When I was little, I didn’t understand that my parents
couldn’t have children of their own. I
grew up surrounded by busy adults who had no time for a little girl and her
play and I was lonely. So every night
when I went to bed I would pray for God to send me a baby brother or sister.
Then one day God sent Donny. The story my mother told was that she had
received a call from Judge Zoe Ann Warberg in the middle of the night. The judge told her that six children had been
abandoned by their mother in nearby Burley, Idaho. The judge wondered if my mother and father
would be willing to take one of them in.
My mother agreed and Donny came into our lives.
Donny was five when he came to live with us; a year
older than me. He was a dark haired boy
with freckles. I remember him wearing
jeans with suspenders and a plaid shirt.
I was thrilled with my new big brother.
My parents set about making him fit into our
family. They cut his hair and bought him
clothes and shoes. They turned the old
glassed in porch into a bedroom just for him. He was included in everything. There is a professional photo of us together
when I turned five.
In another photo, we are having a tea party in the
living room, and another shows Donny and I wearing the matching cowboy and cowgirl
costumes we received for Christmas.
Donny’s was black with chaps and mine was red with a short skirt.
I was happy to have a brother but on some level I was
jealous of Donny. He got to play with trucks
and guns and Lincoln Logs. Donny was
allowed to go out on the tractors with the men and to help feed the
cattle. He was not marked by the shame
of being a girl. Sometimes my dad would
let Donny sit with him in the evenings.
He helped Donny with his homework.
I thought my dad liked him better than me.
My mom’s seemed intent on wiping away everything which
made him different from us. I remember
they took him to see Dr. Luke and he had an operation. Every night for a while, Mom would make him
lie on the kitchen counter while she tended to him. When I asked her what she was doing she said,
“We had to have him circumcised. What
kind of nasty people don’t have their sons properly taken care of?
Over the next year, the temporary placement turned into
a pre-adoption. I am sure there were a
lot of legal hassles. The children’s
mother had run off with a milkman and the father’s whereabouts were
unknown. The state would have had to sever
parental rights to free up the children to be adopted.
One day Donny and I were playing in our favorite
hideout behind the sofa. A friend was
having coffee with my mother and I heard my mother say, “I don’t like them to
play together out of sight. I am afraid
of what he might do to her. You don’t
know the things that went on in that family.”
Then one bright summer morning I awoke to a scene. It was unusual because in my family we didn’t
have scenes. My mother was crying in the
kitchen. Her white hairbrush with the
black bristles lay on the linoleum kitchen floor. My usually silent and calm
father had beaten Donny with it. “Pack
his suitcase and take him back,” my father yelled. “I will not be spoken to like that in my own
house.”
“But he is just a little boy,” my mother pleaded.
“He told me he didn’t want to live here anymore because
our house is full of bugs,” my father said.
“I work hard to put a good roof over his head, and if he doesn’t want to
be here then he can leave.”
I remember my mother crying in the car all the way to
Twin Falls. I remember the dark wood
paneling of Judge Warberg’s courtroom and how our footsteps echoed in the empty
space. I remember Donny’s room being
empty when we got home.
Our family never spoke of Donny again. It was like he never existed, but things were
never quite the same. Every day for a
year I got off the school bus to find my mother in bed with a sick headache. I stopped believing in bedtime prayers, and I
accepted my lonely isolation.
Something else changed in me as well. My mother claimed she told me I was adopted when
I was four. It must have been about the
time Donny came to live with us, but I don’t remember her telling me. I might
have blocked it out, because I must have understood what it meant for me. After Donny left, I worked very hard at being
good. I didn’t talk back. I didn’t break things or make scenes. I did everything my parents asked of me
without question.
I wanted to be very, very good, because I had learned
an important lesson from Donny. If you
are adopted and you are bad, they can send you back.
