#003 Were there any adoptions in your family around 1960?

So there I was on the night of December 22, 2018 and the far fetched idea that I may very well be the person that answered the question: Were there any adoptions in your family around 1960?

To say that this was a shock would not be completely accurate.  My initial shock rating was off the chart.  Then, as I allowed myself to breathe--why they say that you need to breathe is beyond me, as I was hyperventilating, breathing seems to be the last thing I needed to focus on--I immediately went through my mental filing system pulling out past events.

Sometimes I hear a comment and for what ever reason I do not think it important to listen. But, months or years later I can recall the comment as if it were being said here and now.
As I read the email I had received via Ancestry asking about any adoptions that may have happened in my family around or about the time I was born (1960) I heard a million voices from the past.

"You really don't know, do you?" the clerk behind the counter at the Dearborn Post office asked.

I must have looked like the person who had just been asked to speak Finnish, never having heard the language.

I was going to Europe over Christmas break 1995.  I had just graduated from eastern Michigan University with my teaching degree and an endorsement in special education in April 1995.  By May that year I had accepted a teaching position for September.  My first real professional job, and I wanted to do some traveling.
My brother had been to Europe, China and Australia over the past 4 years and agreed to do another trip at Christmas with me. So naturally I needed a passport, which is how I ended up in Dearborn looking at the clerk as if I were brain dead.

All I could say was "Know what!?"

The clerk went on to say that the document I submitted, what I believed to be a birth certificate, was not acceptable as a legal document. I was bouncing between laughing like a maniac and shouting like a mad man. How is it I always end up with the most unqualified person on the other side of the counter.  Seriously, where do they find these people that work for our government!

Eventually the clerk realized I was absolutely and totally dumbfounded.

She handed my my "birth certificate" saying, "You need to go talk with your "parents."


NEXT:  MOM, YOU HAVE A LOT OF 'SPLAINING TO DO..