Before and After

Growing-up, I was Different.  Different was not good.  Different got poked-at and teased.  My differences made easy targets for my brother to attack, as brothers often do to their little sisters.  I'm told sibling rivalry is completely normal and healthy. 

I suppose.

Personally, I wouldn't know what's normal or natural, because I was not a natural child or sister to my parents and brother.  I was adopted by pure-breds, who had a pup of their own.  Three years later they went to the store and bought a mutt, me.  I was an extracted addition to an established family, where blood runs thicker than water.

My brother liked sports, I liked reading.  I was teased for using big words.  That itself was not what upset me as a child.  What upset me was the fact that I was the only one in the family who DID like to read.  No one read books like I did, so the more I read, the more alienated I became, simply because I had nothing to talk about among my owners.  Not only that, but when I did want to refer to something I read, I was teased, because I was this annoying smarty-pants.  The family joke was:  My brother had the Looks, I had the Brains.

That hurt even more, because my looks were not like his.  Although adoption back then took great care in pairing babies with like-nationalities (for reasons that are not at all "caring" or "nice"), I always knew, and my brother always knew, I was not "One of Them". 

I hated never being one-of-them.

Hated it.

Decades later, I willed myself to Search.  I got as far as my non-id info.

One of the very hardest, saddest, most difficult things I had to read was my parents general physical & personality descriptions, with a short list of their hobbies and interests.  Everything on that list described me to the letter.  All the things I was mocked for, were the very things my biologic parents gave me.

I left the social-worker's office a wreck.

Had I been kept my the same breed, would I have been deemed an over-sensitive bitch by so many ?  The way I see it, I was a child who wasn't understood because no one took the  time to get to know the Real Me I have always been, Inside. 

Some people say Adoption was something that happened to them, it's not what defines them as individuals.  For me, it DID define me.  It defined me as being Difficult because I was Different.

Had I been among people who shared similar habits as mine, I wonder how that would have affected my behavior and natural disposition.