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Mid-Life Adoption
See that baby. She’s pretty cute, right? I think she is. You can’t tell from the picture, but she has big blue eyes that dance when she’s spoken to. She’s got a crazy mop of straight black hair. She was born with that. If the stories are to be believed, she was, according to the nurses at the hospital, one of the prettiest babies they’d ever seen. I choose to believe it because she is me. And she was eventually adopted. It was an inter-family adoption, my biological father’s oldest brother and his wife took me after literally everyone on both sides of my family passed on the slightly less than the 6-pound bundle of joy that I was.
But why didn’t anyone want her? I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. That baby is a 50-year-old woman. But that baby, to this day, feels the sting of being unwanted. It’s probably silly. As an adult, I can intellectualize things, but as a child, I couldn’t. Being told things I should never have been told cut me to the core and left me with a lifetime of self-doubt and shitty self-esteem.
For example, was it necessary for my aunt to tell me that she had a brief conversation with my biological mother immediately prior to her giving birth to me and that in that conversation she said if I came out female, she was giving me away? I’m sure Auntie Fay was…
