How Far Would You Go to Know Who You Are?
Currently Seeking Representation / Agent / Publisher
[REDACTED] is about the mystery that began the day I was sold on the black market; the day an unscrupulous attorney shuffled me off the street and into the eager arms of a desperate couple denied by the adoption system. Were they deemed too bi-racial, old, poor, unstable, unhealthy? What if they were all those things?
As a black-market baby, bought for cash along a Texas hospital curb in 1970, I knew one day I’d tell my story. Of the 170,000 infants placed for adoption that year, 9000 were illegally sold on the black market. I was one of them.
Deemed unsuitable by numerous agencies, the desperate bi-racial couple who bought me that day soon faced extortion by the same attorney they hired to broker the deal. After coughing up 30K, they hid in plain sight with me, the child no court would ever call their own. Fear, abuse, and addiction followed.
At 5 I asked for a new family, at 12 I used face papers, at 18 I stood pregnant in birth mother’s shoes. At 38, still in need of a birth certificate, and spurred by my “adoptive” mother’s death, I journey to unearth the lifelong threat that drove her into an alcoholic abyss and ballooned my crippled “adoptive” father to 650 pounds — at any moment someone could return to take back their baby.
Racing to untangle decades of deception before the secret keepers pass away, a years-long search, at last, unearths my birth mother, but our reunion sours when she claims I am the result of rape. The accusation doesn’t ring true. Is my birth mother keeping secrets too? I realize that to obtain the truth, I must convince my natural mother to divulge the name of my “rapist” birth father. Yet, who should I believe? And what will it cost me?
My manuscript has been professionally edited and beta-read by both adoptees and first mothers. A complete full book proposal is available upon request. I live in New Orleans, LA, where I am currently working on a reportive memoir about birth father rights and my ten treasured years in reunion with my birth father, who at 69 learned I existed.
@myadoptedlife Visit www.my adopted life.com #adoptionstory #adoptee #adopteesoftiktok #adopteevoices #myadoptedlife somebodysbaby-thebook
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EXCERPT
Chapter 3 – Brown Babies
“And she began thinking over all the children … to see if she could have been changed for any of them.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Sitting on the potty in our 1950s-style pink and black porcelain bathroom, I’m half-watching Popeye on the small black-and-white TV Mommy set up on the counter opposite the tub. She’s made a place for it beside the phone, so we can watch shows while we bathe. Happy Mommy is standing naked in the water, scrubbing her body like my grandmother Minnie scrubs me; like you’re not clean till all your skin rubs off on the washcloth. All I see is my mother’s soapy, white, round belly. A large polka dot towel hangs across the shower rod, hiding the rest of her.
Mommy always hangs a towel up there before bath time, so it can warm in front of the gas wall heater above my head. As the heat shines down, I think of how good it feels when she wraps me in that towel and lifts me all swaddled up like a big baby after bath time. “You’re getting too big for this Peep,” she’s started saying each time she plops me down to finish my drying. But today I’m sitting on the potty lid, just watching, keeping her company like she does for me. On the TV, Swee’ Pee is crawling along the edge of a tall building, and Olive Oyl is crying, “The baby, the baby! Oh, Popeye save Swee’ Pea!”
But instead of watching Popeye save the day, I stare at the long white line on Mommy’s shiny belly. “Why can’t you make babies?” I ask.
“We don’t think it’s my fault,” she says, swinging the wash rag around to scrub her back. “The problem is with your Daddy. His weight. When men are obese, sometimes they can’t, well, they can’t make babies.”
“Does obese mean fat?”
“Yes, Peep, your daddy was fat then, and he’s fat now. God-damn impotent. Just 300 pounds back then, but even so, that’s probably why he can’t make babies.”
“But you did make some right?”
“Well,” she says, catching me staring at the sad scar that reminds her of the same, “we did make a few, but they didn’t live. I always thought the last one was a boy. Maybe he’d have looked like your Daddy?”
“Like how?”
“A chubby brown Mexican baby,” she answers, pushing the towel aside and pulling the shower curtain closed to wash her dirty blonde hair under a hot and steamy stream. I stare at the plastic wall between us. I’m not chubby. I’m not a boy. I don’t have brown skin like Daddy or blonde hair like Mommy. So how can I be perfect for them? Mommy can’t see my wet eyes, so she keeps talking. “But you, my darling, are everything. You make your Mommy and Daddy so happy.”
I hear her but don’t say a word. No matter how much she swears they couldn’t have gotten a better baby than me, I’m second pick. If they could’ve made a baby on their own, they never would’ve even looked for me. They found me like Popeye and Olive Oyl found Swee’ Pea. And who knows whereSwee’ Pea came from.
“Popeye, Popeye, you saved Swee’ Pea,” Olive Oyl claps as I twist the knob to hear the show better. Mommy, still rinsing all that soap off, begins to sing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”
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