Essay 2

Adoptive Living

    Hundreds of thousands of children are adopted every year all over the world. In 1990, I was one of them. Twenty one years later, I’ve yet to meet my biological parents.

People often ask me if I have the desire to meet them. Every time I’ve answered a simple no. I’ve gone my whole life without them, being raised by what I consider to be my ‘real’ parents.  Why bother trying to find them now?

    I never had any interest, that is, until the last three years. Each year my mom slipped some new piece of information about my biological parents into passing conversation.

    At age 19, she told me their names. My father was Carl Webb. My mother was LeTisha Powers. They never married.
At age 20 she told me I had a sister. Her name was Marielle. She was a year and a half younger than me.

At age 21 she blew my mind.
It began very subtle...

“Have I ever told you about your grandmother?..
She was a very influential person in your parents lives. She was the one that suggested they put you up for adoption. She was a very smart person.

Then things got real weird..

You know how John had that big gambling problem? Well.. he gets it from your grandmother. One day, when your grandfather came home from work, she killed him! Then, she stuffed his body in the closet, took all their possessions, and ran off to Atlantic City.

    I was in awe. My mouth hung open like the jaws of a claw machine at an arcade. Was she for real right now?

She’s still alive, you know. She’s in a prison in Pennsylvania. You can visit her if you want.

    I wasn’t sure why, but I could not stop laughing. At first I didn’t believe her. I thought she was lying to me to insure that I, unlike my brother, never consider gambling. She swore to God she was telling the truth. To this day, I’m still unsure how to feel about this information. A part of me wants to visit her. But I’m fearful it will end up being creepy like Silence of The Lambs. I’ve played it out numerous times in my head, but I would never go through with it.

   

   

    These days, I like to use that story as an ice breaker, because I still find it hilarious and it really shocks people. When I was younger, it seemed like I always had the same conversation a million times about how I’m adopted. I always got the same questions. Always answered them the same.

    At 21, the subject only comes up when I bring new people over the house. The questions remain the same. The answers do not.

    Being adopted, I’ve met a number of other adopted kids, as if we were all magnetically drawn to each other. In my experience, growing up around them, I feel that every adopted person I’ve met, or heard about or seen on television, all have an outstanding kind of quirk or attribute about them. This is a theory that I’ve read about online but is not considered realistic in professional psychology. It’s call Adopted Child Syndrome. It claims that adopted children are prone to act out, develop bad habits, and become violent. As someone who interacts with adopted children on a daily basis and have since I was but a boy, I find some truth in this theory.

    People may argue that these traits can be found in any person, adopted or not. But I allege that, although they can be found in people, most times they are directly related to the person’s genetics or their upbringing if they are not adopted. For some adopted people it is very hard to relate and connect to their biological background.

    Adopted children, have very little history of their family history or ethnic heritage. I think that the adopted find it hard to find an identity. Personally, I struggle to identify and belong to any group, but mostly cultural.  People often assume I am from Latin or South America. I work in retail and spanish speaking customers come up to me and immediately speak to me in Spanish. Granted, I took five years of Spanish in high school and college, it is not my preferred language. Last week a teammate and friend of mine had to explain to some ignorant person that I was not a ‘Mexican.’

    Many people wear their ethnicity on their sleeve, bring it up in conversation, or brag about their heritage, whether it be Italian, or Irish, or Latino, or Asian or any other culture. Growing up, other kids, mostly white, would insult me by calling me both nigger and spic. In fact, other minorities would make fun of me and call me white for not acting in accordance to what they thought was my ethnic upbringing. I understand that being proud of where you’re from can be important, but attacking someone for looking different or not acting stereotypically as they are expected is not a way to show pride in an appropriate manner.

    Some people embrace this harassment and try to fit in to those stereotypes as a way to be accepted. I am not, nor will I ever be one of those people. I am my own person, not a color, or a country, or a stereotype. But, still people assume that we all have to act a certain way according to where we are from. This theory of Adopted Child Syndrome, accuses  a group, one that I belong to, of being different and having stereotypical flaws and developing negative traits. What the theory fails to exhibit, is that adopted people also have traits that allow them to be amazing people. The late Steve Jobs, is the perfect example of an adopted person without these stereotypical traits that changed the world.

Adopted people search for a sense of identity, something that they can connect to on an intimate level that other people get to such as ethnicity, family dynamic, or a social group. My hope is that everyone develops a more individualistic approach to life and doesn’t care about belonging to a certain group.