The Beginning...

This is my first entry.  I expect to primarily focus on my adoption, how it affected my life, and how reuniting with my birth mom and her (and as it turned out my) family drastically changed my life.  Some of this will be history, some of it will be "as it happens" since this is, as I begin, an ongoing process.

I'm writing this mostly to preserve recent memory.  As time goes on I don't expect it will remain as fresh in my mind as it is now, and I'd like to have a record.  Should this blog attract any attention I'll do my best to respond.  I'm happy to help anyone in a similar or not so similar situation, in any way I can.

I'll start with some backstory, mostly for context, and because writing it down will help me sort some of it out in my head.  So, here it is:

I was adopted as an infant in 1973.  I was about 3 1/2 months old when I went to my parents, having been in a foster home from the time I left the hospital.  The adoption was closed, standard practice in 1973.  My adoption was not handled by an adoption agency, but by county social services.  My parents paid a sum total of $15 to adopt me, quite the contrast to the thousands upon thousands of dollars people spend to adopt a "healthy white baby" these days.

I don't recall ever not knowing I was adopted, which clearly means I got the news from my parents very early in life.  I didn't see the actual paperwork, including notes from the foster home and non-identifying information about my birth parents until I was much older, at least 14 or so, but they told me what was in it.  When I eventually saw the paperwork for myself it said exactly what they told me.  I never got the impression they were trying to withhold anything; I believe they didn't give me the actual paperwork until they felt I was mature enough to understand it.  I have it still; I've been carting it around for years, never believing it would do me any good.

I had a mostly happy childhood.  It had its ups and downs, as it does for most people, but overall I would classify it as happy.  I didn't think much about being adopted, or about my birth parents.  When I did, I would sometimes wonder about my birth mother, or wonder if I had any brothers or sisters.  I grew up an only child.  My parents couldn't have children of their own, and never adopted any others.  I always took it on faith that I had been given up as an act of love.  I had no idea where this feeling came from, but I always felt it was true, and I never questioned it.

There was a large rock under a tree in the front yard of my parents’ house where I would sometimes sit and think.  There were a couple of years where I had few friends and I was therefore often alone.  I spent a lot of time on that rock those couple of years, and sometimes I would wonder if I had brothers or sisters out there somewhere, perhaps close by.  I'd fantasize about finding them and never being without friends again.  I would discover many years later that I did in fact have multiple siblings, but at the time I was sitting on that rock daydreaming about them one was a toddler, one was an infant, and two had yet to be born.  They wouldn't have made very good playmates for an eleven year old.

Time passed, I got older, and I started to grow apart from my parents.  That is, of course, normal for teenagers.  I didn't think I was any different in that respect, and perhaps I wasn't.  I made new friends, some of whom I still have nearly thirty years later.  As time passed I became more and more uncomfortable with my parents, especially my mother.  We didn't have any other family living within 1000 miles, so my contact with family other than my parents was sporadic at best.  Two of my grandparents died before I was born, my mother's father died when I was four, and that left me with a single grandmother, my father's mother, for most of my childhood.  We would see her about twice a year, and my mother's brother and his family perhaps once every second or third year.  My grandmother died when I was 19, the summer after my first year of college.  When my mother told me she didn't even ask me if I wanted to go to the funeral, which was out of state, she just told me I had to stay home to take care of the dogs.  The point, family was never a big part of my life, or something that comforted me in my later childhood/adolescence.

I dropped out of college after two years.  I totally lacked focus, and I spent most of the second semester of my sophomore year much more interested in a particular girl than in going to class.  I missed my 2pm class on a regular basis because I slept through it.  I was wasting my time and my parents' money.  I wasn't going to finish at the rate I was going, and I wasn't motivated to change.  I didn't have the sort of relationship with my parents where I could talk to them about it, and my friends, bless them, would support me no matter what.  I really didn't need someone to support my stupid decisions, but I was young and I didn't know that.  So, I quit school.  I dated that girl for a while, and then she broke my heart, as is to be expected in stories like this.

I decided about that time I wanted to be a police officer.  Luckily (or unluckily as it would turn out) for me, one doesn't need a four year degree to be a cop.  I was dating another girl.  She lived in another state, and since I wasn't doing anything terribly important where I was, just working in a restaurant, I moved there.  I worked in another restaurant, went to community college, got an associate’s degree, and eventually got hired to be a cop in the place we lived.  I also married that girl.

This wouldn't be much of a story if we just lived happily ever after, so of course, we didn't.  One of the problems with getting married young is that you are not finished growing up (I was just about to turn 21; she had been 21 for 5 months when we got married).  We were married about four years, but eventually split up, no great falling out or anything, we just grew apart.  No children, no house, I got the dog.  Just another bad relationship for the guy that doesn't do well at relationships, nothing new there.

I originally got into police work with the intention of doing it for five years, then going back to school, finishing my degree, and finding something else to do with my life.  I felt like it would be a good experience to have, be interesting, be something most people hadn't done, and might give me a chance to do a little good in the world.  By the time of my divorce I had figured out that I was pretty good at being a cop, and that five years wasn't long enough, I wanted to keep doing it.

This next bit sounds dramatic, but I was young, and the young are prone to drama.  I was also dealing with circumstances for which I had no frame of reference.  I became convinced that I wouldn't live to see forty, so I became less concerned with planning for my future.  I had been a cop for about three years at that point and I had one person try to kill me, I'd been in a serious car crash, I'd been to the funeral of an instructor from my academy class who was murdered in the line of duty, I'd had several co-workers seriously injured, one of whom had to medically retire, I had been assaulted multiple times, and I had more near misses driving than I could count.  I was so sure I was eventually going to die doing police work that I sent my mother a list of my friends she needed to contact in the event I was killed or seriously injured.  Unlike most cops, most of my friends were not in law enforcement, so I couldn't count on anyone at the police department knowing to contact them.

Time moved on and I kept being a cop.  I got married, and then divorced, again.  I had a lot more near misses, I'm not sure how I survived some of them, but I did.  Still no children after the second divorce, no dog this time, the ex got to keep the cat.  I still loved police work, so I kept doing it.  I didn’t think about it a lot, but I still had the idea that eventually it had to catch up with me; one of my near misses wouldn’t be a miss.  Again, young people are prone to drama. 

The reality is that the vast majority of cops make it through their careers without getting killed in the line of duty, feloniously or accidentally.  My last couple of paragraphs makes it sound like I was on the verge of death all the time for years.  I wasn’t, but there were a fair number of incidents that could have turned out quite differently, and with me a lot deader, and luckily did not.  People in emergency services tend to downplay “almosts” as “nothing happened”.  Why tell your friends and family you “almost got killed”?  If you are there to tell them and it isn’t from a hospital bed, nothing happened.  So, one never hears about the vast majority of near misses people doing these sorts of jobs have because they just don’t talk about them.  However, sit down and really talk to a cop, a firefighter, a paramedic, or someone in a similar job, and if you ask, most of them will have multiple stories about times they were nearly killed, but came out fine.  Also, because of my general emotional state for many years of the time I was a cop, I took more risks than were strictly necessary trying to get the job done.  That put me in the line of “near misses” more often than I might have been otherwise.  At the time I wasn’t even aware I was doing it, it’s when I look back that I can see it. 

I was married for a third time in 2009.  Not too long after that my twin sons were born.  That was a life altering event, one I thought I was prepared for, but I wasn’t really.  I was 36 years old when they were born, and it was the first time in my life I laid eyes on another person, in this case two people, to whom I was related by blood.  That wouldn’t happen again until the day before my 43^rd birthday, but I didn’t know that then. 

I spent some brief moments over the next months and years wondering about my birth mom and what it must have meant to her to give me up, but only brief moments.  It’s hard to give anything a lot of thought with two infants, and then toddlers, to deal with.  I did think more about my past, and especially my history of failed relationships.  In addition to the two marriages I had several long term girlfriends when I wasn’t married. From the time I was sixteen there was only a single period of six months where I wasn’t either married or dating someone exclusively.  Other than that, every other period during that time I was single lasted less than six weeks. 

I understand now what I was doing, though at the time I had no real idea.  If asked I would have said that I had no issues with being adopted and it didn’t bother me at all.  I rarely thought about it, and when I did, I was never angry, bitter, or upset.  That, at least, hasn’t changed.  All my life something was missing, but I didn’t know it because I had never experienced it.  I always felt strange and uncomfortable at the few family gatherings I attended, and I could never understand people who enjoyed them.  My wife has a fantastic relationship with her mother (her father died 8 years before we met) and since we lived far away from her, my wife often talked about missing her mother.  I didn’t get it. 

So, what was I doing for all those years of failed relationships?  What was missing that I never knew wasn’t there?  It’s simple really, but since I had never felt it before, I couldn’t identify its absence for what it was.  I was missing a feeling of belonging.  In all those failed relationships I was trying to create a family where I felt like I belonged.  I finally did manage that, after a lot of failures, but even then I didn’t know that is what I was doing, and I didn’t identify the feeling at the time.

After my sons were born I slowly started to realize that I had to get out of police work.  I had people counting on me to come home; I was no longer “expendable”.  It took me a little over three years to work myself out of the job.  All told, I spent sixteen years as a police officer.  I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, but I also have no desire to return to it.  Unfortunately, thanks to my lack of planning for a future that I didn’t figure I had much of to worry about, I never finished my degree, nor did I manage to save any money.  I got a job I enjoy that pays less than what I was making as a cop and has no real opportunity for advancement.   Law enforcement is really the only thing I’m qualified to do, and it isn’t something I want to do anymore.  I’d really like to go to law school, but that is beyond unrealistic. First, it would require me to finish my four year degree, which is probably a year and a half worth of classes if I manage to carry a full time course load.  Then, three years of law school, if I could figure out a way to do it instead of working.  With a family to support that isn’t realistic.  The other option is four years attending part-time, which would be possible in theory, assuming I could pay for it and work my schedule around it, but would likely make me completely unavailable as a parent and husband for four years.

How is any of that related to being adopted?  I don’t know that it is, at least not directly.  It could just be that I made some less than ideal choices when I was younger and I am faced with the consequences now.  I certainly never would have accepted any sort of link between the two prior to six months ago.  However, I believe a link does exist, and that link is this: because I never felt like I belonged I did not concern myself with planning for a future that I wouldn’t belong in either, even if I had one.  I didn’t think of it that way at the time of course, not having even identified that the “wrongness” I felt was the feeling that I didn’t belong to anything or anyone.

That basically brings me up to the present.  All of this seems like something of a downer, and that really isn’t fair to my life as a whole.  Overall, I’ve been happy.  I’ve had a lot of great experiences, met a lot of great people, and have some fantastic friends.  My adoptive parents were loving, supportive, and did the best they could.  If there were times it wasn’t enough, it was because of who I am and how different I am from them.  I think my mom made the right “choice” in giving me up for adoption (I’m not sure she could do anything else, hence the quotes) given her circumstances at the time.  I certainly don’t blame her for the issues I have finally figured out I have with being adopted.  We do the best we can in life, and I believe that she did the best she could for me.  I spent most of my life being very pro-adoption, primarily because my experience was, in my view, so positive.  However, my view on the subject has changed almost completely.  I believe that absent danger to the child or a complete and persistent inability of the parents to care for the child, adoption is the wrong choice.  That is why I have kind of a negative lean here, not because I had a bad life, because despite its ups and downs, I have not.  However, since finding out about the life I missed, I have felt a profound sense of loss, somewhat similar to the death of a loved one.  It’s not the same feeling, I have an opportunity that doesn’t exist with someone who is dead, but the feelings of loss are similar.  The reality, of course, is that if my mom had kept me her life would have almost certainly been very different, and the life I lived would not have been the same as the life I missed.  I understand that logically, but sometimes the heart won’t listen to logic.  So, this first entry is written as I try and figure out how to deal with these feelings and that has resulted in a slant that is perhaps not representative of my life as a whole.

I think I will end this overly long entry hear.  Next time I’ll get into the letter that arrived in early November 2015 and the phone call on November 30, 2015 that changed my life.