Dorie Morgan’s Rising Up

Adoption 13 years later

December 15, 2008

Posted in: adoption, family life

Thirteen years ago today, I wore a plaid skirt and a red turtleneck at a courthouse. I also wore a deer in the headlights look while a judge in Doylestown, PA approved my adoption. I was 13 at the time.

I didn’t know how adoption would change my life. At the time, I just thought that it meant that I would get my dad’s last name. I also knew that it meant that if something ever happened to my mom, no one would be able to take me away from my family. I had no concept of the larger changes it would create.

I grew up in a single parent home. I don’t have all of the details of how we ended up in that position but they aren’t really necessary. No child really needs to know the personal details of their parents’ divorce. And in my case, it probably would have been too much for me to comprehend. What I know is this: my mother left Florida and her first husband when I was five months old. The divorce was final around the time I turned two. I have no recollection of my birth father – I have not seen him in at least 24 years.

I didn’t realize when I was little that my home life wasn’t “normal”. My grandfather and my mother’s younger brother stepped up to the plate and fulfilled most of the dad functions. I took my grandfather to the “Daddy & Daughter” dances my Girl Scout troop held. My uncle sewed buttons on my Halloween costumes and went to all of my recitals. In fact, I was slightly confused by the two parent household concept that my friends experience (wait, you have a dad and he’s always here?).

And then when I was eight, my mother met Thomas. Four months later, they were engaged and one day shy a year from their first date, they were married. And from that moment on, he wasn’t “Thomas” anymore. He was my Daddy.

He wasn’t just a step dad. He was my family.

He was the one who was insistent that I participated in summer theatre, even when money was tight, because I loved it so much. He was the one who commuted over an hour to work each day so I wouldn’t have to change schools after the wedding. He was the one who took care of me.

In his first year of marriage, my dad was the sudden parent of a nine year old girl (at a point when my parents should have been enjoying the honeymoon phase of marriage) but he did it with such grace and consistency that you would have thought he had been he had been there since the day I was born.

While I would love to tell you that I was just so lovable you couldn’t help yourself from loving me, it isn’t true. I was a pain in the ass. But my dad loved me and I am so blessed for that. I never thought of him as “my mom’s husband” because he immersed himself in creating our family.

His love was unconditional, even when I thought it wasn’t. Which might be a universal truth about learning how to be parented (something we all must learn) but it was so profound for me. I had/have a very hard time with letting myself be loved because once a long time ago, a man who was supposed to have a biological urge to love me unconditionally did not. Learning how to accept unconditional love was a painful and bitter process but something that I could not have survived life without.

My family

Navigating Twenty-Something Suburban Life

Adoption 13 years later

Recent Comments

Leave A Comment

Related Posts: