How I Thought I Was Going to Turn Out, Pt. 1

This story is kind of long and rambling, but I'm a firm believer that you need to have all the pieces in order to fully understand this story. I'll tie it up all nicely in the end, I think. I hope.

So you know how when you're a little girl, you would play with your dolls and play house? You grow up thinking about that man you're going to marry and the 2.5 kids you'll have with the dog and the white picket fence? Yeah, that was never me. Not that I didn't play with dolls and play house.

When I was 7 years old my Mom, Wiki and I were shopping at JC Penney when I noticed that there was a Cabbage Patch Kid sitting atop one of the rotary clothes racks. I pulled him down, looked around and couldn't see any other little girls looking for their dolls. I took the doll over to my Mom and showed it to her. Of course she thought that I had taken the doll from someone so I showed her where I got it from. She asked me if I had taken it out of the packaging and I said it was just sitting there. Wiki pointed out that the clothes/shoes/doll didn't look new. So we walked around and we stopped Moms with kids and asked if they had misplaced a doll. None had so after about an hour my Mom decided that we could keep it. At the time there was no way I would have ever gotten a CPK on my own. They were about $30-$50 dollars and my Mom was in no way going to spend that much on a doll. I remember thinking "How could anyone leave him sitting there? How could they forget they put him down? How could they walk away from him?" But then I knew he was mine. I no longer cared where he'd been, why he was left behind, or anything. He was mine.

Quick side bar here: My Dad was obsessed with computers and technology. He always wanted the latest thing. Sometime before the whole JC Penney scene, he convinced my Mom to buy a Coleco Adam. With it you got a $500 college savings fund (which was like the cost of the system) and a rebate for a free Cabbage Patch Kid. We mailed off for it and she arrived. She was really pretty, but remained in a plastic bag on top of my parent's hutch in their bedroom. Like I said before, there was no way my mom was going to pay for an actual CPK and since we only got one and there were two of us, it was decided that the doll would be kept as a collector's item. Neither one of us got her.

So back to the day of the JC Penney trip. We got home that evening and there was a decision to be made. As I was the youngest and very much a spoiled brat, Wiki let me decide which CPK I wanted. I knew right away, I wanted him. I named him Marc Allen, made him an adoption certificate like the one that came with Wiki's. I loved him. He looked nothing like me—pale, blonde and blue eyed—but I loved him. I played with him all the time, even when playing with my other toys. During the day he lived on my bed instead of in the toy box. Then about a year later my Mom and Wiki came home with two new CPKs (the ones that could hold pencils and wore glasses). Marc Allen and I welcomed Miguel Andres (whose original name was Headley Roy—yuck! Quickly renamed!) to the family. Miguel Andres was older, looked more like me with his darker hair and made our play family whole. I loved that my CPKs came to me, I didn't choose them. I loved that we made a family and that they were "adopted."

I think that's when I started thing about adopting. I started thinking about what would happen when I grew up. I always wanted a big house, but not because it was big, but because I could adopt lots of kids then. I pictured myself opening up my house to all these kids. But no where did getting married and having kids of my own factor into it. I always pictured it just being me. And the adopted kids.