First of all, I always thought I was adopted because of multiple "clues" that I got when I was growing up. My parents had sworn the entire family to secrecy as they never wanted me to know for fear, I suppose, of me picking up and wanting to go back to my bio family if I knew. My first clue was that my great Aunt, who was a bit crazy anyway, let it slip in a casual conversation when I was about 11. Just when she mentioned it, my grandmother walked back in the room, and she shut up. I also noticed the most obvious thing. I didn't look like anybody. Turns out I'm of a hispanic descent, so my general looks were much different than everyone else. I never really directly got told ever again past the great aunt, so at one point I just wrote it off as "so what if I am" and lived my life. No one EVER confronted or told me. I never had the "you’re adopted" stuff going on. People argue this point all the time, saying, it's better to tell them, but that was not my experience because of how it went down. I was essentially a hispanic boy living in a small Southern town. I'm not sure there was another hispanic ANYWHERE that I ever could remember, but because I didn't KNOW I was hispanic, I grew up (as I often tell people), as a middle class white kid - and everyone treated me as such. So, I dropped it.

So, here we are some 55 years later and my father dies. My mother had died 8 years before this. I went to clean out the house and as part of this, I took all the mounds of papers in various drawers and stuffed them in a box. It took a couple more years before I went through them, and then I saw it. A petition to adopt. I called one of my Aunts, and she gave it up. She said they had been sworn to secrecy, but that she had told them if I ever asked, she would tell me the story. All my parents’ brothers and sisters knew all along - from the start. Turns out that most of the small town knew too, but again, no one EVER said a word to me. It wasn't a week after that, that we were back in that small town and my wife was talking to a caregiver her mother was using and she said - oh yes, I knew your father in law - he had that adopted child. It took 57 YEARS before anyone - in the entire town, mentioned it.

I did decide to look for my birth family, and I did find them, but that is a whole other story!