When I was Jewish

As you probably know, I'm 100% Mexican.

For ten years, I thought I was Jewish.

No kidding.

My adoptive dad told me my birth mother was Jewish. Then he changed the story and said she was Latina, but my father was a German Jew.

When I did well in school, he whispered it was because I had Jewish blood.

Whispered because adoption was a taboo subject. Plus, he's an anti-semite.

So for an entire decade, I began to explore what it meant to be Jewish while raised as a Mexican Catholic.

Then I began to ask, "how did this happen?" I was told that I should have been placed in a Jewish home. And then I got angry. If I had gone to a Jewish family, I could have had a lovely bat-mizvah and been raised around books and my plan to go to college would have been encouraged, not sabotaged. During that time I had kids. So I sent them to Jewish pre-schools. Gosh, I even learned how to make those little triangle pastries and a killer brisket. Okay, a somewhat superficial exploration of my Jewish side, but stilll. You get the idea. A whole lot of time and effort was spent thinking of myself as a Jew. Or part Jewish. A big deal if you're raised with saints on alters and St. Jude on the dashboard. A personal paradigm shift. I LOVED it.

And then in a day, I was no longer Jewish.

My non-identifying information had arrived.

Mother? Mexican. Father? Mexican national of German ancestry.

Confused and furious, I called my adoptive father. "Why did you tell me I was Jewish, for Christ's sake?"

"That's what the social worker told us," he replied. "That your mother was a German Jew."

The lights went off. My narcissistic adoptive father doesn't listen. He can't attend to a conversation like most folks. When somebody is talking about something that doesn't interest him, his mind wanders.

"You mean my father was a German Jew?" I asked, thinking of the German ancestry reference.

"I guess," he said.

More prodding revealed that my adoptive father had added one and one and came up with five. He ASSUMED that my adoptive father was a German Jew who'd escaped to Mexico during WWII. Wrongo.

When I finished scolding him for his error, he said he didn't know what the fuss was about. It didn't matter to him whether I was a Jew or not.

"Gee thanks," I snarked. "That's big of you."

This is the problem with adoption. We adoptees are at the mercy of adoptive parents and others who hold the key to our identity. Obviously, some of them (like my adoptive parents) are not capable of acting in a responsible manner. Either heritage is important. Or it isn't. Society can't have it both ways. You can't have the whole genealogy craze AND simultaneously argue genealogy is no big deal and quit obsessing about it. You can't say, as odious Thomas Atwood did on NPR the other day, that the adoptive family is adequate to the formation of an adoptee's identity, when the adoptive family is sometimes INADEQUATE.