Adoption Is Trauma. Part 2.
1972. I’m sitting on the padded peeling black leather seat, bumping up and down in the little yellow school bus as it traverses pot holes. My raincoat is translucent, crisscrossed with red plaid, my soft brown curls pulled into pigtails. The bus pulls into the Robin Hill Nursery School parking lot; it parks, and the bus driver sings a song to accompany our exit. I interrupt her. “I’m better than everyone else because I’m adopted. My parents chose me. Your parents were forced to keep you.”
The bus driver admonishes me, tells me not to lie. “What a terrible thing to say,” she says before marching into the principal’s office to repeat my shocking words. My mother’s best friend is a teacher at my nursery school, I call her Aunt Carole. The principal asks Aunt Carole about what I’ve said. “It’s true. She’s adopted.”
The principal calls my parents, asks them to come in. My father is working — delivering babies — so my mother goes alone to a conference about her 4-year-old adopted daughter.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asks.
“I didn’t want you to treat her differently.”
Treat me differently? Despite being told babies are blank slates, that I am like “her own,” that I am from an educated Jewish woman similar to her, despite being “matched to fit” by the Louise Wise Agency For Families And Children, my…
