No talent there . . . or is there?
I’m adopted! Many of you knew that already, but for the sake of this post I needed to repeat it here and now. I’ve never known who my biological parents were. I was adopted out of the foster system when I was nine months old and that was that.
About a year ago I did that DNA testing thing with Ancestry.com. I wasn’t really looking for a connection to my biological family, but I was curious about medical history since I’m rapidly approaching seventy and, well, you know.
For the next few months I heard from people who might have been fourth and fifth cousins, so far removed from reality that I couldn’t get excited about it. Time passed and so did my interest in the process.
Then one day I heard from a woman named Rose and according to Ancestry.com we are first cousins.
Now we’re getting somewhere! First cousins . . . that’s close enough for some serious information.
Emails ensued and information was finally discovered. My biological mother’s first name was Dollie, and she lived in the Brinnon/Shelton area of Washington State, about twenty miles from where I sit right now typing out these words.
Dollie gave birth to me in 1948. She was twenty at the time. I was declared legally blind by the family physician, and for whatever reason I was placed in the foster system, where I remained until nine months when my adopted parents, Dale and Evelyn Holland of Tacoma, adopted a blind kid and gave him love.
Dollie died in 1968 at the age of forty from acute liver disease. You can probably read between the lines and surmise that Dollie was a heavy drinker. I had an older brother who was in and out of prison. I had a younger brother who died in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty. Not much is known of my biological father, and I had a sister who seems to have slipped between the cracks of time.
It appears my biological family was a troubled group which was chased by tragedy.
I, on the other hand, grew up in a loving household and was given every opportunity to thrive.
As a footnote, I gained sight three weeks after being adopted. The legally-blind kid saw for the first time, and what he saw were the faces of two people who loved him. Can you imagine adopting a special-needs kid back in 1948? Yep, some special kind of love right there.
REFLECTIONS
I don’t know how I feel about my biological family. I’m sorry their lives were so turbulent. I’m grateful as hell that Dollie chose to put me up for adoption. It was the right decision for me and that’s for damned sure, and I hope it was the right decision for her. I certainly have no negative feelings about my biological mother. She did what she felt she needed to do, for whatever reason. The end result was me, here, now, typing away in the midst of a life I love.
The winds of fate!
I haven’t sorted it all out yet, but I do know this is a missing piece to the mystery of who I am today. Someone once asked how it is I write so easily, and so realistically, about the dark side of human nature. Perhaps that dark side is part of my DNA. Perhaps I was saved a dark outcome by a simple wind of fate.
Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 