A continuation of the Adopted Daughter series.
Disclaimer: Before we start today's episode, I need to say a couple of things. I am enjoying and appreciating the comments of those who participate with me on this little story of mine. Many of you ask questions about adopted children and parenting. The answers I give you are my opinions from my childhood heart, and the knowledge of a lifetime of dealing with and overcoming related difficulties. I am not a therapist. I am certainly not an expert on anything. I do have a college background in Psychology, Philosophy and Spiritual/religious studies. So please do not take my "opinions" as being anything more than that and a desire to help or give a perspective. If I could channel my mother, I am sure she would give you a whole other view of the challenges. If your situation could benefit from some professional help, please do yourself and your family a favor and seek out good professional help.
Next, I never had children of my own. I am not nor have I ever been a parent so I really have a colossal nerve suggesting things about child rearing. Please know those comments about parenting are again just my opinions from what I have experienced, what I have studied and coming from the point of view of the child within me. I am an expert on being a child (LOL).
Part I
Part II
Part III
Major life events occur in the most surprising places. At least mine have seemed to. September of 1946 unleashed some very important ones for me. Mom had been giving me a big buildup all summer long about starting school. She was pretty damn excited about it too, so I figured it must be a mighty big deal. What I didn't know then, but I do know now, is that she had to fight a battle royal with the school to let them admit me to first grade. I am sure they had no idea what they were in for or they would never have started that one with her in the first place. They certainly didn't know my mother. School starts the 1st of September. You have to be 6 to go to the first grade. If you are 5 you go to kindergarten. I turned 6 in October almost exactly 30 days after the cut off date. Mom would not hear of it. I was going to go to the first grade. None of that nap, graham cracker, scribble on paper la de dah stuff for me. To this day, some have suggestested that my missing kindergarten is responsible for some of my more quirky traits.
"Shirley is lacking in acceptable social skills." (Oh my God, I certainly hope so! And I wish the same for all of you out there in reader land)
I had a brand new dress AND new shoes and I'll tell you, I was so dang cute and over the top impressed with myself, I could probably have gotten into the University that day. Watch out Shirley Temple, I'm a comer! And that great feeling of conquering the world lasted right up to the point where mom took me to school, found my classroom and introduced me to my teacher, Mrs. Briggs.
I started to get a very queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The teacher told me where to sit and she and mom chatted a bit while I realized I was in a room with about 20 or so kids my same age. Pretty soon the teacher told us we had to be quiet and sit in our chairs because it was time for school to start. I guess I looked away for a moment because when I looked up to the front of the room, my mom was gone. Panic. Bells, whistles, gongs, and 176 trombone marching bands set off inside of me. I jumped out of my chair and ran over to the big windows and stood there looking to see if I could see my mom or our car on the street. Well, damn it! I let myself get suckered again. This was the old drop the kid off and disappear thing all over again. The teacher tried and tried to get me to sit down and join the class. She could not move me from that window. I stood there the entire 4 hours of school with tears running down my cheeks. This damn new mother of mine told me I wouldn't ever be left again. Another lying mother! I was angry at myself for being sucked into yet another "I'll be back soon" lie. I knew this drill all too well. The dumb teacher, Mrs. whatshername, kept telling me my mother would come back and get me in a little while. Well, I was no ordinary stupid almost 6 year old, I knew how this one went. I had visions of having to stay in that great big school building for days, weeks or who knew how long. And I didn't even know anybody here. Someone was going to have to pay for this one.
Report card: Shirley has self discipline problems. Course work is good to excellent.
A bell rang somewhere and the teacher said school was over and to put the things away so we could go home. After 4 hours standing at the window crying, I was pretty much reconciled to my fate. Somebody would probably come and lock me in the room or something. Then I heard my mothers voice. . ."Come on Shirley, let's go home." What the. . .? Huh, there she was. She came back. Hmmm, just a trick to get me to think that was going to continue. I was more relieved than I was going to let her see at the thought of going home. But you can be certain I was not going to be fooled by that trick. Sooner or later she just would never come back to get me. I know stuff, and don't you forget it. And this is something I know almost better than anything else.
Teachers and mothers are deserving of Sainthood. The two toughest jobs in the world when they are done properly. Standing at the window, immovable, was how I passed the first weeks. . .maybe a month of 1st grade. Yet every day that woman that was my mother now kept showing up to take me home. I wasn't sure how this played into things, she must be pretty smart to understand how closely I was watching her, but I would be smarter. I was getting bored, so little by little I worked my way into the class activities, about when we started to learn our words for reading. Hey! this reading thing is really something. I'm going to learn this stuff.
Report card: Shirley has a problem paying attention. Course work is good to excellent.
After I began to read a little, mom took me down to our local library and got me my own library card. That thing was magical. You could walk in there and pick up 5 or 6 books, any books you wanted, and just show them your card and PRESTO! You got to take those books home and read them. When you took them back you got to get more books. Boy, I couldn't wait to tell everybody at school and the neighborhood and at church about this! For some reason, no one was as excited about this as I was. Oh well, what did they know. This was a ticket to the whole wide world and forevermore. My own library card. There'd be no stopping me now.
Some of you will understand this, of all the things my parents gave me, of all the things they did for me and helped me with, nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to ownership of a library card. To this day it is my most prized possession. I never failed to thank my mother for taking me to the library that day. . .all through her long life. I reminded her of it once again just shortly before she died at age 95. A gift of such magnificence is a life altering experience. And wow, did it alter mine. I lived the majority of my childhood in books, lots of them under the covers with a flashlight after I was supposed to be in bed sleeping. By the time I was in the 5th grade and they gave us the Minnesota Multiphasic test, I was reading at 10th grade level. At 12 I had read every book in the children's and teen section of the library and moved up stairs to the big stuff. Freud was an interesting early choice at that age. He was pretty good, but I disagreed with quite a few of his conclusions and theories. Glad I lived long enough to find many of my quibbles with him justified by the professional mental health communities. Eh hem, I think that sounds just a little full of myself. I really don't mean it that way. At the level I was understanding what I was reading of Freud, I thought he wasn't quite right about some of his conclusions. All these years later, some professionals happen to agree with some of those same thoughts I had.
Books and school. Now there was a combination that just can't be beat. I had problems in school for several years. Well, actually I always had problems in school, as I grew older I just learned how to deal with them better. All of my teachers still remembered me long into my adult years. That's got to tell you something right there. It wasn't because I was such a stellar student. Here is something that bothered me all through school: How can someone take a subject that is potentially the most interesting and fascinating thing in the world and just bore me to death with it? After the first couple of weeks of every school year I would be bored out of my mind. But Albert Einstein saved me there. E = MC squared? Well, sure that's a fun one and you can spend years exploring that. No, it was something he said about imagination being more important than any skill you can have. Alby you're my kind of guy. If I would just print them up and iron them on, I probably would have an Alby T-shirt on all the time. He's my secret love. My fascination with him is not so much the physics part of it, though I dearly love physics, but all the other parts of him and the way he thought about things and how imagination allowed him to see things that others couldn't. He got it. He understood things about the world, about the nature of people, about the nature of the universe that way too many people don't get or don't want to get. Alby rocks!
Report card: Shirley doesn't follow course assignments. Always reading ahead of the lesson we are on. Course work good to excellent. (she really needs to learn to adhere to the rules)
Big imagination + bored out of your mind = something has to come from that. It's physics, actually everything is physics. I started writing stories when I was 9 years old. I read them to my classmates during recess. I think I was channeling "True Romance" or something, because these were all Knights rescue the Princess falling in love stories. Well, not quite all. I wrote some about Billy loves Sally and takes her in the car to the drive in movie and kisses her. . .that would be my classmates Billy and Sally (these classmate stories made everyone scream and laugh and say euuuwwww. . . God! stardom is great). You know, just reading stories to the rest of the kids during recess was not enough action, so we converted the Knights rescue Princesses into a game. Good Knights, bad Knights and fabulous princesses. Great battle scenes, lots of horses and the victor riding off with the blond haired princess. In my mini-drama creations anybody could play any part they wanted. Girls could be knights, boys could be princesses. . .we didn't care. Somebody cared. Some teacher came and asked us what we were playing one day and we told her. Next thing we knew the principal, dragon lady herself, came out and told us to stop and we could never play that game again. Better we should play dodge ball and see how hard we could hit each other with the ball. A promising playwright was nipped in the bud. It took me a lot of years to figure out what was wrong with that game, and clearly they thought something was wrong with that game. I don't know about 9 year olds in 2005, but in 1949, we didn't know a thing about gays or gender switching. We just liked to play. Have I forgotten to tell you grownups are just plain stupid sometimes?
Report card: Shirley daydreams in class too much. Needs to learn to follow instructions. course work good to excellent.
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My brother, Kent played a major role in my life albeit a popping in and out of my life role. Kent was very bright with an IQ in the high 170's. He could also charm the stars down out of the sky. If I have any propensity or skill for telling stories it may actually come from him, or it is something in both of our genetic makeup, reinforced by a wonderful storytelling mother. Even at 9 or 10 years of age my brother could tell you things so convincingly that adults never questioned the facts or the veracity. My grandmother used to say he had a "glib" tongue. That's an old expression for "we have a con man in the making here." He also was fearless, or was able to subjugate his fears to a place where he never had to look at them or give them any credence. He thought, and may have been right, that he was smarter than everyone around him and he was a perfect liar. I think he took lying to a new level and was in a very select group of prevaricators. So a couple of very valuable things he taught me as a child were: Don't ever be afraid. There is nothing you can't handle; Hardly anyone is as smart as we are so before they ever guess we didn't know something we will already have figured it out and know it; Life is about adventures and we can have them all. He became a pathological liar and by the time he was an adult he hardly knew the difference between the lie and the reality. What he said was real to him. . .eventually. The elements of a really good lie, he told me, were details. If you put enough details in the telling, almost everyone will believe you, especially details that are or could be accurate to the content of the lie.
As an example: When I got to the 5th grade, I had the same Social Studies teacher that he had 4 years earlier. During the course of the year we did a study on Mexico and their culture. I cannot begin to tell you how excited my teacher was about the prospect of the report I was going to do on Mexico. She asked me if I had been born in Mexico too as my brother had and did I remember about hanging the peppers out on a line to dry in the sun and other such fascinating things that Kent had reported on. Interesting development here. Kent was born in Raton, New Mexico and had never stepped foot in Mexico in all of his life. But here was an experienced middle aged teacher who still remembered vividly the elements of a report he had given 4 years before. A very tough act to follow. The funny part of it was how disappointed she was that my report, based on mere facts I had gathered from books, was nowhere near the living, breathing experience of my brother's "first hand account." It occurred to me that if I kept getting his former teachers as I progressed through school I was in for a rough ride.
Why did Kent, who seemed so eager to be adopted, decide he wanted out of the whole thing? There are a lot of contributing factors and in order to have some understanding of them you need to think about a 9 year old boy. Think about a 9 year old boy who had for those 9 years never been required to do chores (except when he was in the orphanage), never had any rules that he had to follow beyond what school required, never had to tell anyone where he was going or who with and had no requirement to be home at any given time. School work was so easy for him he never did home work. And even at the age of 7 and 8 he would take me by the hand and we would go to the local butcher shop and he would tell them the story of how we were starving orphans and could we maybe have a piece of bologna? We always got the bologna and sometimes one of those big fat dill pickles too. Fagan would have loved him! If he saw something he wanted he took it. He felt rights of ownership were vested in the possession of the object.
Nine years old with a colorful background (euphemisms are great, aren't they?) Now take that 9 year old and put him in a structured family situation. We had rules in our family. We had chores to do everyday and every week. There were behavioral expectations in force. Values, ethics and rules for life were seriously important things to our parents and they tried their best to teach them to us. They had a plan for how they intended us to turn out and the type of life they hoped for us. Gosh, these things seem so normal and ordinary, but they were absolutely foreign to us. Since I was trying to be perfect I sort of learned most of them, although it was in protest. Kent was not going to accept this rigid (as he saw it) structure in his life. He never did. It was not for lack of Herculean effort on the part of our parents that he never accepted this way of life. They went to counselors with him. He went to counselors on his own. He could snow a seasoned counselor like nobody's business. They tried rewards, they tried praise and affirmation, they tried loss of priveleges, they tried reasoning, they tried everything. They gave him a job so he could have more money to spend. He stole from them. They tried to keep track of where he was going and who with, but he needed to come back by dinner time or some other designated time. He never did. They bought him a watch so he could know when it was time to come home. He never made it at the agreed upon time, and he certainly didn't care.
He had been molested in the Orphanage (that Priest thing again) and he knew way too much about sex for a 9 year old. He was a good brother and told me more than I ever wanted to know about sex from the age of 5 on up. So I can't tell you how funny it was when my mother gave me that talk when I was about 10. I let her go through the whole explanation, she had books and diagrams and everything, but all the while I was thinking. . .no wonder she had such a hard time getting pregnant if that is all she knows about sex.
[I have some things to say about sexual abuse of children, but I will save it for future parts of the story.]
As my brother became overrun by hormones going into his teenage years, life became just impossible for him in the family setting. Those of you who have teenagers or can remember how it was for you at that age know what I mean. Kent matured early and was nearly 6' tall by the time he was 14. He could easily pass for 17 or 18 and you have to know he did when it suited him. My parents were at their wits end they tried everything they knew to do, they sought advice, they did what the so called experts suggested and finally when things were just totally out of hand, some psychologist told them to have him sent to the Juvenile Detention center for being "incorrigible." It broke their hearts, but this psychologist must know what he was doing, didn't he? So at about 12 Kent went to the "big house" and learned how to really rip people off and consider a life of crime. I don't know what the answer was, they had already had him stay several months with a counselor and his family that he really liked to see if they could influence him. Nothing seemed to work. My brother was always able to "get by" but he hated rules and the enforcement of them and he did what he wanted then dealt with the consequences if he had to.
One more very important factor here. When we left our "other mother" she promised us both that we could come back and live with her when we were 16. Frankly, that was no driving force in my life. Fourteen was close enough for Kent, he was not going to hang around for two more years. He knew he could find her somehow and that is exactly what he meant to do. That was a very powerful motivator for Kent. He used to talk about it a lot to me. Told me many times that he was going to go back and live with our mother when he was 16. In spite of my sometimes worrying imagination of him being dead on some stretch of highway somewhere, I actually was very, very sure he was on his way to find his mother and I also was sure that he would.
We are not done with my brother yet. He did come back into my life 6 years after he left. We had a drop in relationship for the remainder of his life. Every 6 or 8 years he would appear or call out of nowhere and we would spend a few days together and then he would be off again. He died two years ago in June from Leukemia, ten days before his 67th birthday. A pretty interesting fellow and a very adventurous life.
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[Probably most of you did not see my comment to you from yesterday, so I would like to add it here:
"As I have been over here wallowing in your praise and encouragement and the never ending sense of wonderment of this community and all of you who have shared with me, one of you has been over at Yahoo pointing other folks to my diary here. I have got an email box full of notes from people contacting me about how they relate to this story.
So as awestruck as I have been with the comments here, I am overwhelmed by this further contact from those outside of dkos.
Damn it! You all are just incredible!
(and being a snot-slinging-sob-sister as I am, I gotta go wipe the tears away now)
Dreamtender! Hugs, for me and my firends. . .set 'em up all around. The abundance of love is on me tonight.
Just thanks, everyone."]