I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was adopted. It’s always been with me, something a little different but not so much so you’d ever notice. Like having green eyes, or a birthmark.
My questions about being adopted were always answered, and in more detail as I got old enough to understand more. I don’t know how they did it, but my parents always made me feel special, chosen, and never once have I felt abandoned or unwanted by the woman who gave birth to me. My birth father in all this was a cipher, unmentioned and barely considered by me. My mother’s name was on my birth certificate and adoption papers, but he was the “unknown.”
While I was curious about my birth mother, I never felt the desire to find her while I was young. It may have been that I had more than enough going on without one more upheaval, one more thing to worry about. By the time I was 10, I had lived in 5 countries, spent Christmas in Tokyo, gone on safari in Africa and generally had an interesting life in a Chinese curse sort of a way. May you live in interesting times, with all its implied joys and tribulations, has reverberated through my life since the day I was born.
I believe a lot of children wonder what their life would be like with their birth parents; if life with these imagined parents would be somehow better, happier, when heartache comes, as it always does. I knew from an early age that when you go searching for something or someone the outcome is not always what you imagined or even wanted. There was no guarantee that finding my birth mother would be a joyful reunion for either of us. Plus, I didn’t want to hurt my parents’ feelings or make them feel I thought they were not my “real” parents.
That I felt this way about my adoption is quite astonishing to me, especially as my parents had a long and unhappy marriage. I was the UN, negotiating uneasy peace and occasionally getting wounded in the crossfire. However, I never felt that they were not my parents. The conflicts I had with them, and my mother in particular, had more to do with my being a teenager and my mother’s raging mental illness than anything else. In an odd way, I felt being adopted set me apart from my family’s craziness. I hadn’t inherited that DNA and was free to build my own sort of life. That I went on to create a towering inferno at one point in my life said as much about me as it did about my family.
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