On Pain, and Competition
The last few days I’ve been catching up on reading blogs more than on writing my own. Several of the blogs that I follow are related to adoption. I’ve learned over the years that my experiences as an adoptee were not so unusual as I had thought, and many adoptees have had it much worse.
But here is the thing that strikes me tonight about some of these stories. Read more
Validation
A cool thing happened to me today.
One of the many things that defines my life, and that I will write more about here over time, is that I was adopted. My childhood was not, for the most part, a very happy one, although I don’t know that being adopted was, in itself, a big reason for that. But I did grow up feeling very different from my adopted family. My mother wasn’t the sort of person who could respect and validate other people’s differences. She was more the sort of person who made me think — in fact she outright told me on many occasions — that there was something wrong with me.
Even with good adoptive parents, or for that matter, good parents of any kind, this can happen. Another blogger who I often read with some interest puts this very well in a recent post — she says it was as if her mother was Jackie Onassis, and had to raise Amy Carter as her daughter. (You can read the whole post here)
A few years ago I heard Ian McKellan — who I’m pretty sure was not adopted — describe a similar experience. Always an artistic and unusual sort of person, he said he felt a little sorry for his family. It was as if his parents, being rather ordinary middle-class suburban Brits, were asked to raise a giraffe.
Anyway, today I was working on my myspace page — part of my midlife crisis, I suppose — and I found my niece’s profile. She lives in the Midwest, and we don’t actually talk all that often. However, her profile featured a quote from a new and rather obscure TV show that is my current comedy favorite.
Now, finding out that a relative enjoys a TV show that you also like may not seem like a very interesting discovery. But when you go the first 30 years of your life not liking ANY of the same things your family likes — and being told that this is because you are a weird and disturbed person — well, I just never get tired of knowing that somewhere out there are some people who look like me, laugh like me, and even like to eat the same foods I like.
Oh, the show, by the way, is called The Flight of the Conchords. It’s on HBO and it’s brilliant, although I had to watch an episode or two before I really got into it.
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