Product of a One-Night Stand

“Who am I? I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be different. I need people, but I keep pushing them away. I’ve got all this love to give.” — James Dean

One night, when my rural Iowa parents felt I was old enough to understand my adoption, my mom told me everything she knew.

I was the product of a one-night stand, nothing was known about my father, but my real mother was a red-haired Irish schoolteacher who already had a son and daughter. Being a single mother already, she placed me for adoption while still pregnant since she couldn’t afford another child. At the birth, my adopted parents were there in the Catholic hospital waiting for my delivery, and my real mother never even saw me.That’s all my adopted mom knew and though it doesn’t sound like much, just that snippet of information opened a world full of possibilities when I was told. From that day forward, the fantasy image of my real mother was Maureen O’Hara, the red haired Irish actress from The Quiet Man. That, along with the thought I had siblings somewhere in the city brought a great deal of comfort.

Someone asked me once if I thought it had been a good thing I was told about my adoption at the age of five. Would it have been easier on my psyche if I had been told as a teenager? Well, I think anytime a person is given that sort of news it’s got to be a shock and change them internally in some way, but I personally believe it was healthier to know it at the age I did. When things got rough within my adopted family, I had a second, imaginary world to dive into. I always knew I was different and somewhat of a black sheep within our Midwestern blue collar home. My parents weren’t poor, but we were close to the border of lower middle class, having come from farmers and truck drivers who seldom showed emotion, and when they did, it was either as a joke or in anger.Nobody else in the family seemed as sensitive as I, no one wanted to please the others as much, cried under their pillow as often, took as many chances in the hopes of adventure or seemed to crave love the way I did.

Spending much of my childhood being the quiet obedient one, I only got excited when sad or incredibly happy about something, be it a western, a comic book, a musical, whatever. I wanted to share these discoveries, but nobody seemed interested. When lonely, I couldn’t turn to my family because they wouldn’t respond in a consoling way, they simply weren’t capable and it always felt we were on different wavelengths, seldom connecting.Once I hit fourteen, I looked elsewhere for acceptance and felt any positive emotional experience I’d be given was just a fluke, pure chance. So, I grabbed as many rings off the merry go round as possible, not even caring about my parents disapproval, since I’d lost respect for their decisions long ago, watching them continually operate on impulse and negativity. Selfishly taking what I wanted that was positive about them internally, I searched elsewhere for the rest. If the good times weren’t going to last, I may as well experience as much life as possible, that’s the way I looked at things growing up and I suppose, even today.

There were plenty of wonderful moments with my adopted family I’m thankful for. But from a very early age I felt on my own emotionally, even though I craved some type of loving normalcy from them. When I didn’t receive it, I looked high and low for it elsewhere.

Hello, co-dependency.

The one constant was the knowledge there was still that other family which really existed, somewhere, despite the fact I never met them.

Even today, whenever Maureen O’Hara appears on the television screen, I can’t help but smile at all those wonderful possibilities.