Growing Up Adopted
Apr 12 '00 (Updated Apr 14 '00)
I was adopted at seventeen days and my adopted brother, six and a half years older than me, was thrilled to finally have a baby sister to tease unmercifully. My adopted parents were a little older, too, than usual, since they had lost two babies before my brother and hadn't had any more. The age difference is important in how you are able to fit in and communicate and I wouldn't recommend having parents forty years older than you.
Truly, though, I had no reason to complain while I was a spoiled child, the apple of my parents' eyes. Even when I was told I was adopted before school began and I could hear it from someone else, it didn't concern me. I don't even remember wondering why my birth mother gave me away, but instead took it as God's will. My adoptive parents raised me in fundamental Christian values and so I believed God had given me the parents I had for good reason.
I'm not so literally Christian anymore, but I still think they were the better option. Having met my birth mother and birth father, who never married each other, I realize I grew up in the better home with its strict Christian teaching. I could have ended up giving a child away, too, if I'd grown up with my free-spirited birth mother. Still, my curiosity never left me and one day while a story on adopted kids looking for their roots came on TV, I mused aloud to my adoptive mother about how nice it would be to find mine. That's when I found out that my adoptive parents had known her name and hometown all along. I was shocked. They could have volunteered the information back when I was growing up or at least when I turned 21. I had always thought I would never find her.
My adoptive parents felt they might lose my affection, I guess, but I think just the opposite would have happened. I really felt like they were strangers when I was a teenager and through half of my twenties because I had no connection to anyone. When they helped me to reunite with my ecstatic birth mother, I finally felt loved by them. Maybe it was because they were willing to lose me that showed how much they loved me.
I have since then been better friends with my adoptive mother and also have occasional contact with my birth mother and a half brother. Yes, it's good I grew up with my adoptive parents instead, despite the age difference causing communication problems, but I think my teens and twenties would have been much better if they had let me know about my birth mother and understood my need for roots.
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Member: Jan Peregrine
Location: Lincoln, NE
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Peregrine 10 write-off in progress: http://www.epinions.com/content_5367242884
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