Do you skip chapter 1 of every book you read?

The analogy was brilliantly stated by Darryl "DMC" McDaniels in his testimony before a New Jersey Senate panel.

http://www.me-dmc.com/index.cfm/pk/view/cd/NAA/cdi...

Personally, I don't mind having a mystery - as long as by the end of the book, I have the answer. How would you feel if Agatha Christie ended books without revealing who, why and how?

As for the person who insisted that "Lots of people don't know their links to the past. Lots of people don't know their ancestors, their family tree, what genetic diseases they are predisposed to. Being adopted doesn't "steal" that info from you, and it is withheld from MANY people."

- Who else is this information "withheld" from? Not lost or destroyed - WITHHELD.

Adoptees don't even know who their PARENTS are - not just their remote ancestors. There is a three-inch thick file all about me and my family - it is being WITHHELD from me under NY State Law because I was adopted. It's not like "the Yankees burned down the courthouse so I don't have my great-great-great-great-granddaddy's name". This is NOT a case of "what's gone is gone". Change the laws, give me MY records. I'll even fly to New York to pick them up to save you the postage.

ETA: If you think this is about longing for a "different" or "better" adoption experience - you're not getting the point. If you think this is about "remembering" the first year(s) of your life - you're not getting the point. If you're a genealogist or a historian, chances are you understand.

While I admit that many people couldn't care less about their family tree (like my husband who has an entire book about his father's family listing hundreds of relatives) there are others for whom genealogy and history ARE important. Why are their motivations not suspect? Why are they not told - "leave it alone", "you're opening Pandora's Box", "it's all irrelevant", "don't you love your parents?"

For those who insist (or were brainwashed into believing) that their adoption was part of some divine plan, that they were meant to belong to their adoptive family, how come part of the plan was to be born to someone else? And what do you tell those who are abused by their families? Was it some divine plan to either leave them with their abusers - or worse - to have them handed over to abusers?

And yes SLH - Star Wars did begin with Episode IV. If it started with Episode I, we wouldn't have the drama of "Luke, I am your father." We'd already know it. But - there was certainly an audience crying out for Episodes I, II and III - we knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father - but we wanted desperately to understand HOW it all happened. Funny you should pick Star Wars to illustrate how knowing one's ancestry and history is irrelevent. Keep it up!

Wow that is a GREAT analogy to explain exactly how I feel about the missing chunk in my life. Imagine how confusing the rest of the book would be without reading chapter one. And then imagine how difficult it would be if you were reading about a culture you didn't belong to and didn't know much about. Then imagine my life and my confusion.

ETA: Ipnerd, "as an adoptee, you always have the option to go back and read that first 1/2 chapter."

Yeah right. And before you go on and call me an unhappy adoptee, I'm a happy adoptee. I'm just frustrated sometimes by not knowing my real birthdate, real name, etc. The chances I might get to read even the first line of my first chapter are slim to none. Without a real birthdate, the only name I had given to me by an orphanage, no real record of my actual birth, there is little chance I might get to know my origin.

I missed out on knowing my mother`s parents...she broke off contact with them just after I was born (aparently from the little hints I got they were pretty nasty people)

This is only a little hole in my life...but I feel a sense of loss from that. Recently I have decided that I want to do a search of my own to find out more about them.....find death certificates/ graves etc. Of course this should be reasonably easy as I can start with my own birth certificate and work back.

I don`t know their first names, or when they died (I am assuming they would be dead by now) or their nationalities.

I often wondered about them....not that I necessarily wanted a relationship with them...but their stories were part of my history and I just wanted to know.

I didn`t feel I could ask my mother about her parents....because she had her own feelings and issues with them....and I didn`t want to betray her. I guess I also felt I should be grateful for my mother for protecting me.

This is nothing like the whole missing chapter at the beginning of the book (more like a missing page).....but it still was a feeling of loss.

I am grateful that my daughter doesn`t have any missing pages...she has lots of relatives hanging from her family tree. 4 living grandparents (one step) and a great-grandmother and not only knows her dead grandmother`s name (my mother) she even has it as her middle name.

I can`t imagine how awful it must be to have a whole missing chapter and have to accept that....and then to have to feel guilty for wanting to know more.

Honestly, I feel like I started somewhere in chapter 5 or 6. I feel like there is so much deep history behind me, but I have no clue, and may never know. I want to know everything though. I'm a history buff and read constantly, and the thought of missing the first chapters of a book makes me itch. VERY GOOD analogy. Very intuitive.

It seemed like you jump around alittle on present, past, etc. The story was interesting enough. It seems like you could maybe "reflect" while you are on the plane about why you were leaving if the main story is about the boy you met, and the boyfriend. I get the feeling that is where the meat of the story is going to be and just when it was getting good the chapter ended :) Good luck to you!!

I'm a second generation "no history" myself.

My mother was estranged from her family and I never met them - they're all dead now so that boat has sailed. My parents are divorced, and mother has been estranged from me for 9 years (they're a weird lot, suddenly stopping talking to each other for years and years with no apparent reason).

My father was adopted so his memories begin in an orphanage five years after the second world war. He was adopted by a family for a few years and then the mother died and the father put him back in the orphanage where he was adopted out again.

When I was pregnant, they kept asking "any family history of...." and I honestly couldn't say. I have no one to ask and in my fathers case, no one knows. So I am missing background and recent history, no family history and no one to ask about my own childhood - my father doesn't remember anything, but he's a guy.

If no one cared about chapter 1, the Bible would not be the best selling book of all time. And if its creation story was banned--really, honestly banned--there would be war. Actual war with death, bloodshed, and such. That's how much value people put on chapter one.

Santa's Little Helper, I hate to point out the obvious, but that's because Luke was adopted. Well, at least oblivious to his full birth story. I guess Leah was adopted.

An artist boyfriend of mine used to tear paperbacks in half and distribute the halves between us for reading. Both of us would read our portion. Both of us would be left wanting, longing to answer questions. At some point, we would trade halves to connect the story in our minds - but Invariably, pages would fall out during the process and get lost forever. It was our job to fill in the loss and complete the story.

We adoptees are not art projects. We are human beings. It is natural to want our stories to feel whole. But our lives were disrupted and our stories torn in half by others, and there will always be pages missing.

My chapters one and two and three are in someone else's hands , across the ocean, written in a foreign language. One can gloss over a missing page or two. But whole chapters, the beginning half of the book - not possible. So I must get on a plane to find it. That's the great thing about planes - they travel in both directions.

YES, DEAR answerer. I am being dramatic. Having a three year hole in your life makes you dramatic.

Can I ask what you would like to do about this? I am the mother of a young girl adopted at 14 months of age. Nothing is known about her birth, her birth parents, her birth family. Nothing. No one is withholding information from her, the information is simply not available. (She was abandoned shortly after birth, and even the authorities where she was found were unable to locate her birth family.) She is welcome to whatever information we have. She is welcome to feel whatever she feels about this when she fully understands it all and welcome to look for whatever answers she can find when she is ready to look.

Are you suggesting that she should never allow herself to feel happy or to accept that her life, however imperfect, is the only life she's going to get and that making herself miserable over facts that cannot be changed may not be the best use of the time she has for living?

I'm not trying to diminish your feelings, but we all have stuff in our lives we'd rather hadn't happened or weren't true. I am speaking as a person who has wasted far too much life by failing to recognize that there is seldom any redress in this lifetime for unfairness, and that I simply needed to get on with - life.

I do think about this from my daughter's perspective. It makes me sad to know that she will likely never meet or even know anything about her birth family. I pray that it will not be a major issue for her, but I also accept that it might. And I pray that she will also come to accept what cannot be changed and live her life well.

I know you may not see this as an answer to your questions, but it's what I have to offer. (And no, I don't skip chapter one, although sometimes I do miss the beginning of a movie without losing the whole plot line. I don't like it, but if it's a matter of "see the rest of the movie and enjoy it as best I can," or, "miss the movie entirely," I'll generally choose the first option.)

Chapter one is the knowledge of who created you, where you came from in terms of blood and ancestry.

Adoptees are told this information is irrelevant, all that matters is their adoptive family. This is illogical and contrary to the laws of nature - we all have a fundamental need to start at chapter 1 - to know where we came from, how we were created, who are ancestors are, are links to the past.

This is all vital information to our understanding of our place in the universe. There is no legitimate reason for withholding this from adoptees.