Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of
Adoption and Identity
Written by Paige Adams Strickland
Edited by Wendy Hart Beckman
My Bio:
Paige Adams Strickland is an
educator and writer from Cincinnati, Ohio. She is married with two daughters.
In her free time she teaches Zumba Fitness (™) classes, enjoys gardening, her
pets, reading and spending time with family and friends. Her work has been
recognized by soniamarsh.com,
awordwithyoupress.com, scinti.com
and adoption voices.com.
You can connect with Paige at her blog: https://akintothetruth.squarespace.com/about or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/23plas and
Twitter: https://twitter.com/plastrickland23
Excerpt:
Chapter 1
When I asked my parents the classic question, “Where did I come
from?” Mom and Dad began by telling me that I came from God.
I found that piece of information very confusing because the first
picture they have of me was of a dark-haired woman holding me
with her back turned. My baby face peers over her shoulder. Bare
trees and a sky-blue Volkswagen with Ohio license plates can be
seen in the background. For a long time I wondered if God was a
brown-haired lady from Ohio who drove a classic Beetle.
I hated how the story was so nondescript and lacking in
information. It wasn’t exciting and filled with humor and
tenderness like scenes on television. Everybody else had
pictures of sleeping babies in mothers’ arms, related stories of
all the visitors who came, and told the dramatic stories of how
their dad frantically loaded the car, backed out of the driveway
and knocked over the trash cans as he sped off in a blizzard
during rush hour to deliver Mom to the hospital while she sat
beside him panting and yelling, “Honey, hurry faster! The baby’s
coming now!” I didn’t have a father who nervously paced around
in the waiting room, wearing a tread into the flooring with his
big feet or a five-o’clock shadow across his weary face. No
doctor in scrubs came out after many hours to shake his hand and
say, “Congratulations, Mr. Adams, you have a daughter.”
No one threw a party to shower my mom with receiving blankets
and tiny booties while she sat in a chair with a cup of tea, a
bulging belly and a romantic glow on her face, either.
Instead, I was born prematurely in both time and weight and had
to spend about a month in the hospital until I grew and gained
enough to be released to foster care. Then my parents came along
in 1962 and adopted me from Hamilton County Welfare when I was
13 months old. Their social worker informed them very little
about my start in life, only that the birth mother was a minor,
and she couldn’t keep me.
They noticed that I had some sort of “lazy eye” condition. My
adoptive grandmother was quite concerned that my feet were
pigeon-toed, so she and my mother took me to doctors in downtown
Cincinnati for examinations. Both specialists told my family
that everything was just fine, and that eventually I would grow
out of these perceived deformities between my eyes and my feet.
I just needed extra time. That gap between my birth and the 13
months it took to have me placed in a home setting set me back,
and the welfare agency told my parents that I might lag behind
in my development. It was HCW’s version of “Buyer beware”. When
I was eventually adopted, I didn’t walk or crawl. I could sit up
but not yet walk. I used a bottle, but I could not feed myself
finger food. I rolled around and cried, “Waa,” but I couldn’t do
much else. I was a blob, even at slightly over one year, until
people began to spend enough time with me and allow me freedom
to explore scattered toys, books, messy cookies, hallways and
the gooey jowls of our family dog, like a sensorimotor-staged
baby needs to do.
My first actual memory is sitting in the side yard of our
house throwing a bunch of leaves in the air at some lady. I can
still recall the clear autumn sky and the crunchy mounds of
just-raked leaves of rust red, dusty orange and brown, spiraling
in the air as they landed around us. Maybe the lady was my mom
who raised me. I wish I could know for certain that my first
memory is of my mom.
I don’t remember John F. Kennedy being shot, but I do
know that when it happened in November of 1963, Mom and Dad were
in the process of packing up the house and moving to a new place
over that somber weekend. We were staying in the same town, but
it would be a larger home on a street with a lot of young kids
and sidewalks for bike riding and walking to school. My parents
were among the few in the nation, it seemed, who were not JFK
fans. Mom and Dad had their own agendas and were more focused on
packing boxes, loading cars, making runs to the new house and
meeting deadlines. Their priorities at the time were primarily
on my father’s emerging career in management with the phone
company, and setting up house. They were constantly going,
growing, changing and making improvements to their lives, such
as adopting a child, moving to a better place and buying nicer
cars. They were go-getters and never stayed satisfied for very
long.
I spent a great deal of time with my Grandma Frances, my
mom’s mother. She lived in walking distance, so we spent many
days and nights together. Grandma Frances, who had an incredible
sweet tooth, was also the provider of endless sugary and starchy
treats like big cookies with icing, hard rolls, sweet rolls,
chocolate pudding and her homemade sodas with vanilla ice cream,
Hershey’s syrup and 7 Up. When she made them at her house, they
were the best because she even had long spoons with handles that
were actually straws. In all the sugar we consumed, not a soul
in our family ever turned up diabetic. No one cared about
carbohydrates or fat either. We simply ate and enjoyed.
When I was small, I was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. I spent
hours pretending to be Dorothy, roaming my block with a stuffed
dog and a basket. I re-enacted scenes from the movie so much
that my nursery school teachers were baffled by my need to live
in an imaginary world and by my extreme creativity. The movie
scene in which Dorothy stands at the gate of her farm, while the
wind howls was mesmerizing as I watched the incredibly reallooking twister spin
closer in the background. It was amazing and terrifying.
There were two major problems when I was little. One was
being short. I had a very intense complex about this condition.
I hated the word and anything synonymous with it. For whatever
reason, to me, short or little equaled inadequate, and I dreaded
being unworthy. I was a small child in a world full of important
adults, who ruled everything. Adults in charge of me held the
secrets to the universe. They knew all the answers to
information I wanted to know, like where I really came from. I
surmised that if I could be physically bigger, I would have the
authority to know more about myself and anything else I wanted
to learn, but little people like me were stupid and couldn’t
handle it. From cookie jars to closed legal records, everything
was out of my reach.
My other shortcoming to contend with at the time was my first
name, Paige. I absolutely hated it. It was different. My parents
picked my name because my Aunt Nora, (my dad’s sister), had
heard it somewhere, and she liked it. Aunt Nora did not have
children of her own. I don’t know if my parents were trying to
include her or felt sorry for her or what, but because of her
idea, they decided not to go with the name Cindy, and my name
became Paige.
I withstood endless days of teasing on school
playgrounds. I hated all the jokes and silly remarks about my
first name, and I wished I’d been given a normal name like Julie
or Mary. I’d become angry and yell or cry, and that intensified
the taunting of the other children. Having a temper did not do
me any favors.
Unknowing people misspelled my name. I was sick and tired
of going through it with anyone who couldn’t treat my name
normally. No one else had confusion about his or her moniker. My
name was the only identity I did have, and it pissed me off when
someone got it wrong. I was ready to scream and punch out the
next person who said, “Oh...like page in a book.” When I was
small, I couldn’t tell the difference between honest mistakes or
if this was another way for people torture me for having an odd
name. Once, when we had to write business letters in third
grade, I received a reply to mine addressed to Mr. Paige Adams.
The stupidity and thoughtlessness of people would never end,
even with adults!
I hated being different. Around school, peers would
crucify and senselessly hate you for being different. All I
wanted was to blend in with people. Instead, I saw myself as a
feisty, short person with a weird name, who had an odd start in
life and a bad haircut to boot. My goal was to cruise along,
unnoticed, and be treated the same as everybody else. However,
that wasn’t easy for a little person with an uncommon name, and
ugly, crooked pixie bangs, who often felt left out when
childhood friends discussed how do babies get born.
Until next time,
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