8/3/2011- from the start I knew

My mother had no idea how hard it would be to give me up, to sign her name to many pages of documents that would fill a green file folder later spanning over an inch thick, which seems thick when you imagine it sitting vulerable on a table, but when you know it is all that you have to link your heritage to, it is quite the opposite. In fact, that exact folder, dusty in it's current redemption, filled with its yellowed tattered pages with ancient typewritten font of dark black ink, is not large enough, and is like a block of gold to someone like me. Its pages would be  notarized and copied and recopied, probably photographed by someone, who knows who, but always etched in the mind of my biological birthmother, who I will for name's sake call, BM. How fitting.  She didn't know what it would feel like to always wonder how I was fairing in life. Was I smart enough? Did I look like her? Were my adoptive parents loving like hers were? Did I grow up to be something aspiring? Would I get married? Have children? Would they look like her too? Would I love her or hate her for what she did? Would I even know that I was adopted?  She didn't know what it would be like to hide in fear from her boyfriend, whom she had been dating for several years, and didn't tell she was pregnant with his unborn child, whom she hid from and went to great and unimaginable lengths to keep this emerging secret from. He couldn't afford a baby and a wife. After all he was in dental school, and his education was prioroty. How could he afford that- a woman and child, most likely a woman he would have proposed to, given the opportunity to make a decision. If only, he had been given the opportunity. Who knows what might have happened. I don't. I was adopted by another family. I guess we will never know.

At three weeks old, with bilateral tibial torsion with metatarsus adductus, I had to look four times when typing that one out, which dumbed down for the ones of us who aren't orthopedists, means slightly turned in foot, which was later corrected by a surgury which I haven't the faintest memory of,  and with a red curly waft of hair, beeming bright blue eyes, not to sound arrogant, but hey, I was a pretty baby (don't act surprised), I was officially named Elizabeth Brooke Fairley, daughter to John and Lynne. I was no longer baby Vera, and no longer in the care of an unknown foster family, who hopefully, had no sick obsessions with small children. I wonder sometimes- I have been known to be kinda kinky, but that's beside the point and will probably be needed to be "worked through" at a later date and time in my life while laying on some form of brown or white leather couch that probably came from a cool store like West Elm, not IKEA.

I was given a name. I always imagine a large, deep voice calling out, "and you will be called insert name here" I was not in the care of a foster home. I was in the care of my new parents who wanted a child so badly that they told the Children's Home Society of North Carolina they would even take twins. What kind of saints would volunteer to be partially miserable for 18 years, give or take a few, considering the economy, we can almost guarantee 23? The CHS is the agency that placed me, walked my birth mother through her pregnancy, held my adopted parent's hands and most likey shed a few tears with all, both on happy notes and also stemmed from deep seeded pain, which will later be repressed by all parties involved, (and we go back to the leather couch)  and all of which have a direct coorelation with an understanding on a deeper level of what true love really entails.