My Sweet Boogs

My sweet Boogs, what a wonderful birthday present this is!  You’re absolutely right we have so little one-on-one time and I love the time that I spend with you so much.  You know that I never planned to get married – I kind of got conned into it.  There’s no question that I’ve always loved your dad, but I just never planned to marry or to have children – it just wasn’t in my mental script.  After living together for 4 ½ years, your dad announced to me one day that I wouldn’t marry him he was leaving.  I loved him and couldn’t imagine life without him so I married him when I was 34 (I originally met him when I was 29 and he was 19).  We had a crazy, hippie style life together.  I found myself cast more and more into the spotlight as I accepted more and more important jobs (only one of which I ever “applied for” – the rest were just offered to me—oftentimes more than once).  As you probably know, if I had not broken my neck I probably never would have gotten an education –which is probably why I have never overly hassled you about your education (notice that I said “overly”).  I kept getting offers for more and bigger jobs and usually ended up grudgingly accepting them.  I was content to just make a living – enough to support your dad and me.  But, as luck would have it, bigger and better jobs came my way and I eventually became more and more successful in my professional life.  In the early to mid 1980s, I began to feel as if my life was missing something.  Your dad and I became foster parents to a 12-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his parents.  He had two brothers and the three of them live at a facility kind of like an orphanage that was run by a church group.  I felt that the three brothers should be kept together.  A family tried to adopt them and ended up keeping just one of them.  It made me really sad to see that happen to those brothers.  The boy who was living with us as a foster child deeply believed that his parents would come back to get him one day.  We kept in touch with him until he got to the age of 18 when he moved out of the facility that he was returned to after the “adoption” with the other family didn’t work and they just kept one of his brothers.  It was then that I started realizing that all my feelings about not wanting to be a parent were probably something that I was hiding behind because of my absolutely horrible childhood.  I told your dad that I wanted to adopt a child.  He thought that I was absolutely out of my mind.  I was in my mid-40s by this time and we were living in Tallahassee.  Your dad was working at a halfway house for delinquent boys.  His best friend at work was named Mike.  Both Mike and his sister had been adopted.  One day, Mike came to work and announced to your dad that his niece was pregnant and wanted to know how to go about having her expected child adopted.  Your dad immediately called me and I had the best adoption attorney in Tallahassee get in touch with Mike’s niece and arrange for us to pay for her prenatal care and your birth.  She was only weeks pregnant when she found out and called Mike.  Consequently, we were able to keep up with her whole pregnancy through Mike and his wife – approximately 8 ½ months!  Mike’s wife kept calling me and giving me progress reports.  At one point, she called and said that your birth mother’s doctor suspected that she was going to have twins.  I told her that she absolutely couldn’t tell your dad – he would probably have a stroke!  She later called me and told me that you are going to be twins – that you were just a very large baby.  At the time, the cast director for Disney World was a friend of mine and had found out that we were expecting a baby.  He was just in the process of leaving Disney World to accept a job as tourism director for Vail, Colorado.  As luck would have it, he had three young sons so he sent me three large boxes of boys baby clothes. I still didn’t know whether you were  going to be a boy or a girl.  I called Sarah, Mike’s wife to find out the result of the ultrasound that your birth mother had gotten to find out that she was just going to have a large baby and not twins. She didn’t want to tell me, but after my telling her that I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea about how to raise a girl child and I had three boxes of boys baby clothes and if you were a girl you would have a major gender identity problem, she confessed that you were going to be a boy.  I was absolutely overjoyed!  (To be continued…)