Growing up Adopted

Chapter Three

Although my childhood at home was idyllic, school was a different story. I was painfully shy and didn’t make friends easily. I had a huge desire to be liked and accepted, but I was also very awkward. My second-grade teacher noticed I liked to sit in the front row but was struggling to comprehend what was written on the chalk board. She suggested that I needed an eye exam. At the age of seven, I had to start wearing glasses. At first, I was excited! I thought glasses would make me look pretty and smart! Instead it became a problem. My vision was extremely near-sighted and it degraded so rapidly during my youth that I needed new prescriptions every six months. To put it bluntly, I was wearing “coke bottles” on my face. My eye doctor would ask about family vision history because it was most likely hereditary. My Mom would answer, “We don’t know. She is adopted.” I also had such crooked teeth that all of my baby teeth had to be pulled because my permanent teeth didn’t push them out like they are supposed to. I knew my ophthalmologist and dentist better than I knew some of my family members! To complete this unfortunate trifecta of awkwardness, I was an early bloomer, and reached my current height of 5’8 by the time I was twelve-years-old. Other than a couple of boys, I towered over everyone else until I got in high school.

Kids can be so cruel. I heard it all. “Four eyes.” “Fatty, fatty two-by-four.” “Cow.” “Ugly.” “Fat ass.” I can’t begin to count how many times I would come home from school in tears because of some nasty remark from a classmate. I can remember hating myself, wishing I was pretty like the other girls. Wishing I was thinner, or my hair longer, or my clothes nicer. Hating my glasses, hating my ugly, twisted smile. When I was old enough to wear make-up, and use a curling iron, I would spend hours in front of the mirror experimenting with styles and colors to get it perfect. To get it right. Not because I was vain, but because I didn’t want to be ugly.

In those days, I think the mentality of bullying was quite different than it is today. It was seen more as a “rite of passage.” It was just something kids had to go through. I know it hurt my Mom to see me hurting. She would tell me she was teased too. She would tell me, “You are just like God made you.” She would wrap me in her arms and dry my tears every time.

One of the happiest days of my life was the day I got contact lenses. I was in the 6th grade. I still have a pair of glasses that I wear around the house, but I will not wear them in public. That is an emotional scar that has never completely healed. As a freshman in high school, I got braces on my teeth. I was probably the only teenager in America that looked forward to them!

It has taken nearly my entire life to finally feel comfortable in my own skin. To finally feel “beautiful” and “worthy” and “confident.” Sometimes I fantasize about confronting my bullies and telling them how they made my life Hell and that I hope they raised their own children to be kinder than they were. But 35+ years later, what good would it really do? It wouldn’t change the past.

School wasn’t completely awful. I got good grades most of the time. I loved to read and write! I developed a love for classics like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe, while devouring modern popular fiction by Stephen King. I wrote my first poem in the first grade and was forever filling notebooks with stories! My favorite classes were Creative Writing and English. I even wrote a short one-act play that was produced by the drama department. What a thrill it was to see my words being acted out on stage! My Dad took that day off from work so he could accompany my Mom to see it.