Late Discovery Adoptee

I started this blog post on July 14, 2015. And then life and busy-ness got in the way and I forgot all about it. Now my life has changed completely and in searching all the blog posts I had written about adoption, I found this again. So I'm publishing it today, nine months later, before starting my next set of blog posts about my newfound sister.

Here's a bit about Kevin Gladish's blog:

A friend of mine in Chicago emailed me a link to her friend's blog. He's a Late Discovery Adoptee. There should be no such term!

Why can't parents read more about adopting before taking it on. Why can't they understand: We know. We know! Deep inside each adoptee is a sense of dis-ease. A sense of not belonging. A sense of being, always being, in the wrong place. (This is merely my opinion, based upon the reading I've done. I don't have a doctoral degree to validate my "facts.")

As I read this beautifully written blog, one statement Kevin made struck me this morning.

I know there are those who will tell me that being adopted "shouldn't matter." Though I have never once heard or read this sentiment from a fellow adoptee, it comes up as a thing people say to be helpful. After all, you might argue, I was chosen. I was wanted. I was given opportunities that I may never have had otherwise. I was loved. So why should I insist on digging up all this stuff, when none of it should matter?

The answer is that it does matter. Plain and simple. It matters to me. It matters to a great many of us.

I wasn't chosen. How can you tell me over and over again that I was chosen.

My parents chose to adopt a baby girl. It had nothing to do with me, personally.

Here's how it went for me:

Daddy was a doctor. He told all his OB/GYN buddies that he and his wife wanted to adopt a girl. (Yes, OB/GYNs were all men in the mid-20th century.) He let them know that if they had a pregnant patient come in who wanted to give up her baby and had made no plans, that they should call him.

I don't know if my birthmother ever went to the doctor after escaping from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Orlando to live with her brother after discovering she was pregnant. She was 37 years old and had never been married. Her mother had died when she was 16 and her father, whom she adored, when she was in her early 20s.

And now I stop this post and continue tomorrow with my new story. I hope you'll read that and marvel in it, as I have been doing for a week.