By John Anderson I was born on a hot summer morning in Minneapolis, MN. Six months later I was adopted. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in south Minneapolis, just a few blocks away from the Mississippi River and Lake Street. Evie was born 23 months later and grew up in the "poor section" of the Washburn High School district. Our fathers were middle-class workers, my Dad with the Minneapolis Gas Company, and hers as an inspector with the City of Minneapolis. My Mom was a full-time homemaker, hers, a working mom doing part-time bookkeeping during the war. We each have an adoptive sibling, Evie a brother, Jim. I have a sister, Mary. At some time early in my life my parents told me I was adopted. I didn't understand what that meant and didn't think much about it. I could never understand why some kids laughed at me when they found out. One even called me a bastard. I just shrugged my shoulders and walked away. For me, being adopted was just a fact of life. Unfortunately for my sister, it wasn't. She learned when she was seven and it destroyed her. I asked my parents why they hadn't told her and they said that she wasn't ready to find out. I never was able to understand why I was ready to know at three and she wasn't at seven. Evie learned early on and fantasized that she was the lost daughter of a princess. Her parents regularly read her The Chosen Child, which dealt with adoption. We both led normal lives, but I had a strange experience when I was four-years-old. I was told from the beginning that no one knew who my other mother was. But one day I came in from playing and found her crying. "your other mother died," she said. How could she have known if nobody knew who she was I wondered. I still wonder to this day, but I did find out that my birth-mother wasn't as anonymous as I was led to believe. More of that in Part II. Evie and I lived through the 'Forties and 'Fifties and graduated from High School. Evie went to Washburn and I attended Minnehaha Academy, then went on to college. Evie went to Hamline University and the University of Minnesota. I graduated from the University with a three-year break with the Army after my Freshman year. We met in 1966 and married in 1967. In 1973 our son Clint came along. Clint was healthy and happy, but definitely like neither of us. He shares our facility with language, speaking full sentences at 9 months and able to carry on adult conversations from the age of seven. But while Evie and I have trouble changing a lightbulb, Clint is literally a mechanical genius, scoring at the 9999th percentile in an mechanical aptitude test. From the beginning he was fascinated with cars. I've always liked them, but I didn't have to have one next to me on my pillow when I went to sleep. His intelligence has worked against him. Bored in school, he began to get in trouble from an early age. When he was seven we were surprised to find a pizza delivery man at our door. "Some woman ordered it," he said. It was Clint. Later he started to run afoul of the law by stealing hubcaps and escalated to frequent trips to the Anoka County Jail. He finally was sentenced to a community corrections program, where they forced him to attend school and finish his high school degree. Since then he has worked in any number of jobs, including owning and running his own businesses, and has added numerous certificates for car and computer repair, as well as a low-voltage electrician license. Besides being unlike us in interests, he is also unlike us politically. He is a hard-core Republican and we are life-long Democrats. Our daughter Katie is totally unlike him, and us. She is bright, sweet and artistic. Like Clint, she hated school. An undiagnosed ear infection caused hearing problems during the crucial language development stage. Her speech is fine, but she has difficulty understanding figurative language. She also was diagnosed as learning disabled, but not at a severe enough degree to require Special Education classes. (To me, this always sounded like having only one leg, but not being eligible for services because you didn't limp badly enough.) Her academic problems were compensated by her artistic gifts. She is a very talented writer and keeps a diary. Once, when little, she described an extended trip to northern Minnesota. "We drove and we drove and we drove." She also won an award for a statue she made in a school art's class. She also has high moral standards, and went through her teens drug and tobacco-free. We couldn't be more proud of her. After she finishes a course in aesthesiology she intends to become a make-up artist. We're sure she'll do a wonderful job.
Like us, she's an animal lover. She graciously is leaving two dogs for us to care for. In short, being adopted doesn't seem to have been such a big thing for our family. As we grew up, Evie and I would have liked to know more about family health issues. That problem has been solved because we both have found our birth-families. Neither of us have had abandonment issues, or at least not conscious ones, and I don't think Katie or Clint do either. Since we have met out birth-families, it has been nice to know people who look like us. Our children seem to be comfortable that they are adopted, and we can always think that the really good things about them are due to their upbringing, and the things we don't like, to heredity. The discovery of our birth families is told in Part II. John Anderson is very anxious to learn of adoption experiences/issues and invites you to contact him at http://cmasterpiece.com. He is the author of a mystery-thriller, The Cellini Masterpiece, written under the pen name of Raymond John. If you would like to read the first chapter of the book, it is available at the above web-site. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Anderson http://EzineArticles.com/?Adoption-Runs-in-Our-Family---Part-I&id=110182 phentermine on line without a prescription
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