The place I grew up was a big village/small town. Things changed slowly. Everyone knew everyone. More importantly, everyone knew everything about everyone else... and yet, everyone also ended up believing exactly what they wanted to believe regardless of what they knew about everyone else.

I went to a small Catholic school in our village. Our class varied from nineteen to twenty-five students every year, including at least four of us who were adopted. So, in the firsth through eighth grades, between 19 – 21 % of us in our class were adoptees. That’s a fairly high average, though I would imagine, for our time, not so remarkable. Even in such a small class, there were cliques and “groups” of friends, but we adoptees never formed any kind of group or bond due to adoption commonality.

I did (and still do) find it interesting, however, that even though everyone in the village knew who exactly was adopted, everyone seemed to forget. My fellow adoptee classmates all looked exactly like their parents to me. Just about everyone that would speak to my family after church on a Sunday would say to me, “Gosh, you look more and more like your father/mother every day!” The funniest part was, it seemed to be true.

Though both of my sisters are biologically of my parents, my features appear to be the most obvious combination of my parents’ features: my mother’s coloring with the shape of my features coming from my father. My younger sister looks exactly like my father, but if one was to meet her with my mother, one would assume that she was the one adopted. My older sister is the obvious reincarnation of our maternal grandmother and always was, even when our grandmother was still alive.

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