hey mouse. i have two adopted brothers. well... this is a bit complicated... but my mother got married to her first husband and gave birth to two girls. then she had a couple miscarridges and they told her that she might well not be able to have anymore kids. so... she adopted 2 boys.

(this is a little unclear... but i've heard something about how some women can't carry boys. i don't know whether that was the case with my mother or not????? i'm fairly sure she doesn't know anything about this condition at any rate...)

in those days there was a shortage of people who were willing to adopt. i guess back then people had funny notions about genetics. there was something about 'if i adopt a vietnamese infant will i need to learn vietnamese in order to speak to my child when it gets older???'. people really didn't have much of an idea... and they thought that genetics played a much more significant role (sin acquired via the blood and all) and so not many parents wanted to adopt. it was hard to find adoptive parents.

(i mean to contrast the situation then with the situation now when so very many people want to adopt and where there are fairly stringent safeguards on screening people who want to adopt).

my mother...

got divorced. she then married her second husband when the youngest adopted boy was 7 years old. the other boy lived with her first husband and the girls were old enough to have left home (scooted out the door as fast as they could). then... 9 months after her marriage to her second husband, along came me. so i was raised with the youngest adopted boy (who i think of as my brother) though he was a bit older than me (and he scooted from home when i was 7 same time as my dad).

my mother had funny ideas about a lot of things. one of them was certain notions around 'truth' and 'lying'. for example, she always told me that santa claus was a lie that adults tell children and that there is no such thing although the myth had origins in st. nick. for example, she always told my brother that he was adopted. apparantly when he was an infant people used to say 'awwwww he looks like you'. and my mother would go 'funny that - he is adopted' in this kind of gloating way (i think she liked the shock value 'cause as a said it was uncommon for people to adopt back then and she would always succeed in embarrassing the person who had commented. so he always knew that he was adopted. from before he knew what adoption meant.

did she treat him different? she made 'you aren't mine' out to be an excuse for giving him a hard time and abusing him, yeah she did. but then... she gave me a hard time and abused me too it was just that her reasons were different. she would come up with reasons to justify her acting out her moods basically. you simply could not win with her.

i'm not sure what the point of that was.

i'm sorry.