Column that ran in the paper

Being chosen simply means two mothers loved me

By Alyssa Schnugg
Staff Writer

Recently I wrote a column about how my name is pronounced several ways and how it didn’t really matter because I am me, no matter what people call me.
It was just a week later when I received news that made me question who I really was after all.
At 45 years old, I found out I was adopted.
Since both of my parents are now gone, an old friend of my father’s felt it was time I knew because my parents insisted that everyone who knew their secret to never, ever tell me. Even my own siblings who are 11 and 7 years my senior — and were well aware I did not come into our family the “usual” way — held it in for 45 years. You’d assume that, during some sibling spat, one of them would have let it slip out of anger. But nope. Not a peep. They were terribly mad at my father’s friend as they had planned to tell me the next time we could all be together.
For several days, I ran a gamut of emotions from shock to denial to a complete feeling of being lost. Friends and family offered words of comfort like “Be grateful you were chosen!” At the time it made me angry. Everything I knew was a lie. I grew up thinking I was Jewish of Russian decent. Now? No clue. I grew up thinking I had my mother’s shoulders and my father’s fingernail biting habit. Everything became unknown. For all I knew, my birthday really wasn’t my birthday.
My own children took it stride. Their grandparents were their grandparents and that was the end of the story. But they were a bit used to this since their father was also adopted which he had always known.
I told a friend one day I felt like a rose with all the good and bad of a person that had been snipped off its bush and tossed into a vase, with no roots.
She told me I was a hybrid and that I am the creation of two different plants whose vines intertwined and made me the person I am today. I knew it may not make scientific sense but somehow it did make me feel better.
As days passed, my head came out of the shock cloud and I started to process things a bit more. I knew my parents loved me and they never treated me differently than my siblings. I know my brother and sister love me. I can recall a day when I was about 5 years old and they got into an awful fight over who I was going to play with and I picked up the phone and called the operator (remember those?) and asked to talk to my “mommy.” They doted on me, always.
Dismayed there were no local support groups for adoptees, I started to read and register on forums for adult adoptees. I was amazed at the anger I read in so many posts. They were angry at their birth mothers, angry at their adoptive parents, angry at the world. I was told I should be angry with my parents for not telling me. That I should be angry at the selfish woman who gave me up.
Hard as I tried, I could not find that anger. My parents are gone; what good would it do me to be angry with them? Should I have been told sooner? I believe so. But I know my mother, and I know she did it as a way to protect me so that I never felt like I wasn’t hers.
When all is said and done, I am still just Alyssa. I am my experiences and past and formed from the love my parents chose to give a baby girl who’s own mother couldn’t provide those things.
It’s been about three weeks and I can now say, I am grateful I was chosen. I still get moments of feeling lost and probably always will as I continue to process all of this.
I started a blog which helps me do just that and also with hopes of connecting with other adult adoptees who like myself, found out they were “chosen” later in life.
Feel free to email me if you are in a similar situation and interested in helping start up a support group here in Oxford.
—alyssa@oxfordeagle.com