…but NOT THE IRISH!
…oh, OK, the Irish too!
Have a merry, merry, Astros-are-World-Champions Christmas!!
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“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.”
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Just got back from spending all day with the in-laws. About to crawl into a fetal position.
Merry Christmas to all!
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You should read today’s Doonesbury.
Didn’t know that was still a thing, good to hear.
Far Side, Garfield, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes are the ones I remember most from a while ago.
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I came THIS close to naming my kid Calvin. In the end I figured it would be quite a mantle to live up to. I now know he would have lived up to the title, would have been a noble Calvin, but, you know, hindsight and that.
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My dad, his dad, and my brother all were Calvins. My brother never liked the name, but my parents did him the favor of not making him a III, much to my grandfather’s irritation and chagrin. I was first born, and I am glad I was James Robert, not Calvin. That pissed my grandfather off too.
Speaking of Calvin and Hobbes, I am a fan for sure, but if Mark is not the world’s biggest C&H fan, he is in the top 2 or 3.
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I would not mind being a III, or even a IV or V, it’s pretty cool. Well, other than my grandfather and great grandfather were named Albert, which was quite a popular 19th century name, but not so much anymore. Actually, my grandfather, step-grandfather and at least two great grandfathers were named Albert, and my maternal grandfather was named Alfonso. You could almost have called me “Al”. At any rate, I knew a guy in high school who was “the VI”. That would have been cool.
My brother was named after both grandfathers (Calvin Lee, not Calvin Ray), not only one. My paternal grandfather wanted a III, and when my brother got his first name but not the middle name to make a III, let’s just say he was not pleased. This is all family lore because I was only 3, but my mother always said if she and Dad were not in my grandfather’s will, she would know why.
I could have been a III if my birthfather had married my birthmother. But he chose not to marry her and went back to divinity school at SMU. (He later changed to Law and became a labor lawyer.)
My mother was a 1961 UT grad (I tracked her down by buying a Spring 1961 UT Commencement brochure off eBay) who was just starting her first teaching job. So she gave me up at the Methodist Mission Home, and I got adopted out to Lubbock with a new name attached. My adoptive family mostly died out decades ago, but I still have their name attached even though none of them have reached out to me in years.
My bio families ignore me too, even though I can see them celebrating the holidays on social media. They all have names that I could have had – I’m the first-born male to both my parents – except for a quirk of fate.
Family names have weird power. I think about it a lot.
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I know someone with a very, very similar story. Shows that what matters is what you make out of your own life and the good you do for others.
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I’m sure my daughter can find her bio siblings on social media if she wants to. But the only time (that I can tell) that her adoption has bothered her was when she wrote to her bio parents and never heard back.
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DNA to Ancestry.com worked for my daughter. Her bio mother said some things I did not appreciate, but I left her relationship with my daughter up to them without attempting to influence or to interfere. My daughter kept that relationship in the proper perspective, imo. I worried a lot about her mom’s feelings when bio showed up, but those fears seem to have been unfounded.
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I’ve been doing some genealogical research off and on over the last 20 years, and the availability of consumer DNA tests and databases has really changed it. It’s sort of now split into “genetic genealogy” and “paper genealogy”, where it used to be pretty limited to the latter. The occurrence of these “non-paternal events”, where a child ends up with the name of someone who is not their biological father, are quite common. In fact, they occur pretty regularly about every 4-5 generations, on average. Lots of reasons for this, of course; adoption, orphans, raised by aunt/uncle, grandma fooling around with a traveling salesman…finding relatives you didn’t know you had can be kind of fun, if you keep it in perspective and understand that they may not want to have anything to do with you, and it may open up old wounds, especially if the NPE was recent. A couple of years ago my dad found out he had a half sister, and neither of them knew about the other. They both had a good attitude about it, and managed to be friendly, even meeting once and having a very enjoyable visit. But not everyone is that understanding. My mother and her half sister never had any sort of relationship, even though it wasn’t a secret. Her sister was VERY suspicious of my mother’s motives, as if the man being her father was some sort of nefarious scheme.
After my cardiologist cleared a 99% blockage in my Widowmaker artery, he looked at me and said “Man you just have shitty genes.” Being adopted, that’s when I knew I had to get serious about learning my family medical history, so I took all the commercial DNA tests and learned a whole lot about genealogy.
And guess what I found? One man after another dying of heart attacks in their 50s. (The State of Texas will let me look up other people’s death certificates, but not my own birth certificate.) I really dug into and, ironically, put together family trees that are bigger than any of my bio family members have online. But while I know the paper genealogy, I don’t know the people – the personal quirks, family stories, traditions, etc. And as I get older, that’s something I really grieve.
I’m active in several adoptee communities online, where everyone has taken DNA tests and learned genetic genealogy. One thing I’ve learned is that the NPEs (non-paternal events) are common throughout history, in about 12-15% of people. In other words, mom was presenting the wrong dad for her children, for whatever reason. DNA tests are unravelling all those old inaccuracies.
Almost no one in either of my maternal or paternal families will even acknowledge me, but I have found a “black sheep” on each side who is happy to communicate. And I’ve learned so many weird coincidences about my adoption. For example, I connected with a second cousin who is a few years younger than I, and has lived in Boston her whole life … “except for those few years when my Dad taught at Texas Tech and we lived in Lubbock.” She lived at 14th and Slide Road; I lived at 16th and Slide. I rode my bike past a houseful of first- and second-cousins for years – they lived a couple hundred yards away – but none of us knew it until 40 years later. I could go on and on …
After it all, I’m still so grateful for my loving adoptive parents. Their intentions were pure and they acted in good faith; my many problems with the adoption industry were not their fault. But at 60 years old, the end result is that I don’t really have a family, other than my wife and adoptive sister. I have tons of biological relatives – I can show them the DNA evidence – but no real family.
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Sad for you, Craig. As far as I know, my kids’ lives with us have been happy, and I know their mom and I think of them as our own. I often forget they were adopted, not born to us, and in every real sense, we are their family, not bio people who, for one reason or another, went away.
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Thanks Jim, adoptive parents truly are some of the best people in the world. My parents were kind, generous, decent people, but they both died fairly young and the rest of the family just disappeared into thin air. At 30 years old I realized I didn’t have a family anymore.
I have all kinds of problems with the adoption industry as it’s currently run, especially in Texas because that’s where my birth certificate is still hidden, but I’ve never doubted the sincerity of my parents. Their hearts were golden.
EDIT – BTW, my wonderful adoptive father died on New Year’s Day 1993, exactly 30 years ago. So I guess that’s why I’m feeling a little maudlin today.
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My mother in law comes from a big family. She had one brother and six sisters. Three of her sisters died in their late 20s/early 30s from a form of ALS. One got pregnant in her teens, and “went to visit relatives” for 9 months. The baby was adopted, and that was that. She died about 12 years later. A few years ago, my wife got a call from the kid, who was then about 40. He wanted to know family medical history. My wife and her brother tried to have other conversations with him, but he would have none of it. “Just tell me how my biological mother died, that’s the only thing I want to hear”.
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