Things To Do: Scrapbooks!

The response was sent a couple of days ago...via email.  Now it's time to wait, again.

I'm not a patient person so I have to stay busy to keep myself from climbing the walls so I have created a list of things to do while impatiently waiting...


Things to do: Scrapbooks!  

I'm not talking just one, I'm talking 7 scrapbooks, each one just alike.  I started this little (more like overwhelmingly HUGE) project at the end of August.  These scrapbooks are actually Christmas presents (one of them is mine).  Back in 2009 my Mom, Aunt, Sister and I drove straight through to California to get my Uncle who my Mom and Aunt haven't seen since 1963.  His health was failing and we weren't going to let him be alone so we went out there to pack him up and bring him to Texas.

This road trip was certainly an adventure!  My Aunt handed me a journal and told me I had to write everything down.  Well, I didn't want to do it so I ended up writing about the off the wall stuff...like how my sister and I were wearing matching PJ's while on the road and how we ended up in a field of prairie dogs, giant arrows that I threw myself in front of so it looked like my sister was stabbing me, giant fiberglass dinosaurs that my sister and I were underneath pretending like we were about to be eaten.  I even wrote about the Kamikaze Butterflies that were attacking the truck when we were on the highway.  I wrote about the crazy stuff and I had pictures that went with most of the entries.

We still laugh about some of the crazy things my sister and I did on this trip.  My half Uncle who had been packed up and thrown into a truck with 4 women for 3 days was certainly a good sport.  He passed away 7 months later and during those 7 months he talked about how the trip leaving his home of 35 years and coming to be with his sisters was the best trip ever.

So I thought it was a brilliant distraction for me to put everything together in a scrapbook, for each of us to have.  Why should I be the only one to have the journal and the pictures??

I drew the little picture for the front of the scrapbooks.  It is a little skull with sparkly eyes and a tiara.  The skull sits above a pair of panties and each pair of panties has a different saying (mines says "I miss the internet").  The words in the circle say "Pirate Princesses", that's what my sister and I kept calling ourselves.

When I started the scrapbooks I thought it was a good idea to put in a warning since there are some "colorful" words and references in the journal.  At least this way I can say they were warned!!

Yes, I did mention prairie dogs, small yap yap dogs, naked sheep and fiberglass dinosaurs in the warning.  I thought it was best to cover all of my bases.

Each journal entry was re-written...seven times!!  When I originally wrote the journal I used different colored ink for each entry, why use the same boring color for the adventures that were waiting for us??

Because I am a little OCD I had sharpies to match what I used in the journal.  I also "created" notebook paper out of card stock.  Hey, I want the scrapbook to last and I was trying to stay distracted!!

(that is the picture of me laying spread eagle in front of the arrow and my sister behind the staff pretending to stab me.)

I tried to match up all of the pictures with the journal entries.

The scrapbooks are just about done.  Thanks to this project I have been able to keep myself from obsessing over my email.

Thankfully my Aunt and a Cousin are coming in for Christmas so I don't have to ship these scrapbooks off...that would cost a fortune!!!  

So there you go...something to keep me from climbing the walls while waiting for Ashley to respond to my email.  And it is something that my family would love :-D

Adoption Kool Aid Strikes Again!

"Good news is that the agency will be there for me if and when I am ready."
 
This sentence, this single sentence is absolutely killing me.  Every time I read it I start crying.  Good news?  How is that good news?  Really?

She has absolutely no idea what happened, not a single clue.  She believes adoption is a beautiful thing.

Damn that effing adoption kool aid!!!

If and when she is ready what is she going to find out?  You can't know a person from a piece of paper and God only knows what kind crap is in that file.  They already told me they can't find the letters, the cards, the little gifts I left for her...they acted like it was no big deal.  These "wonderful" people at the agency threw me away like some piece of crap stuck to the bottom of their shoe.

Good news?

How could it possibly be good news for me?  I'm the one who sat there each week and listen to "The Brainwasher" carry on about what a shame it was that I was pregnant because she could see me dating her son (gross!).

No there was no care or concern coming from her.

Just her telling me if I kept my baby my boyfriend would leave me and the baby and I would be living in a cardboard box under I-20.  Or I would be raising my child in one abusive relationship after another because no decent man would want a tainted woman.  This woman, this one woman managed to destroy every ounce of confidence I had in myself!!


Every time I said "My baby" the woman yelled at me telling me this was not my baby, I had no right to this baby.  (the baby wasn't even born yet)  Once I mentioned I wanted to keep my baby and the woman nearly choked on the handfuls of dry cereal she kept shoving in her mouth...she told me if I kept my baby they could take me to court and get my baby from me because I was an unfit, "loose" woman and I didn't stand a chance in court against them.

Sometimes she would tell me stories of this couple who she thought would be perfect.  They were rich, had a nice, big, beautiful house and so desperately wanted a baby.  They were from Dallas and lived in a very upscale neighborhood.  They had been married for seven years and had tried to get pregnant since they got married and unfortunately the wife was just not capable of conceiving and they have been waiting on "the list" for the last seven years.  There would be no way I would ever cross paths with them.

And the lies go on and on and on and on....

It took 18 years for me to find out about them.  They are not from Dallas.  They were not married for seven years.  The neighborhood was about 10 miles from my neighborhood...not in the area the Brainwasher described.  They were not on "the list" for seven years.  The wife did give birth to her own biological child a few years after they adopted Ashley. And has for crossing paths...well, I think our paths started crossing as early as 1989.

Ashley has no clue.  She has absolutely no idea that the "Good news" has been my freaking nightmare all these years.

She doesn't know any different, she was taught that this was a "beautiful thing".  She doesn't know about the pain in my heart caused by adoption and she doesn't know that my broken heart also ripples out and touches the people who are connected to me.

I can't come out and throw all that on the table, that would surely scare the daylights out of her and right now it would not be necessary to fill her in on that subject.  And if she is as stubborn as I am then she wouldn't listen anyway, she would have to find out for herself.

Am I getting upset over nothing??  The way she wrote the email I can tell she trying to be stand offish and guarded, that's fine...I understand that.  But the "Good news" part...that is absolutely killing me right now.

And I thought waiting in Limbo for the last 6 years was tough...