National Adoption Month: Day 10

If you haven't noticed, I'm jumping around a bit here.  I'm taking on the topics that I can handle, ignoring the ones I can't, and hopping around the month of prompts, all in an attempt to get back into it.  So, bear with.

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“That’s not your baby,” the woman in line behind my mother and father spoke bluntly.  “There’s no way that’s your baby.  I’m looking at you…and I’m looking at him….and there’s just no way.  She’s too beautiful.”  Her comments may have been meant as a compliment.  She may have been struggling to find a new and unique way to tell someone that their baby was adorable.  But since I was, in fact, not “their baby”, those words left deep wounds on the hearts of my parents.  This story was retold to me more than once by other well-meaning relatives, again, trying to boost my confidence or perception of myself - but what it did was make me even more aware of the differences between myself and them.

Perhaps my most distinctive feature is my hair.  It’s big, it’s red and it’s curly.  I live in a family of brunettes and blondes, all with thin straight hair.  Where I might normally have counted myself lucky, I grew up hating my hair.  It was different.  For the longest time, I didn’t understand that I had curly hair.  I did as my mother did - I brushed it out each morning after washing it, and each time I was crushed that it did not fall straight as everyone else’s.  It was poofy and frizzy and all I wanted in the world was for it be silky and smooth.  It seems trivial but it was an obvious difference between myself and my family and one that I did not want.  

When I reunited with my birth mother in 2006, the first thing I noticed about her was that we had the same hair.  Her smell was foreign as she wrapped her arms around me for the first time.  I didn’t recognize her touch.  But when I looked at her, I saw myself for the first time.  For those who are not adopted, this is a privilege that is taken for granted.  To be mirrored in your own family is so desperately important in those dreadful and beautiful formative years.  And instead, adoptees are reminded constantly that they are not the same.