We all know what a joke non-ID is. This is my bdad non-ID bullshit story.
I planned earlier to post my bio-dad’s non- ID “information,” but due to my move last year, it appears that my adoption file, including the certified copy of my OBC, went into the storage pod that now resides across town. Although I can’t scan the letter I received from the adoption agency to post here, it is, nonetheless, so unique and informative that I remember every word clearly:
Jack around the time of my birth. He was a man!
Jack Reese (of course they didn’t give me his name- I got that from Dottie years later), I was informed, had blue eyes, was a high school drop-out, working class, a Protestant…. and A MAN!
Good Lord! A man! I couldn’t have been more surprised if they’d told me he was Norman Thomas or Westbrook Pegler.
A couple helpful people on the old AMIL suggested I obtain the names of all men in Akron within a certain age range with blue eyes. How I would do this remained unanswered. Besides, it turned out he lived in Cuyahoga Falls
Many years later when I first talked to Jack he was outraged that he was designated a Protestant. “I’ve never been baptized and I never will be. God damn ’em! ” Jack was, you see, a free thinker. or to be more precise, he just didn’t know. and didn’t seem to care a whole lot. He had the same opinion of organized religion as he did of the Republican Party. Despite the supposed doom and gloom non-ID I learned quickly that he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. His father forced him to quit school and get a job when he graduated from the 8th grade, but Jack never stopped learning. I swear, the guy could talk about almost any subject but math, Like me, the most simple arithmetic problem was a loss. Forget balancing a checkbook! It was nothing for him to call me up to talk about Mao (whom he’d met a couple times), Madame Chaing kai-chek who he met a lot, or 19th century Robber Barons, He tried to teach me words like “bastard”– as in Bastard Nation– in Mandarin, but alas, unlike him, I had no real talent for languages either.
I was lucky in a lot of ways, As far as non-ID at least nobody claimed my bio-parents were a sweet teenage or college couple caught up in a lusty moment. Or that I was the scion of a wealthy family. Jack had just turned 18 when I was born. Dottie relatively elderly at the age of 24. Oops!
Anyway, I know that even today, some adopteees get put off with the non-ID that is so grudgingly given them via the adoption industry. Don’t Most of it is BS, and even if true, doesn’t tell the real story. You might even learn that your father was a man