By AMY SHANKLAND
Perfectly Imperfect
The topic of my adoption didn’t come up very often between my parents and me after that revealing Sunday. I do remember being a preteen brat once and claiming that they had said they regretted getting me during a fight. That brought on a lot of tears and sadness for all three of us. Mom and Dad reassured me that they never had such a thought.
My admiration for my parents grew thanks to learning all this information. I couldn’t imagine the pain they endured losing a child at such a young age. And I found out that my mom had some incredible courage and strength.
At one point she was getting ready to have one of the final interviews with Catholic Social Services in order to adopt me. The day before this occasion, she was hanging a mirror with my grandfather in the living room. I remember this mirror – it had to have been at least four feet wide and three feet tall. It was large, with an ornate, gold-plated frame. It fell off the wall and right on to the last three toes of Mom’s left foot. Needless to say, she broke all of them, and they still didn’t look right in her later years.
But Mom refused to walk into that office using crutches or wearing any special shoes. She didn’t want the adoption agency to think there was anything wrong with the potential family I was going to be placed with. So the next morning, my grandma dropped Mom off. She walked into the building, had the interview, walked back out, and burst into tears upon climbing back into Grandma’s car due to the pain.
Yeah. My mom was kind of a badass.
I went on with my life, going through the typical tough years of adolescence, which included not only braces for my teeth and acne, but glasses and a back brace for scoliosis. If you looked up the word “awkward” in the dictionary back then, you would have seen my picture. I even went through a time where I was tempted to take my own life, but thinking of what that would do to my parents stopped me right away.
Thankfully, most of us survive our teen years and hopefully escape that awkwardness. By the time I went away to Indiana University in Bloomington, both types of braces were gone along with my zits. And after encouragement from good old Dr. Erickson, my glasses were replaced with contact lenses. Of course, he never got to see my new look because every time I saw him I was sick and didn’t feel like putting in the contacts. That irritated Mom to no end.
During a delightful dinner out over IU’s Parents Weekend, I broached the subject of my adoption once again. I remember we were at a beautiful candlelit restaurant in Columbus, Ind., and I had just tasted duck for the first time in my life. I asked my parents if they knew anything about my biological mother and father. Once again, Mom was the one who responded.
“We were only told three things,” she said. “That they were college students, they wore glasses, and had allergies.”
I thought that was really strange because at the time I wasn’t allergic to anything that I knew of. But the glasses part made sense, since my vision was terrible, and I was a college student after all. So I at least had two things in common with my birth parents.
We had an interesting talk about how easily I had just fit into our family over the years. I also found out that one friend of the family was not so accepting of me. She would often ask my grandmother, who died when I was 10, about my brother and sister, but never about me. It was as if she had some sort of prejudice against me because I was adopted. I never found out who this woman was. But I am amazed that there were, and probably still are, people in the world who have these kinds of feelings.