Somewhere between the age of 4 and 5 my parents began to explain to me what made me special. I don’t mean special as in little bus special but what made me different from other little kids. I was not their child, someone else had created me but couldn’t keep me, was how they explained it, I was “adopted”. For about a year I really didn’t have a concept of exactly what that meant until a trip to the local  pound gave it some perspective.

I had somehow made a connection between the way that I came to be a Jones with the sign at the pound. “Save a life, adopt a pet” was printed on a poster as big as I was and my 5 year old brain connected the dots. Unfortunately someone at the pound explained how the puppies came to be at the pound rather harshly and that left me with the idea that my own existence must have followed the same line as the “unwanted” puppies and kittens.

In grade 1 we had an essay to write about who are family was, where did we come from on an ancestral level. Deep topic for grade 1 yes. Knowing that I didn’t originally belong to the Joneses I had my first mental meltdown. I really liked Ms.Plunkett and I wanted to do well in her class so I could get extra time with the ducking our class had adopted but I didn’t come from my family, I was special and I was not part of the ancestral link.

The day came for everyone in the class to stand at the front and read their essay. Some of the kids had fascinating stories about how Grandma and Grandpa had gotten on a boat and spent an entire week on the sea to get to Canada. Others stood at the front and boasted about how their family had been here for centuries then it was my turn. I strutted to the front of the classroom and bravely declared that I was special, my parents chose me from hundreds of other babies and everyone else’s parents got stuck with them.

Needless to say the rest of the school year did not go smoothly, I got into fights on a weekly basis, I got beat up at least one a month and I got my first school yard nickname, “The bastard”. I had already heard this nickname, “dirty little half-breed bastard” was how my father’s side of the family referred to me as and I had no concept that that was a bad thing until I was about 10. I suspected that in that phrase somewhere was a swear word because whenever I repeated it my mother would freak out and I would have soap as a snack.

I made it through school despite being different or rather in spite of being different and the word bastard lost it’s sting about 35 years ago. We moved from Quebec when I was 5 and my paternal grandparents passed away 3 or 4 years later. We seldom saw much of my father’s side of the family but the label they had tagged me with still has the power to cause me pause. I wonder what they would have thought about me if they had been able to look beyond my exterior?

I still belong to a family that I feel no connection to, I am not close to my parents. They have made it perfectly clear that I am not who they want me to be and just like the paternal side of my family, they have no clue who I am. Oh well! My brother lives in a different province than I do and we only see each other once a year, he too feels like there is a link missing.

There have been literally hundreds of studies on adoption and how it has or hasn’t affected a child’s self image. For me it has been a double edged sword. On the one hand I never felt like I belonged as a child, but on the other hand I have a deep appreciation for the people and places where I do belong.