<p>I agree, I am amazed at her (Momsdream’s) story. Wow!!</p>
<p>Thanks all. It really is interesting, if I do say so. The details become even more interesting when I think of how I learned my original first name - Suzanne, which was a slight variation of her first name - Susan, by rubbing the back of foster home pictures with a pencil and finding the name, which had been written and then erased at some point. And then how I used the name Suzanne to call State Vital Statistics with the name, date and county of birth to get them to look up a birth certificate…and the young, unsuspecting girl on the other end said “no babies named Suzanne were born in that county on that date…but there was a birth to a mom named SUSAN…but that baby girl was never named…wait…hold on (gasp)”…click. Bingo!</p>
<p>Really it was 6 months of being a detective - and this was all before I owned a computer and was only 20. And then to find her and hear all the history and drama…it was really a shock. </p>
<p>I’m sure Oprah has enough of these stories to keep her busy for a while. </p>
<p>If I die today, I really can’t complain that my life was boring!!</p>
<p>“Get that boy outta the house”</p>
<p>I don’t understand Cangel. What boy? My S? Why?</p>
<p>Momsdream, after you get your S out of the house, if you find time, write a book. I don’t know about Oprah, but being rich instantly would help you out, wouldn’t it? :)</p>
<p>p.s - Made a huge assumption that you are not rich right now (but comfortably well off), and I could be shocked again!</p>
<p>standard middle class achat. Instantly rich? I can’t imagine :)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t even consider writing a book while her father is still alive - and maybe while she is, too. I’m not that fond of that heritage, and neither is she.</p>
<p>Momsdream, when we finally get my son out of the house (he’s 13) we will be so dead old, all the fun will be over - you’ll get your son out of COLLEGE, and just be getting your second wind! Hope you don’t have any little ones left at home. Just feeling a little tired these days ;).</p>
<p>Cangel…ha…temporary insanity leaves me with a first grader at home…speaking of tired.</p>
<p>Talking about little ones. SBMom, frazzled, dancersmom: My D called it Uhssigh. This is because she was one of those 45 minutes a side children and I would have to say, “Other side” to get her to switch. It was useful, because shopkeepers would hear her say “Uhssigh mommy, ussigh!” and think she wanted to go Outside. My S called it Lanli, just because his tongue would be hanging out of his mouth and he would be almost panting. Stick your tongue out and make the vowel sound A and you will know what I mean. I am so not kidding you.</p>
<p>momsdream- that is some story. You are very, very lucky that you got to ultimately meet your biological mom and good for you for playing sleuth.</p>
<p>No great hooks here - although I did birth two nine pound babies with no drugs AFTER pushing for three hours. I did play #1 singles on my high school badminton team - that might have been the hook that got me into Duke lo those many years ago.</p>
<p>I know more about sports than any other mom and I crush my family every night when we sit around and play family Jeopardy - my kids are always pressing me to apply to be on.</p>
<p>But really, pretty dull and boring and pale in comparison to everyone else here. But if I ever really do get on Jeopardy, I’ll be sure to put it in my resume!</p>
<p>Wow Momsdream. Your story makes me believe that maybe we do get not what we think we want but what is good for us. Wow. Just wow.</p>
<p>Amazing story, Momsdream. Did you ever get acquainted with your bio father?</p>
<p>kissy - no. That’s the remaining mystery…and I’ve not yet found the energy to begin playing detective again. She gave me his name and said she barely knew him. He was an artist, which is how they became acquainted (she was a budding artist and would go to his apartment to see what he was working on). However, she said he spoke with an accent - and she doesn’t know what kind of accent it was. After she returned from giving birth to me in Florida, she went to look for him at the old apartment building and the neighbors told her that he had left for Europe. She doesn’t know if he was from Europe originally or if he just went there for some other reason. He had very fair skin and green eyes - which could mean any number of things about his ethnicity and origin.</p>
<p>See why I don’t have the energy to try to find him now? Talk about a needle in a haystack! I do wish I could find him, though. She also doesn’t want me to find him. She’s said as much and has asked me to never mention him again - even though I only asked about him once. I asked for his name, which she gave, and that was it. We’ve never spoken of him again. It’s selfish, on her part, to shut me out of that part for whatever reason. I think there’s strong discomfort with him being black, or whatever he was, being so contradictory to how she was raised. Some of it is really too confusing and irrational for me to try to understand, so I leave it alone.</p>
<p>When she and I reunited several years ago, she told me that my resemblance to him was shocking - and seeing me immediately took her back to the apartment and him.</p>
<p>I have really enjoyed reading this thread but I am a sea slug compared to the rest of you! [The poster who managed to get all her dishes prepared at the same time especially depressed me: I often give the kids their Italian brocolli fifteen minutes after their panko chicken!] </p>
<p>My own hook isn’t too exciting, but here goes:
I have a perfectly stable weight. I weighed 110 lbs. in high school and at age 47 I weigh 111. I gained twenty lbs with each pregnancy and lost it both times within two weeks after having each child. I never diet and I eat what I want, which is usually exactly what I have fixed for my two hungry teenage boys. If they put me in a lab, they could discover a secret worth billions! One of my aunts is also perenially thin. We compared notes once and we both eat unusually slowly, so we don’t end up finishing everything on the plate. We are also, strangely enough, both sort of low energy types. [Like I said, sea slugs. :-)]</p>
<p>Of course it was nitric acid. That’s what we used back in the chem lab when I was in college, all of us constantly having a dish with a couple of pennies going, trying to see if we could get them down to the exact size of a dime in an attempt to fool the vending machines (back in the days when a dime could buy something).</p>
<p>I cannot have a baby either with or without drugs, but I do write about them (drugs, not babies) and certain other scientific matters most every day.</p>
<p>Having a Senior Moment, I cannot at the moment remember what hooks I have or even whether I have them. All I can submit is a recap of my own plagiarized Personal Essay:</p>
<p>I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam.</p>
<p>Good weekend, y’all.</p>
<p>I’m sorry folks, I realize this is way off your topic. Mmm, maybe I could say that my “hook” is that I’m a cancer survivor?</p>
<p>Carolyn, I would really like to know about your non-profit that deals with paraneoplastic disorders. I have a friend from a melanoma BB who has been waiting for three months for the lab results of a patented antibody test to see if his neurologist can identify the cause of his unexplained tremors. He, too, is a melanoma survivor. The test came back inconclusive, and now he has to have it done again. Frustration is high. He could use some good information. Could you post a web address? Or you could email me from the CC profile thing.</p>
<p>Again, my apologies to everyone for crashing in here. I was just so startled to see a reference to paraneoplastic disorders. </p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>I’ve performed publicly on more than a dozen musical instruments (but never more than two or three of them at the same time). I’ve forgotten the words to a song on national television. I used to be a PI lawyer, until I looked in the mirror one day and said, “I’m really an IP lawyer, only the P is backwards.” My friends had a pool to predict how many months pregnant my wife would be before she matched me in waist size; the winner picked “8”. I speak Chinese well enough that Chinese speakers on the telephone often assume I’m a native speaker of a different dialect of Chinese. For 20 years, people thought I looked to be about 40 years old. Dear friends have told me they’re astounded by how good looking my sons are.</p>
<p>okay, greybeard, that was a truly funny post. How did you learn to speak Chinese so well?</p>
<p>momsdream,</p>
<p>That is really an incredible beginning to life. I was very moved. I have a story somewhat like yours if you remove the racial aspect. I was born to a teenager–left at the local catholic orphanage, and eventually raised by my single and deaf great grandmother who got me out of the orphanage with the acquiescence of my mother and her father (when my great grandmother died, in 1982, she was the oldest deaf person in Michigan). I was also born in Detroit, 1959.
My Great Grandmother (Francis) married my deaf Great Grandfather (Clyde) after his first wife (and my biological G. Grandmother) Nelly, died. Clyde died the year I was born. Francis was never able to have kids of her own so I was her first and only baby. Francis herself was the result of a Priest impregnating a nun in Germany in an illicit affair. The Priest sent the nun along with her baby (my G.G.), in the 1890s, to America to avoid the scandal her birth would have caused. On the boat on the way to New York she contracted scarlet fever and became deaf at 2 years old. She was 70 years old when she got her first baby, me.</p>
<p>Considering your complicating circumstances this may not apply, but I was eventually able to talk to my mother about my father. When this happened she was all ears and full of her own stories. Once I told her I had found him she wanted to know everything and in turn told me all she could remember. I was 27 at the time.
My father lived in Denver, Ill never forget getting off the airplane and looking at the faces in the crowd and knowing instantly which one was my father
we looked identical. He was a wonderful man. He felt terrible about all of the circumstances surrounding my birth. </p>
<p>He remarried while I knew him and asked me to be his best man. I really loved him. He died of cancer 7 years to the day after I met him. Im really happy I went the extra mile to find him. It made all the difference. I hope you meet yours some day.</p>
<p>Good looks, charm, and family money</p>
<p>My hook? I’ve somehow tapped into some kind of mystic connectedness, as I’ll explain. First, let me tell you that I am in no way any kind of “spiritualist” or the kind of person that believes in ESP or anything of that ilk. But over the past few years, some things have happened that I cannot explain. My best friend from high school is someone I speak with about once per year and that I see about once every two years. We just pick up where we left off a year earlier. About two years ago, I got the sudden urge to call him. No sense of anything wrong, but just a “I-haven’t-talked-to-him-in-a-long-time” kind of thing. When I called his office, I was told that he was in an ambulance THAT MINUTE on his way to the hospital with what turned out to be an acute prostate problem. What a coincidence, I thought. </p>
<p>We had some further conversations then, but about 6 months later I got the same urge to call. Again, no sense of any emergency. I called his house and his daughter told me that his wife was driving him - THAT MINUTE - to the hospital because his problem came back.</p>
<p>And then again some months later I got this feeling about calling him again. But I stopped and told myself that this would be a test. This had to be coincidental. And again I had no feeling of emergency about calling, but I did want this call to be a test. I called his office and his secretary told me that he had gone home for the day. So I dialed his home, but some feeling told me to hang up before anyone answered; I waited and called him at his office the next day. He was glad that I didn’t call his home and have his wife answer and get worried, but he was having another crisis - THAT MINUTE - that I called.</p>
<p>This is very wierd, but is it a “hook?”</p>