Did You Always Know You Were Adopted?

The answer to this question is both yes and no...

I remember clearly the day I learned I was adopted. It certainly wasn't the first time someone had told me that I was adopted. It was the first time I really understood what it meant for me to be adopted. I was in the second grade at the time so I would have been about seven or eight. As a seven year old, I was rather shy and quiet. Even so, I had a good friend. I had lived in the small town where I attended elementary school for all of my young life. Many new children were moving into the area that year. There were new subdivisions fast developing where there had been mostly farms.

My best friend was (and still is in my heart) a girl named Julee. Julee and I were very sad when we were not placed in the same kindergarten class. We were even more upset when we had different first grade teachers. So in second grade, when I was placed in Miss Johnston's class and she was placed in Miss Morrison's class, we were convinced that the school system was out to destroy our friendship. This made us even more determined to find each other during recess and after school.

Soon after starting second grade, I decided that it was pretty okay after all, even though Julee and I had been separated. The reason I liked it so much was my teacher. Miss Johnston was the prettiest, smartest, most graceful woman in the world and when I grew up I wanted to be just like her. She had light brown shoulder-length hair that always curled in the right places. She was young, creative, and energetic.

I don't remember much about what I did in first grade. I remember putting on a play about an ice skater and the day a substitute made me stand in the corner. My memories of second grade are pretty extensive in comparison. I remember our unit on dinosaurs and how Miss Johnston opened my eyes to a whole new world, ancient and wonderful. I remember we had a unit on communication and Miss Johnston hooked up a telephone from our classroom to Miss Morrison's so that we could take turns practicing how to answer it, how to dial it, and what to say when someone answered. As part of our communication unit we all got our own addresses and mailboxes in class. As long as our mail was properly addressed, the mail carrier (Miss Johnston) would make sure that all of our mail was properly delivered.

I remember our second grade science fair and how one kid brought a model of a stream that powered a water mill. I remember career day when several parents came to speak about what they did. One dad talked about being a dentist and it sounded pretty good to me. He gave us all little pink pills to swish around in our mouths when we got home so we could see if we were brushing our teeth well enough. I remember the day that Eva confided in me in the bathroom that she was sick with something I’d never heard of. Thinking that it sounded rather serious. I informed Miss Johnston of Eva's condition. “Die a ree yah”. Several children laughed at my ignorance, but not Miss Johnston. She politely thanked me for being concerned about Eva and sent me back to my seat.

The first week of class she showed us a brown leafless tree made of paper that was stapled to the
bulletin board. It was a large tree but its empty branches made it look somewhat forlorn. She informed us that this was going to be our tree. We would get a chance to say who in the class we thought was a “good apple”. We would raise our hands and say things like "John let me share the ball with him at recess" or "Melanie was quiet in the lunch line". Miss Johnston would then fill the empty branches of the tree with bright red paper apples. Each apple had the name of a child on it who had been nominated. Every so often, we got to take home apples that had our names on them. I began to watch for things I appreciated in others. I felt so good when someone said something nice about me.

The day I remember most, though, was the day Amber got to talk in front of the class about herself. I don't remember why. Maybe she was a new student. Maybe she was student of the week. She told the class that she was adopted. She explained how her sister and she had both been adopted when they were babies. Amber explained that meant that she had a different mom when she was a little baby who had given her to another lady who was now Amber's mom. I went home very confused.

I knew that I was adopted. My mom had told me that I was adopted and that I was very special because I was sent down from heaven just for her. This new information provided by Amber was very disturbing. If adoption had ever been explained to me that way before, I hadn't heard or I hadn’t understood. Someone in my class said to me, “Hey you’re adopted too, right?”

“Yes.”

I remember feeling like a liar because it was not the same kind of adopted that they were thinking of. I did not know all of the kinds of adopted, but knew that what Amber was describing was a different kind of adopted than mine.

I brought up the subject that night to my mom and big brother as we were pulling into the grocery store parking lot. I remember everything about that moment. The smell of the car. The direction it was facing. Everything. We were in our Volkswagen Beetle. I was in the back seat in the middle, poking my head between the seats so I could see both of them. I told my mom about what Amber had said and finished with “and she thinks adoption means that she came out of some other lady’s tummy”. My brother started to laugh. My mom looked sternly at him. The more he laughed, the more I could feel the sadness welling up inside me. We were driving around, looking for a parking space.

“Mom, did I come from your tummy?”

“No, but…”

I threw myself back on the seat. The sadness overtook me. I was sobbing like I’d never cried before. It went from my gut to every part of my body.

“Whose tummy did I come from? What happened to that other lady?”

“She was part of God’s plan to bring you to me.”

That was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. My sobs were uncontrollable. I laid down in the back seat. I wanted to disappear into it. I was inconsolable. I felt fear, anger, grief, and shame all at once. Over and over it played in my head. I didn't come from my mommy's tummy. I didn't come from my mommy's tummy. I didn't come from my mommy's tummy.

We didn’t go shopping. Mom drove back home. I had a new understanding about my adoption. It meant exactly what Amber had said it meant. My world changed forever that day.

In other ways my world went on just the same. I went back to school. I loved Miss Johnston, I liked
everything we did in school (even math) and I was one of the top readers in my class. My mom was very proud of me. She came home from parent-teacher conferences with Miss Johnston and she was beaming. "Miss Johnston said that if she had a little girl she would want her to be just like you." Mom thought this was about the biggest compliment she had ever heard. She repeated Miss Johnston's words to her friends and sisters when they asked how I was doing. I repeated those words to myself.

Mom didn't like to talk a lot about my adoption. I think it made her uncomfortable. I really needed someone to talk to about all the new feelings I was having, but I kept them mostly to myself. I talked to Julee about it and we had a secret fantasy that we were really twin sisters. Our birthdays were both in February so we figured that was close enough. We pretended that her mom had given me to my mom, but they had this plan to be neighbors. Julee had two older sisters who had the exact same birthday as me; one born 3 years before me, the other born 1 year before me. Weird coincidence. But, because of it, I just seemed to fit into Julee's family. Her brother and sisters felt like they were mine too, and I really wanted a sister. But even at age seven, we knew our little fantasy was only a fantasy.

I had other fantasies that I shared with no one. In my heart I knew they were silly and unrealistic. I liked to pretend that Farah Fawcett-Majors was my *real mom. I thought she was pretty. I loved my mom and I thought that she was the best mom in the whole world. I also felt that I needed to fill in the mysterious gap that had been torn in my life somehow. I needed to know - even if it was only pretend - that I came from somewhere special and important. I began to look at Miss Johnston and wonder what it would be like if she was that lady who was part of God’s plan – my other mom. I remembered what she had said to my mom at parent-teacher conferences. I wondered if it meant something. Even if it didn't, it made me feel better to pretend that it did.

I was kind of angry at my family for not explaining things better. This was anger that I never expressed to them and it manifested itself mostly as hurt. Not long after I learned that I had not come from mom’s tummy, we had some of my younger cousins over. All of my younger cousins are actually the kids of my cousins, because mom and dad adopted me when they were “older”. One of these younger cousins asked me what it was like to be adopted. This was another moment in my life that I remember vividly. I felt so stupid. I had just figured out what it meant and my younger cousin already knew.

Someone had to have told her. Not only was my own mom not explaining my life to me, but everyone else in my extended family seemed to have a firm grasp! I had been so stupid, thinking that they were my "real" cousins, aunts and uncles, while they had all probably been looking at me thinking, "She’s adopted." Thoughts such as these would plague me for years to come.

There were many things that tied me to Miss Johnston that year. She was the best teacher I have ever had, because of how she made me feel. She made me feel smart and special. She taught me how to look for good things in other people. She taught me how to appreciate the good things in myself -even the little things. She was someone I wanted to be like. She was there exactly when I needed her to be. Finding out I was adopted made me feel less than human. Like I came from nowhere. When I got really sad, I would remember what Miss Johnston had said about wanting to have a daughter just like me. It made me feel a lot better. Sometimes I would daydream that Miss Johnston was telling me that she was my real mom and that she loved me but that she would let me live with my mom and just come visit a lot. I knew these were just dreams, but they made me feel happy, just the same. Even though she was not my real mom, whenever I tried to picture what I thought my real mom would be like, she was just like Miss Johnston. At the end of the year we found out that Miss Johnston was getting married. She said that she was moving to Wisconsin. I gave her an alarm clock and a note saying that I loved her and that I would miss her. I didn't know where Wisconsin was but it sounded far away.

One day, during the summer after second grade had ended, my mom, dad brother and I went to Spanish Fork to visit my aunt. Spanish Fork was only fifty miles from our home in South Jordan, but I figured it was about as close to Wisconsin as I was going to get anytime soon. I asked my mom for a piece of paper. On it I wrote something like this:

"Miss Johnston, I love you. I miss you. I think you would make a good mom. Come see me if you can.

Love, Debra".

I folded it up neatly and wrote Wisconsin on the front - although I'm sure I misspelled it. I opened the little window in the back seat of our Volkswagen Beetle - the kind that snaps open about 2 inches and does absolutely no good on hot summer days. I threw the letter out onto the highway. I felt a lot better.

*I use the term real mom in this article, because at that young age it was the term that everyone around me used to describe my birth mother. I couldn't write this article and describe my feelings without using that term. I have come to resent the term real mom being used for a birth mom. I had a mom. A real mom. She changed my diapers and wiped my tears. She was very, very, real. She was, and still is, my sweet mom.

I originally wrote this in 1994 for a writing class at the University of Utah. This was the teacher’s comment at the bottom of the paper:

Yes. There was finally resolution.  

I met my birth mom in 1999

My birth mom - 1977

Miss Johnston - 1976-77 school year

The Missing Eight Days

Day 8 - meeting my big brother

Just like everyone else, I was born. Unlike most, I don’t have any pictures from that day. Or that week. Nothing. My first pictures are on day eight of my life.

My brother and I each had a baby book. Mom wrote a few things in them, but mostly they were a place to stuff all the papers related to us. People laughingly say “babies don’t come with a manual” as they raise their eyebrows and smile at new parents. Strangely, I did. My baby book had "the manual” in it. There were also various letters between the adoption agency and my parents. All very formal sounding. Some regarding payments. All very unemotional discussions of things surrounding the event that has arguably been the greatest source of emotion in my life. The family I left. The family I gained. My family.

I asked my mom how old I was when she “got” me.

“Well, you were 8 days old, but your brother was a month old when we got him. Probably because he came from out of state.”

This blew my young mind away. I became secretly obsessed with what had happened to me during my missing 8 days. Who had changed my first diaper? Who had given me my first bath? Was I in an orphanage like in the movie Annie? It really bothered me that someone out there knew the answer to all of those things, but that someone wasn't me.

I remember reading "the manual” over and over. It wasn't much to read, yet I read and re-read it just the same. I’m not sure you could even call it a manual. It was only a piece of paper folded in half, with all the important bits on the inside. On the front it said “Your Baby”. This is how I knew it was the instruction manual for me.

The inside was a lazy fill-in-the-blank. I studied it over and over. I dissected every typed line. Especially the part about “nationality/background”. I remember reading it as a young child. Knowing they were describing me, but in a strangely clinical and elusive manner. The document seemed to be purposefully mysterious and secretive.

From the pages of "the manual' I was able to pick up on a few key points of information. I'm Scottish. I'm English. I'm all of Northern Europe! Well, I wasn't too sure what the North European part meant, but I began studying up on all things Scottish and English. I loved the royal wedding. I loved bagpipes and kilts.

"The manual" filled in a few pieces of my missing eight days. it seemed that whomever had me those days had figured out two things about me; how I liked to sleep, and how I liked to eat. This seemed reasonable. I guess that's mainly what babies do. But it felt so minimalist. Nothing about my first bath. Nothing about whether I was held and snuggled.

Mom was a school teacher. She taught us that knowledge would open all kinds of doors for us. She bought us the 1976 version of the World Book Encyclopedia when I was in first grade. The books were a striking red, white, and blue with gold edging on the pages. They were all lined up A to Z. So many things to research and learn about. I spent lots of time reading about various subjects. Learning about distant planets, breeds of dogs, even sex. It was amazing the things we humans had figured out. But the most basic of all knowledge - Who do I look like?, Where do I come from? - these were shrouded in mystery.

meeting my dad

Day 8 - meeting my mom

I still don’t have answers about the missing eight days, but the desire to know more started at a very young age for me. I don’t presume to speak for all adoptees. I know there are some who feel “I know exactly who I am” and don’t have a desire to know any more. I’m not wired that way. And, I wasn't raised that way. Mom taught us to learn about things. When I asked her if I could find out more about my adoption, I remember she didn't bat an eye and said “Well, if it were me, I would want to know”. She gave me permission. And thus, my quest began…