An answer to your question

Just a warning... This was very hard to write, so it might be best to not read it all at once.

A while back, you asked me in an email, if it would have been fair for you to disrupt my life when I was a child. I never answered, but I'm at a place where I can try to answer it now. I doubt that my answer is going to be what you expected or what you want to read. That's one of the reasons that I never answered. However, it would be a disservice to both of us, if I didn't tell the truth.

As a child, I really thought that you would come back for me. I expected it to happen and I wasn't frightened by it. I think my understanding of adoption, or lack thereof, was part of the reason I thought this way. Being adopted wasn't talked about very much. I know that I knew about it before my brother was born and he was born a month before I turned three. The only thing I was told about adoption, was that my mom wasn't my "real" mom. In my chidish thinking, I knew the opposite of "real" was "fake" so I thought that she was just someone to take care of me, until you could.

I was always hypervigilant about watching and waiting for you-especially around/on my birthday. There was a lady at our church who had the same birthday as me. I was very skeptical of this lady and I remember secretly thinking that maybe she was you, but she just couldn't tell me. On my fifth birthday, I wasn't at the sitter's- for some reason I was home. I remember playing and stopping dead in my tracks when the doorbell rang. In the thirty seconds it took my mom to open the door, I was thinking that I just knew it was you. You had finally come back for me and I was ready! Of course, it wasn't you. In fact, the lady w/ the same birthday as me, had brought me flowers. I had never heard the word "conspiracy", but for some reason, that's what I thought was going on. I thought that everyone BUT me knew who you were.

I don't know how old I was when I stopped watching out the window, waiting for you. I think I did it for quite some time. Even when I had stopped watching and waiting, I still looked for you. I was always looking for you, everywhere that I went. So, would it have been fair for you to disrupt my life? Based on what I thought as a child and knowing that I always assumed it would happen, I can't say that it would have been unfair. Again, I know that's probably not what you want to hear and I am sorry for that. However, what good would it do for me to lie?

Best wishes,
Jen