CANDID

When I was in high school I thought of the woman who gave birth to me slightly different than most kids would.  When I thought about her, I thought about her dark blond hair.  The kind of dark blond that she would have to clarify to her friends it was actually blonde, not brown.  So dark that she has to stare in the mirror to convince herself she wasn’t brunette.  

 

I think about her green eyes.  Or are they blue?  They shine a different color depending on how the light is hitting them.  The green comes out on a cool spring day as if they are trying to mimic the green that is blooming all around them.  Or maybe that green will show when she laughs so hard that her overly sporadic tear ducts send tears streaming down her face.  But then the blue will come out.  When she relaxes and puts her feet up and thinks about the beauty of the world.  Her family.  Her blessings.  The innocent deep blue will shine so bright you can see them across the room, though they may be staring at nothing in particular.

 

I thought about her teeth.  She wasn’t religious about her brushing habits, but they weren’t chompers.  They were just simple, off-white, completely normal teeth.  What I thought about, though, was her smile.  A simple rise of the cheeks and that basic set of teeth radiated and created a smile that was contagious to the people around her.  Though, when she catches herself smiling too large, she lowers the cheeks a bit.  Sometimes, the thinks, her smile is too much.

I think about her height.  At almost six feet, she towers over most of her girl friends, and close to her husband.  It’s a height she struggled with as a kid when the names weighed her down, but also a height that helped her be a star athlete.  Basketball, softball, you name it.  But it’s not an awkward height.  She looked normal enough and didn’t stand out too much amongst her peers.

 

I think about her sensitivity.  Combined with her size, she received the common nickname Gentle Giant.  Her 72 inches fooled no one who knew her.  She was a rough and tough-looking athlete on the outside, but a teddy bear on the inside.  When she passed a cute puppy, she had to stop to pet it.  When Marley dies at the end of Marley and Me, you can see her tearing up (again because of those overly sporadic tear ducts).  And when a family member just needed a hug, she was in first in line.

 

And I think about her house.  She was a modest woman with a modest job.  She wasn’t living Beverly Hills-style, but she wasn’t in a shack either.  I never thought of her as rich, and I liked to not think of her as poor.  She lived in a 4-bedroom house in a suburb of Cleveland.  Her yard was medium-sized, enough for a swing and some room for a dog or two.  Her house would have wreaths on every window for Christmas, and kids would stop there first to Trick or Treat on Halloween.   

This is how I thought of her.  Basically, I thought about all the things that were the same about me, all the things that she passed along to me.  I thought about her as any son would think about their Mom.  There was only one difference.

I had no idea who she was.

 

But, very soon, I was going to find out.

 

• • •

 

I don’t remember much from when I was a kid.  Just ask those who know me, and they will go on and on about my less than average memory.  For both the simplest and grandest of moments, many just seem to slip away from my mind.

 

Weirdly enough, I do remember parent teacher conferences.  

 

I remember the table with the room temperature coffee and the stale cookies from the lunch cafeteria earlier that day.  I remember the looks you gave your best friends as you try to hide your usual behavior with them or risk unleashing the wrath of the various ominous authority figures, both parents and teachers, lurking around every corner. I remember how weird it was seeing my teacher when the sun was no longer in the sky.  Didn’t she turn into a bat and flee to her cave when the school day ended?  And most of all, I remember the days of fear leading up to that dreadful night, wondering what horrible things the teacher would tell your parents that would ultimately result in your imminent decapitation.

 

No good memories were tied to parent teacher conferences.  I miss nothing about them, and when I think back on them, I get the uncomfortable feeling of someone tying a Double Englishman’s Knot with my small intestine.

 

Over the years, the usually troubling news my parents received from the teacher all began to blend together.  An airborne pencil here, an atomic wedgie there, they all were the same.  They told my parents, I got grounded, life went on.  No two meetings were the same, and even the ratio of good to bad news eventually increased.  

 

But there is always one recurring question.

 

Friends and teachers saw me every day, so they were used to my freakishly large feet and my gaze that lingered many inches above anyone else’s head.  I was just known as the tall guy, and eventually I was treated the same as anyone else.

 

But at parent teacher conferences, friends and teachers saw me with my parents, the people who supposedly gave me my size.

 

“Where did your son get his height from?” someone would ask, looking at my 5’3” mom and 5’10” dad.  “Because there’s no way the two of you gave it to him!”

Nervous glances.  The awkward moment the three of us are all too used to: a split second of looks from the corner of our eyes to see who would respond and, better, what they would say.  I wasn’t going to say it.  I am only a kid; I’m not expected to answer questions.  And better yet, it wasn’t even directed to me!  And there was no way Dad was going to either.  He was too focused on eating the peanut butter cookies he snuck into his suit pockets earlier in the evening.  It would be my mom’s job to answer, as usual.

 

“It’s just a gift from God,” she said hesitantly, not making full eye contact.

 

But the person was right; my parents didn’t give me my height.  I was ok with that.  It doesn’t matter where it came from, so long as you had it, right?  The problem was that I just wished I could tell the truth one time.  Sure that person, like the many before and after them, may not be close enough to us to be told how I am different than most kids.  But how great would it be to skip over the nervous glances and avoidance to immediately answer them with the confident truth?

 

But no one possessed that truth.  I was a kid, loved and cared for by the most beautiful family I could ask for, yet I had never met a blood relative.  I don’t know who in the family was tall enough to give me these genes.  When I began that thought, as I did resiliently as a child, I would think about what other things I didn’t know about myself.  Why are my arms and legs harrier than an abnormally pre-pubescent hobbit, yet my chest and face resembled a baby’s bottom?  Why do my eyes change from green to blue depending on my mood?  Why am I a natural athlete?  Most importantly, why do I feel the constant need to give those atomic wedgies? 

 

The very foundation for who I am had yet to be found, by anyone, and I was already nearing high school.

But why was I so different?  Why didn’t I know the roots of my birth?  The story begins almost 21 years ago, almost to the month, as anyone else’s story would: with a mom and a dad.  

 

Karen was running out of time.  She lay in bed and rubbed her flat belly, wondering when, or if, she would see a bump there.  Any other normal 35-year-old woman already has.  She was not normal though.  A normal woman doesn’t spend her 30s in and out of doctors’ offices.  She doesn’t cry herself to sleep on a nightly basis.  She doesn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to do what others can do by mistake.  

 

But she knew secretly her time was up.  The optimism had faded long ago, though she pretended to be positive in front of her husband, Matt.  She knew long before her sixth failed IVF that there was no more hope.  

 

But the phone call from her doctor three months ago was the excuse she needed to express the doubt she had in her biology.

 

“You have one last choice,” the doctor told her.

 

“Whatever it is, I’ll do it,” Karen anxiously replied, a rare hint of optimism in her brown eyes.

 

“I have a young woman here.  She is looking for a loving couple,” the doctor explained.

 

Karen and Matt didn’t need to discuss it.  Thoughts of the normal life they had always envisioned furiously danced through their heads. 

So, as she lay in bed in late March, a time when everyone hoped for the sun but only got more snow, she was actually okay with the fact that no bump would appear there.  She understood that her life was traveling down a different path than what she previously expected, and in that moment she was truly accepting that. 

 

Yesterday she got the phone call, again from her doctor.  “It’s a boy,” she told her.

 

Exactly what she wanted.  She could use the name she had always wanted to use; a name dedicated to her deceased sister that meant a gift from God.

 

“May I come get him?” Karen asked, not fighting the smile that appeared for the first time in months.

 

“No, she has 72 hours to change her mind,” the doctor said.

 

With that, it was harder for Karen to live a normal life than it had been in the years prior; it was three days of wanting to be optimistic, but fighting the urge to out of fear of being let down once again.  She was all too used to that.  

 

She got less sleep and could not think about anything except that boy.  She tried to read, but 20 minutes in she found herself on the same line.  She tried to rest her eyes, but they just flickered back and forth between each corner of her eyelids.  She tried to bake, but she was shaking too much to crack the eggs.  She finally decided to walk the spaniels.

 

And for three days that is what she did.  It was the first time that dogs were exhausted before their owner.  Day and night she would walk, letting Matt stay at home in case the doctor called.  

 

And on the third day she did.  For years Karen had been filled with pessimistic thoughts about what her future would never be, but as Matt held the phone to his cheek, he saw her smile that he missed all too much.

 

Not too long into the call, he matched her smile, and that was all she needed.  She got up, cut the tags off the car seat, and hooked it up in the back seat of the Volvo.  The couple jumped into the car and drove off, speeding much more then they would on the drive back.

 

Over the next 21 years, I grew up in the arms of Matt and Karen, even though I was too big to fit in their arms within years of being born.  Karen may not have given birth to me, but she was how any woman strives to be as a mother.  

 

The two of them loved me to an almost unimaginable extent.  Maybe they wanted to love me enough to satisfy my lust for my birth mother’s love that I could not have.  Maybe the pressure of not being biologically connected pushed them to the best parents they could.

Or maybe they just loved me unconditionally.

 

Just because I was adopted doesn’t mean I wasn’t wanted.  Actually, the opposite is true.  I, my birth mother, and my two parents were all a part of a closed adoption.  A closed adoption is a clean, well-organized adoption where a pregnant woman realizes she cannot provide for and love the child inside her to the extent he or she deserves.  So she goes to an adoption agency, and a social worker searches relentlessly for the perfect, safest, and most loving couple possible.  No orphanages.  No devastating heartbreaks between a child and his or her mother.  

 

In my case, the adoption was simple.  A young college woman understood she was not ready for a child, no matter how much she already loved him.  So she made the ultimate, most selfless sacrifice: give him to someone who can provide for him and give him even more love than she could, even though she may never see him.

 

After nine months of the symptoms of childbearing and hours giving birth, the mother and child simply part ways.  She goes back to school.  He goes to grow up in the arms of two thankful new parents.  Neither of them knows if they will ever meet again.

 

  • • •

 

Unfamiliarity.  Nervous glances.  New khaki pants.  Scrawny arms and legs trembling under the weight of heavy books and backpacks.  A long and intimidating schedule in your hand.  We all remember this day: the first day of high school.

 

Like my parent teacher conferences, I can’t recall many pleasant memories about the first time going to high school.  Especially for me, the freakishly tall 13 year-old who just switched to a new school district.  I remember nothing but awkward staring, unfamiliar environments, and the horrible itching of the hammy-down school uniform my Mom just got me.

 

But, like anything else, those feelings ended.  I studied the maze called the hallways more than I studied for my classes.  I got involved in sports.  I even got used to the itchy uniform.  But most importantly, I made friends.

 

Making friends was different then, though.  All the friends at my previous school were life-long friends.  We met as four or five year-olds, when social status and need to impress didn’t exist.  A bond only depended on what toys you had to offer.  I grew up with those same friends until 8th grade until my parents decided to send me off to my Dad’s alma mater: a private college-prep school.

 

There, not only did I have to squeeze my way into friendships that already existed from the private middle school connected to the high school, but I had to simultaneously battle the social status.  I, though, had to deal with one other set back: teenage curiosity. 

 

Until then, kids just accepted the fact that my parents weren’t my biological parents.  Whether they didn’t understand it, or if it just didn’t matter within their innocent minds, no questions were asked.

 

But, while submerged in a pool of pubescent teenagers raging with hormones and curiosity, avoiding the topic was not that easy.

 

“Why are you so tall?” A boy asked, not bothering to find out my name.  I think he was a sophomore.  “I saw your Mom and Dad drop you off.  They weren’t tall.  Do you take steroids or something?”  He looked over his shoulder with a grin, checking to make sure the boys behind him were laughing.

 

“I’m adopted,” I said without thinking.  Wow, I said it.  Why did I say it?  I don’t even know this kid’s name.  Somehow, it sounded a little cooler than saying, “It’s a gift from God.”

 

“Adopted?” the boy responded, his face clearly showing he hadn’t expected that answer.  “How long were you in an orphanage?”

 

It was the first, but certainly not the last time I was asked that question.

 

“I never lived in an orphanage.   My parents got me right after I was born.”

 

Confused, the boy asked, “So they bought you from another country or something?  Why don’t you have an accent?”

 

“I was born in Cleveland.”

 

“But you said you were adopted…”

 

“I was. My birth Mom and my parents both live here.”

 

Clearly, the boy couldn’t comprehend what I was saying.  With a roll of the eyes that said, “Whatever,” he walked away with the pack of older boys.  At first I thought he was just stupid, but I would soon come to understand that many people were as ignorant as him.

 

Eventually I learned his name.  Justin.  I also learned that most people, like him, did not know the first thing about adoption.  They only knew what they saw in the movies or what they heard about Brad and Angelina Pitt’s newest African venture.  To them, adoption was nothing more than orphanages and internationally imported children.

 

At first I tried explained to the best of my ability my circumstance when someone asked, but I found it easier to just play along with them considering no one understood the real story most of the time.  I would make up stories about how I escaped from North Korea or how I lived on the streets fighting bears as long as it meant people thought I was cool.  I was a teenager.  Obviously my social status was more important than my heritage.  

But that conversation with Justin, and the many others I would have again, marked the beginning of my recognition of the view of adoption in American society.  Most of the comments and questions directed towards my adoption were light hearted, innocent and not meant as insults, but were ignorant and ridiculous at best.

 

Everyone loved hearing about how my adoption worked because it was unlike everything they had ever previously heard about adoption.  But, even after hours of question answering, no one ever seemed to fully get it.  I found that not only can I not explain the reasons behind my appearance, but also I can’t accurately explain my background.  I don’t know if that’s because of my lack of knowledge or their lack of comprehension, but even as I approached adulthood I didn’t really know who I was.  I worried that other people and I would never fully understand my situation, and I became frustrated.