I went home with the Larson’s on August 11, the best birthday present my mom ever got. A few weeks later, we moved to Lincoln, NB, where my dad had a tenured position in the math department at the University of Nebraska. I had what some would call a magical childhood.
I was a shy little girl. I had a hard time talking to other people, but in pre-school we learned a few songs in French and I loved it, so my parents got me French lessons through an after-school program when I was in 1st grade. The lessons helped me learn to talk to other people better because we had to converse all the time. I also joined the Brownies and eventually became a Girl Scout. I made a lot of friends, but none of them had ever met anyone that was adopted before.
Third grade was a big year for me — I finally met some other adopted children. They lived a block away and their mom was already friends with my mom. She was a large, red-haired woman from Ireland and her adopted kids had all been in foster care for a very long time. There were three of them — one girl and two boys. The girl was my age. She was scrawny, would scratch you to bits instead of play with you, and I was terrified of her. My mother took me aside and told me that I had to be patient with them because their foster family had not taken good care of them. They needed friends and my sister and I needed to be gentle. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t last long in the neighborhood. Their adoptive mom couldn’t handle them; she said later that they were feral. She returned them to the adoption agency.
That shook me to my core. I had never thought of that as an option. Yes, my family had always had a joke when my mother got frustrated with us that she was going to sell us to the gypsies, but that had always just been a joke. The idea that a mother would return her kids to the adoption agency was heartbreaking and scary. My mother tried to explain how maladjusted the children had been, but it seemed so strange. Who would give away their children when they didn’t have to? When I was older, my mother told me the real reason — the children had tried to murder their adoptive parents. They had set fire to the bedroom during the night.
That year we went to Europe for the first time. We toured fantastic places, like the Bronte Parsonage, the Eiffel Tower, and Rembrandt’s Windmills. At the Bronte Parsonage, my mother kept telling me how much I looked like the sisters in the painting. I had the same color hair. She bought me edited versions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. I read Jane Eyre over and over until it broke. I was elated to find someone in literature that was searching for their own place in the world.
After fourth grade, my father went on sabbatical and we moved to Pennsylvania for a while. There I befriended my first good friend who was also adopted. Unlike me, she was an only child. She lived in a huge house and got whatever she wanted. We had the best times together. We talked about anything and everything, including who we thought our birthparents might be and what kind of lives they lead. It was really wonderful to have someone to talk about those things with.
