Alias Howard….And so It Began for an Adopted Child

R. Farmer

Description

The journey of an adopted child to finding his biological family. The twists and turns and surprises along the way expose all of the misleading “facts”, even the very place of birth.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Family
• Journey
• Truth
• Biography
• Personal Memoirs

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 12 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798823000833
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Alias Howard
….and so It Began for
an Adopted C hild
 
 
 
 
 
R. FA RMER
 
© 2023 R. Farmer. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
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ISBN: 979-8-8230-0082-6 (sc)
ISBN: 979-8-8230-0083-3 (e)
 
Published by AuthorHouse 02/07/2023
 
 

Alias Ho ward
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
I am an adopted child. That fact has followed me around like a summer shadow my entire life. I don’t remember ever not knowing. Never-ending questions were as much a part of me as my fingers and toes. While the questions were always there in my mind, answers were scarce. In fact, they never came up in conversation. I remember being almost afraid to ask my questions, thinking it might be disrespectful or upsetting for the family, so I never did. The questions didn’t go away; they just were not asked.
One year, my daughter was struggling with what to do for Father’s Day, and she came up with the idea of researching my adoption, finding out what she could, wrapping it up in a nice neat package, and presenting it to me. This proved to be an impossible surprise, as I had to request some of the documents to help in the research. I signed the appropriate forms and returned them via email.

Several months passed, over which the research began to fade from my memory, moving from the “anticipation” bin to the “oh well” bin. Then one day, as these things happen, the telephone rang, and the information was coming to me via email. In an instant, the details of my birth and my history arrived. It dawned on me at that moment this was the first time I, at age sixty-seven, had heard of how my actual birth went. What were the doctor’s remarks and opinions? Baby Howard, six pounds ten ounces, was delivered by cesarean section. The baby was normal and healthy with dark blue eyes.
Further into the papers was my birth mother’s account of the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy and her decision to place me for adoption. Information about her early life was included.
She was born to sharecroppers in rural South Carolina just before the Great Depression. She was poor and of modest living conditions, and was badly burned at eighteen months old by a boiling pot of lard her mother was cooking. At first, she was not expected to live. She spent the greater part of the next six years undergoing constant hospital treatment, several times for plastic surgery. This surgery greatly improved her appearance and allowed her to blink for the first time since the accident.
In all this information about her life, there were no names, no towns, no dates, just redacted spaces instead. The further I read, the more attention I paid to what detail was provided. I sought to figure out the county and community of her birth in 1918. A little girl getting terribly burned in a small community in rural South Carolina had to be newspaper worthy. And it was.
After some digging and googling, I decided to take a road trip. The community was only an hour or so down the road in Loris, South Carolina. One Wednesday morning, I struck out with notebook and pen in hand. I felt relatively confident I could find someone who would recall a little girl being so badly burned in 1920. They were described as churchgoing people. Surely an old timer at the church, somebody , could point me in the right direction.

My adoptive father, my life father, was a traveling salesman and had vast knowledge of people and their behavior. I remembered him telling me one summer as I traveled with him that to find out something in a small town, you go to the barbershop. I was off to the barbershop.
I scarcely even remember the drive. Thoughts raced through my mind. The questions never ended, one after another. I thought, What if, what if I had grown up in this little town instead of my home? My mind wandered to my friend from Iowa, who I had met some forty years before in Wilmington. I recalled how our children had spent so much time together. He had been there for me through the deaths of both of my life parents, and none of that would have happened if circumstances had been different. I was saddened at the thought of that.