Why wasn't this accepted?

No luck with this essay either............. 

You must be Irish

I'm Irish, through and through.

You must be Irish.  I heard that regularly growing up, but as an adopted child, I had no clue?  My adoptive parents were of Welsh and English extraction, but me?  No clue.

That’s the way adoptions were handled in the nineteen forties.  Everything was sealed.  Children were given new birth certificates that matched their new identities and there was no possible way an adoptee could find out who they had been, or where they had come from.  The idea, of course, was to prevent trauma for both birth mother and baby and to ensure as smooth a transition as any natural-born child would get from womb to parents.  In other words, adopted children were to be treated just as if they had been born to the parents who were raising them.

But as an adopted child who had always known I had been adopted; my unknown origins always lurked in the back of my mind.  Who was I?  Where had I come from?  Why had my mother given me up?  Did I have brothers or sisters?  There was always a longing to connect with my birth mother, but life intervened and I grew up in a wonderful and loving home with an adopted younger brother and warm, extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.  At times, being adopted was even a novelty to classmates and I vividly recall a fellow grade-five student standing up and asking the teacher if Nancy was adopted.  Proudly, I stood up and said “Yes”.

My parents had always made me feel special.  The tale they told was that they had entered a huge room, where there were rows and rows of cribs and babies and that they had walked up and down the rows looking at each baby, but when they saw me, they picked me.  Growing up, I treasured this story.  It took away any stigma.  But, of course, it hadn’t happened like that.  My parents’ marriage had been considered mixed, one being Catholic and the other Protestant, thus rendering them unfit parents in the eyes of the government.  Yes, that’s the way it was back then.  

A lawyer handled the adoption, which was not finalized until my brother and I were in our teens.  You can imagine the shock when my mother told me someone from the Children’s Aid would be visiting to see if we were happy living with them.  We then had to sign legal papers, confirming we wanted to stay with our parents.  

That was when I first learned my birth name because I had to sign as this mysterious, original me and that’s when my journey began.  Stealth unlocked my adoption when I forged a letter from my father to the lawyer who had arranged the adoption, asking that he release the file.  He did, but all that was on it was my birth name and hers.  Who was she?  Where had she lived and who was the person I had been at birth?  For a few years, I stored this riddle, but when I became pregnant, the intrigue kicked in again.  What was my genetic background?  Was there anything I should know?  Pre-DNA testing meant I was in the dark.  

The journey to unlock the secret of my birth mother was arduous in the pre-computer-pre-Internet era.  I scoured city directories, joined groups and took shot-after-shot in the dark.  Until one day, I hit pay dirt.  “Oh yes,” said a woman from a nearby town, “Shirley was my niece, but she died last year.”  I was crushed.  I had missed meeting her by only a year.  Even though I had never met her, I wept and grieved.  Pressing on, I eventually met her brothers, sister, aunts, uncles and cousins and learned all about this woman who had been a young girl of 18 when she found herself pregnant.  I treasured pictures and found I looked like her.  In those days, unwed mothers were shamed and shipped off to be hidden away until their children were born.  Later, learning she could never have another child, she must have been devastated.

I did not share this discovery with my parents, fearing they would be hurt.  I kept my research a secret, but everything I was learning about my birth mother rang true about the person I was, my personality, attributes, talents and shortcomings.  And, by the way, the Irish part was confirmed.  Back then, the jackpot had not been hit about my true identity.  That would emerge only last week.  In the previous 40 years, I had known only that I had one adopted brother and no half-sisters or half-brothers.

As time passed, the folklore about my maternal side was confirmed – or so I thought.  Apparently, I had Indigenous blood.  The story was that my great-grandmother had married a member of the Mohawk tribe and moved to the nearby reserve.  My birth father – an American semi-pro baseball player -- had been identified by relatives and I even managed to find a picture of him.  I thought all been discovered and my origins confirmed.  

I was wrong. 

Years passed and my birth story lay dormant.  I accepted it, after all, these people were not my family; they were my genetic roots.  Or so I thought.  Then DNA testing burst forth.  Why not, I figured.  Let’s find out once and for all what I’m made of.  I sent for a kit, spit and mailed it off.  A few weeks later, a few myths I had believed for years were shattered.  Indigenous blood?  Zero.  So much for that family lore.  

Over the years, I got report after report about genetic relatives – mostly far afield and distant.  I began to simply file and ignore them, but that changed last week when I got a message from someone who told me our genetics proved she was my half-sister.  What?!  Half-sister!  What did that mean?  Did we have the same mother?  No, that could not be because I was my birth mother’s only child.  The only link left was that this sister and I shared a father.  But he was not the father I had been told about.  He was another man who played on the same baseball team as my mythical father.  Family lore is one thing, but DNA another.  Yes, I was definitely this new man’s child.

Myths shattered, family lore over.  Very quickly I learned I was the oldest of seven brothers and sisters.  Seven!  Immediately I had gone from no sisters and one adopted brother to five sisters and two brothers.  I was now part of a family of eight.  It was overwhelming.  Now I knew why I wept at television programs about DNA and finding one’s roots.  Now I knew how much I envied those sisters and brothers who had found their siblings and birth parents.  This was what I had missed and what I had been longing for for so many years.  

Photos were exchanged, connections made, circle complete.  Now I know from whence come my brown, curly hair and hazel eyes.

Will these connections last?  I don’t know, but one thing I did find out, I am 100% Irish.