didn’t think the information was important enough to write down for me, so she was going off of memory. She talked as if every bit of information was doing me a favor, yet she was irritated about it like she had sand in her panties or something.

We didn’t speak of my biological background again until I was 18 and pushed her on it. Until then, I was left to fill in the blanks myself.

(Scroll down or click the links to read Adoption 1, Adoption 2, and Adoption 3 first.)

My parents adopted me when I was 9 days old. They had tried for four years to have children of their own, but couldn’t conceive. They adopted me, then within four years had two sons of their own.

Did you know adoption was a cure for infertility? It is sometimes.

Problem was, I was an ugly baby. Holy god! I’m talking strangers-smile-politely-then-turn-away ugly. When the call came from the agency saying they had a baby available, my parents had to take whatever baby they had. Even if it wasn’t a pretty baby. Even if it had medical problems (I needed eye surgery by the age of four). Even if it wasn’t a boy.

In the pictures below, you can see the bloom is already quickly coming off of the rose of this “adopted brat” thing. And as photos go, these are the best of the best - my mother gave them to me to include in the slideshow to be shown at their 40th anniversary party. I can’t imagine what facial expressions of disgust are in the pics she decided to keep for herself. You can see in the pictures below that she is clearly contemplating roasting me, and my dad is thinking of tying me to the hood of his car.

My mother is Ms. Sorority. Sometimes, everything is about her, and her getting attention and looking good to others. She got plenty of attention for adopting a “poor, unwanted” baby. (An unwanted baby that there was a 2 year waiting list for! ) After the adoption and the attention she got for it, she was in her element for a while, I would imagine.

But then she found out she could have her own. She had two beautiful baby boys born 13 months apart from each other, cute and perfect in every way.

But yet she still had me, and she had no way to change that.

Growing up, my brothers didn’t like me. At all. I’m not talking normal sibling rivalry, I’m talking hate and resentment that little children just don’t normally have. It was like I was living in a clubhouse, but I was never invited to join. My two brothers were their own club. My parents were a second club. All four of them together were a third club. By God, I was going to join their goddamn clubs!

My childhood was spent trying to win approval, and withdrawing in despair when I couldn’t get it. I shared my toys. Some days I’d spend all afternoon cleaning my brothers’ rooms (to try and get in good with them AND my mom). I remember sitting and thinking, “How will I get them to like me?” I’d follow them around, even spy on them, to try and figure it out.

Spying became my favorite game. I was determined to unravel the mystery of what the problem was… why I was such an outsider in my family. Usually my brothers were the focus of my spying, but one day while spying I overheard a conversation between my parents that I will never forget.

When I was in fifth grade, my younger brother Mark got sick with stomach pains. He even went to the hospital for it. The doctors couldn’t understand what was causing it. He ended up being fine - they never found a reason for it - but for about a week we didn’t know if he’d be OK or not.

One afternoon, I was in the living room while my parents were in the kitchen, talking about my brother’s condition. They must have not known I was home, and me being a super-awesome ninja spy, I was not going to alert them to this fact.

The spying game took an unfortunate “bummer!” turn when I overheard my mother saying to my father that it was my fault my brother was sick in the hospital. That I “kept the house in turmoil” and “made” my brother sick. (Yes, now you know my secret. I was the most powerful and evil fifth grader ever to exist. Bow down before me!) She spoke of me with such anger and contempt, it made my blood run cold.

I don’t remember how she rationalized blaming me, nor do I remember the rest of the conversation. I do know it involved me, and regret that I was in their household. It was pretty ugly. It wasn’t just the words and the feelings that shocked me, or the fact that I had spent so many years trying for their approval just to find out they blamed me for these huge problems (after all, I might be killing my brother with my very presence in the household). I think the most shocking thing of all was to find out that how they acted when I was around was a strained act they could barely contain. It made me wonder who else in my world secretly couldn’t stand me and was just pretending.

I stayed in the living room and hid behind the piano until I could sneak away, feeling like the world had come to an end. I had made my brother sick, and I didn’t even understand how I did it. Also, it was the first time I had heard my mother confirm what I felt all along: that I was an unwelcome burden, an intruder.

I must emphasize that overall I was a good kid. Annoying yes, but I almost never got in trouble, I made good grades, I had plenty of friends. To this day I can’t see how my parents could blame me for making their house one of “turmoil” at that point in my life (teenage years still being a few years away).

When I was about 21 or 22, I had it out with my mother about a lot of things. One of those things we discussed was why my brothers had hated me all my life. I told mom it was because they picked up on my parents feelings towards me, and imitated them. She acknowledged that my guess was probably true. It was a victory for me.

But still to this day, it’s hard living with the knowledge that when my parents look back at their life, I was by far their worst decision. Their biggest mistake. I also realize that, being an unwanted pregnancy and the whole adoption thing, that I was very likely considered one of the worst life mistakes made by my biological parents too. And let’s sprinkle in the fact that I can point to at least a few men who would consider me their biggest mistake in life, and it’s an esteem-shattering self-realization that is no treat to live with.

Say the word “adoption” to people and you get a very interesting array of reactions.

Adoption is portrayed in the media in one of two ways: Either the adopted child is embraced wholeheartedly and lives an idyllic life, for which they are expected to be eternally grateful to the parents who were kind enough to take their charity-case ass in, or the opposite extreme — the noble and saintly parents who adopt a kid and get a “bad apple” and suffer the rest of their lives.

No matter how you view adoption or adoptive children, for some reason, there is still a stigma about it.

Although I’ve written my adoption tales, experiences, and opinions elsewhere, and those that have followed my multiple blogs throughout cyberspace have heard this crap ad nauseum, I’ve decided to re-post them again. Cyrus was good enough to share with me his adoption story, and mine is nothing compared to his - holy crap! But I think it’s good for people unfamiliar with adoption to hear more stories than just the fairy tale sugar-sweet ones, and the ones where the adopted kid turns into a nightmare, destroying small cities and making the sainted adopted parents cry bitter tears.

:deep breath: Here we go.

So I return to work today after yesterday, a day from hell.

My boss has been telling me month after month, “You are the senior trainer on that site. You need to take AUTHORITY. You need to take RESPONSIBILITY. You need to tell the management there that you are the sr. trainer and should be treated as such. You need to tell the other trainers you are the sr. trainer and they have to listen to you.”

So after 9 months of dealing with the crap of another trainer who has been bossing me around since I started there, I finally came out and said it. “I’m the Sr. Trainer and sometimes I have to make decisions and I hope that you all (both trainers) can start to trust that.” Then the bossy trainer said, “I’ve had meetings with my boss about EXACTLY what your job is. Your job means nothing. Your job description is the same as mine. I had my boss send me a copy of your job description and you have no say in what goes on here.” (In other words, the job description that says I have no extra authority or responsibility is the same one she has - she claims - yet SHE has been the “boss” and called the shots for the 1 year and 10 months I’ve worked there… she gathers her authority from the fact she started 5 months before me.)

So I asked what part of my job performance led bossy trainer(BT) to have secret meetings with her boss about MY JOB DESCRIPTION (we have different bosses). BT stammered around and never answered. Truth is, she has had so many complaints filed against her but has kept her job over and over because she deflects those complaints and tries to focus the attention elsewhere by complaining about me.

So I called MY boss and told her what’s going on and she was pissed off and said, “Yes you DO have authority, they have to listen to you, get the other trainers on the phone NOW.” I said I would but if she was going to backpedal and not support me, after I finally did what she had been badgering me to do for months on end, that it would not be forgotten. She promised to support me.

She didn’t. She got on the phone and basically said that any decision would be made by the training “team” (which in BT’s mind meant “made by BT” as it always had) and if no agreement could be reached it would be escalated to the two managers out of state. So she basically threw me under the bus.

BT is 40 percent of the reason I’m miserable at my job. You can’t reason with her, logic with her or deal with her. Any word out of her mouth, she’ll deny two seconds later. I’ve never once seen her take responsibility for her inappropriate behavior. If I have a bad day or get upset about something, she’ll throw it in my face every chance I get as an example of how I “can’t handle this job”.

I’ve tried every way I can to deal with her. I’ve tried every tactic I could. I’ve tried talking to my boss, her boss… nothing works. I’m at my wits end.

To top it off, we have training coming up and I created the invite for the staff SIX DAYS AGO. I put a sign up sheet in the mail room SIX DAYS AGO. But the staff manager has refused to send out the invite for six days. She says there’s nothing wrong with it, she just hasn’t “had time” to click on “forward” and mail to one distribution list. (Takes all of four seconds.) This manager has been retaliating against me since last fall for declining a particularly unreasonable training request, and her sitting on these invites has caused mass confusion to the staff. But she’s doing it on purpose - to make training look disorganized. She has all the power in the local office and there’s nothing I can do about it.

This is typical shit I’ve been dealing with for over a year and I just can’t stand it. Yet I’m trapped because most trainer jobs require travel and I can’t travel because of my dog.

My stress levels are through the roof.

No one has a perfect life. Everyone has crazy stress, unhappiness, barriers to overcome. I am not special.

So why do I seem to be the only one unable to deal?

I would think that having a spouse and kids would be more stress - not everyone’s home life is a happy one. Yet I find myself making excuses… “Yeah, nothing at work gets to him. But he goes home to a family that adores him at the end of the day.” Does that really help people cope all that much? Or is that an excuse that I use because I am not handling things as gracefully as other people?

Every day is a new reminder that I’m not doing this life right and I don’t know how to right things. I can’t find a cure for myself. I can’t find a way to change this personality that seems more prone to take a toll on the world than make a contribution to it.

Am I expecting too much from life when I expect a reason to endure it? “I don’t have anything to live for!” is quite the melodramatic statement, but I wonder… do most people have (or find) something to live for? Or do they find a way to live without purpose, success, or any sort of reason? Is that why people are so driven to have kids - so that there’s a reason for it all and it’s not all so stupid and futile? (Even if that is a reason, still don’t want ‘em, thank you.)

I could make it through just focusing on little joys - the next season of The Office, my dog, my pictures, lame internet jokes. But when I go to a job where I’m constantly reminded that I’m not good enough… that I cause more turmoil than solutions… that every reaction or feeling I have is wrong… it’s exhausting and makes me feel a bit beat up every day. I suppose everyone’s job is like this, but when the job is all you have, it makes one a bit myopic. But does a lack of objectivity - which we all have - make all my feelings invalid, an overreaction? I sincerely doubt it, but now even my feelings seem to be something else for me to apologize for and dismiss as unreasonable without examination, because they are mine and therefore automatically wrong. If I’m to believe those around me, such action is the only right course.

I guess everyone needs one source of joy that can inspire them to set aside everything else, all the bullshit, and have a reason to get out of bed every day. I’ve lived so long without a reason for joy that I don’t think it’s ever going to happen, and I know I’m not the only one in that boat by a long shot. So how come others can plod on, and I seem to have such turmoil about it?

OK, this post made no sense. And I haven’t even been drinking! I suppose these very words can be used as further supporting evidence to my “wrongness” but goddamnit, I’m sick of everyone else’s feelings and frustrations being valid except mine.

At the end of the day I just want a reason for going through it all and I don’t have one, and I wonder if I ever had one. I know I’m not alone on this but I don’t see anyone else struggle so publicly and awkwardly as I do, so what’s wrong with me? I must be weak, too impulsive, self-indulgent.

Would the universe giving me a straw to grasp be just one more joke - a dangling carrot, not really something that could ever be held in the end?

I’ll keep on keepin’ on, but the wrongness of my fit in life clings to me like a bad perfume. I wasn’t meant to be here. Someone messed up. I didn’t get the life I was meant for - a life where my overall footprint on the world would be at least a fraction positive. If I had been born one day later I would have been raised by a totally different family. If I had been born one year earlier in my biological mother’s life I would have been given to a couple of a completely different religion. If my parents had asked for a boy on the adoption application - what they really wanted in the first place - I would have gone to a different family. Was I just one impulse decision away from ending up where I was really meant to? Is that why nothing ever seems to fit?

All I know for sure is that I regret who I am, and that is one fucked up thing to live with.

And the world shares this regret, which I think is even worse.

So I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday flat on my back. Fever/chills, body aches, congestion, sore throat, and coughing until each cough made my ribs hurt. Yesterday afternoon the congestion started to break up and I thought I was going into the home stretch - WRONG!

This morning I woke up with a headache so bad I couldn’t stand. I knew it was a tension headache triggered by three days of laying on the couch, and now gone out of control. So I thought a hot shower might help, but then I thought I was going to pass out so I got out of the shower with soap still in my hair. Managed to call in sick by 5:30 this morning, and after that the vomiting started. What’s this? Severe pain and dizziness isn’t enough (and oh yeah I’m still coughing) - now I have to have nausea and vomiting too?

Have you ever, either by accident or by a loss of temper, done something or said something that you instantly regretted? Maybe not something so bad that you’d turn yourself into the authorities, but something that left you feeling so guilty that you not only expected the universe to get even, you actually welcomed the vengeance that you knew was coming, because until it came you would live your life not only consumed with guilt, but consumed with dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Yes, I admit I didn’t correct the Quiznos worker when they forgot to charge me for the sea salt and vinegar chips. Yes, I admit I didn’t go back and re-align my car when I noticed my parking job had my driver’s side wheel go over the yellow line enough to make the next space over unusable. Yes I admit I don’t bother to recycle my beer bottles.

After the last four days of penance, I can honestly say that my dues are paid and my conscience is clear.