They promised me safety while handing me a loaded gun. From the moment I was born I was unwanted. People like to perpetuate the lie that the children that are adopted are the most wanted children and that is such a lie. I was adopted and I certainly wasn’t wanted. Not in the way that someone is supposed to want a child. I was treated like a second class citizen in my own family my entire life. That’s never how they would tell it, though. No. According to them, all of them, I was the only problem and everyone else in the family had to put up with me. Keep in mind, I was a child but apparently I was so awful that even the adults in charge of the situation (people otherwise known as my parents) were unable to act responsibly. 

My arrival in their home was the result of a private adoption in 1984. Sealed birth records and limited information about it. My mother had multiple miscarriages and believed she was not going to be able to have a child so she settled for adopting one. Maybe even lied to herself that’s what she really wanted. Who knows? What I do know is that the moment that she got pregnant with her own child and knew the pregnancy would be viable, any concern they had for me or my wellbeing went out the window. Their energy was poured into their first and most special princess of a biological offspring and I was the problem. The scapegoat. The blacksheep. 

The first 8 months of my life were spent in foster care with people who were more than likely neglectful. Of course, I don’t know this to be true as I was only months old but according to what I heard about myself as a baby and at the time it’s been easy enough to put two and two together. What I was told was that by the time I was adopted into the family I ended up with I never cried. Ever. If you do any research on this subject when it comes to babies you will learn that babies cry because they learn it gets them care and attention.

A baby that doesn’t cry at some point has learned that they aren’t going to get that so they stop crying and are just quiet. My parents never said much about whoever these foster people were other than they were “nice” and that’s about all I got. I can assume, though, that whatever happened within those 8 months with those people wasn’t good. They were also old even when I was a baby so if I had the ability to talk to them or find out who they were it wouldn’t matter. They were dead a long time ago and probably wouldn’t have recalled much of anything in the first place. 

When I got to the house to live with them, it was only three months later that my sister, Lisa, was born. By that point my mother had decided that I was too much to handle and passed me off to a nanny or a neighbor to devote her time bonding with her child, my sister. We are only eleven months apart. If you’re already thinking this would cause problems in a normal loving household, you’re right. However, since my parents always regarded me as some sort of burden it was even worse than that. By her own admission, my mother wasn’t interested in bonding with or raising me more than she was with Lisa so I got the short end of the stick. From the very beginning. Which has become the summary of my life. 

I don’t have very solid memories of this time period because no one would. What I can go off of is stories of what people have said. Maybe because it was the 80s and a different time abusive, neglectful and destructive parenting was “the norm” but it doesn’t mean it didn’t fuck me up royally in the long run. I know that I’ve been told I was quiet. That I didn’t actually speak a word until I was three years old. Very little crying and I slept through the night. All things that were very odd for not just a baby but an adopted baby. The story of my first word is more the story of my first sentence. I hadn’t spoken before that point but after that point, from what I’ve been told, I always spoke very clearly and precisely. No issues with pronunciation or dictation. I knew what I wanted and was firm about it. 

My mother said that there was a day where she was very busy carrying me around the kitchen trying to get dinner ready for my father before he got home. Something that I was apparently getting frustrated with because I didn’t want to be carted around like a doll. Out of nowhere and very demandingly I shouted at her: put me down! She said she was so shocked because I’d never said a word before that all she could do was set me down. Though I don’t remember any of this I can certainly believe it happened because when it came to ever feeling like she was my mother, I never have. With me, it’s orphan syndrome all around. Whatever happened within my most impressionable years of life, I did not develop a maternal or paternal connection like 99% of the world does with their parents. Including a lot of adopted children. Instead, I feel like an alien who was just dropped onto the planet and left for someone to find. 

Everything was wrong from the start, I never had a chance to become anything that I wanted to become and I never had the supportive family that I needed to do it. I was left behind and counted out before the race even started. I was born in the wrong time and given to the wrong people. I was dealt a hand that I should have never been dealt and I won the lottery of shit. This has left me to constantly wonder why it was these people over the hundreds of other applicants who probably would have taken care of me or actually wanted to have a child. What may have been if I’d gotten a fair shake in life and my entire future hadn’t been set up for me by people who clearly saw this baby they adopted as a burden more than a child they allegedly wanted. 

It doesn’t matter now why it happened or how. The damage is done and it will not be reversed nor can it ever be. The best I can hope to do is get to a place where I can accept that not all life is precious, for some people it’s absolutely meaningless, and a lot of humans were only put on this earth to suffer. I am one of them. As I will go on to explain my entire life from what I can remember to present day, I am very aware of a few different things. The first being that the story will immediately sound exaggerated and unbelievable.

The second one being that people will immediately dismiss any sort of pain or suffering that I’ve endured because my parents didn’t beat me or assault me. They were just shit people who loved to emotionally destroy me for their own benefit. The story isn’t sensational or interesting because what it boils down to is “you had a shit childhood, so did everyone, get over it”. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s not that simple and to explain why it’s not that easy. I know that doing all of this is just me screaming into a void like I’ve always been but I’ve given up on trying to do anything else. People will know my story even if it’s just a few or maybe only one. This is what happened, though, and how it happened. This is my truth. I am not what my father says or wants me to be. I am myself and I am better than what I was told. Or at least that’s what I try to tell myself even though I know it’s pointless as it’s probably never been true in the first place.