How to be a Good Little Orphan I: Like I've got any freakin' idea

We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing.
-- Beck, "Orphans," Modern Guilt

Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?

-- They Might Be Giants. "Ana Ng," Lincoln

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. If you know either of us, you probably already knew that we are adopted, or guessed it.

I resemble the world's largest leprechaun;

Sheree looks like a bit player on The Sopranos.

Growing up, our adoptions were never a secret from us or anyone else. I don't know when I first knew. I always knew. In the I'm OK, You're OK 1970s, adoptees were told to take cheer, because "you weren't expected, you were selected!" More on that in future installments. In 1968, Children's Home and Aid Society couldn't keep white orphan babies on the shelves, especially boys. Even though demand outstripped supply so much that most prospective adoptive parents would have gladly said,"White male hegemony be damned, give us any ol' newborn," I was a spot-on match for my family -- my adoptive family. My mother's red hair and my father's straight-across front teeth garnered them a lot of he-looks-just-like-yous.

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. Notice the use of the present tense. I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. For me, adoption is perpetually in the present tense -- less like face-painting, more like a tattoo.

In my mid-20s, I went through the typical life events: I graduated from college, I got married, I planned out my life's paths. The older generation of my family began dying off. For a while, I was losing grandparents, great uncles, and aunts at a pretty brisk clip. I suppose that all this death sparked something in my back-brain. It burned at the base of my skull for years before it found language: I'm OK. Somewhere, the woman who gave birth to me needed to know I'm OK -- while there's still time left, if there's still time left. I never gave this much thought while I was growing up, but suddenly I felt that she needed to know that I'm OK.

That's not to say that I didn't think about who my birthparents were. I thought about that often. In bad movies-of-the-week, adopted kids are ever running away from their street-urchin existences to seek out their "real" parents who are always successful and rich. This is ridiculous -- not as ridiculous as that piece-of-shit movie August Rush -- but ridiculous nonetheless.

I often felt presque vu. If you were one of those stuck-up bitches who took French in high school, you may remember that presque vu is French for "almost seen." Presque vu can refer to any one of several of related phenomena:

• feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue.
• feeling that you are about to come to some grand realization or epiphany.
• feeling that you just missed something or someone important by mere seconds.

This last sense of presque vu pervaded my youth. If I were in a movie theater, sometimes I would get the overwhelming feeling that my birthmother had been in that same theater (or, even, that same seat) for the previous screening. If I walked up to the counter of a fast-food restaurant, I might get the feeling that my birthfather had just gone through the drive through. Hollywood does it all the time - the departing elevator closes just as the arriving elevator opens. The connection is just barely missed. In the mid-1990s, I made the connection.

This is not the story of the process of my reunion with my birthfamily. Suffice it to say that I reunited with my birthfamily about 13 years ago. Reunion. Sometimes people say reuniting with the birthfamily, sometimes people say reunion. There is no good word for it, because it is not a re- anything for me. I was adopted in infancy; I have no old memories of my birthfamily at all.

I was able to find my birthfamily rather quickly and easily through Children's Home and Aid Society -- the agency through which I was adopted:

From L to R: Beck, Cindy, Wendy, Sally, moron choking on estrogen, Barb, and Abbey.

This was taken at Beck's wedding, back before the turn of the century. The twenty-first century, you meanie. Barb is my birthmother (and look, she put me at her right hand...no symbolism there). Beck, Sally, and Abbey are all younger that I am and are technically my full birthsisters. Cindy and Wendy are both older than I am and are technically my half-birthsisters. They all grew up together with my birthparents. I grew up as the older of two; in my birthfamily, I am the third of six. I am my birthmother's only boy. Do I act like an oldest child with the family I grew up with, but act like a middle child with the family I share DNA with?

Not enough data. Don't bother doing the math, it will only make your head hurt. Besides, there's a lot of unusual math around most adoption stories -- and around this adoption most of that math isn't really my story, that's Barb's story. I exist -- the bathroom scale is the only math I need for that, and that math indicates that I am conjoined twins. Beck and Sally are twins, but not conjoined -- which is lucky since their lives are hundreds of miles apart from each other now. My life is only about an hour from my birthmother's life, and the lives of three of my five birthsisters. Still, I had been almost completely out of contact with them over the last five years , and barely in contact with them for five years before that. About six months ago, I re-initiated contact. So far, there have been lots of warm emails exchanged, a couple of letters, a couple of phone calls, birthday cards, and one face-to-face meeting with Beck (who has outed me to the entire InterWeb as her brother by blogging about it).

Before our recent afternoon together, I think that the last time I saw Beck was at her wedding. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Why? Well, that is a long story...

Next time: more hi-jinx and I will try to fill in some gaps.