new blog site!

This is my new blog site about adoption issues and reunion issues. It will be my main blog.

http://lostadoptee.blogspot.com/

Jane Eyre

So I am in the fourth chapter of Jane Eyre and all I can say here is that I feel really really sorry for this girl! I can't believe....oh wait yes I can. I don't like that people treat others so poorly and I don't personally understand how they can but I do know that it happens. Anytime I read something or watch a movie where an orphan is treated poorly I just want to cry for them. Every child in the world needs someone to love them and take care of them. Not just children either but adults need it as well. We all have a need to be loved and taken care of and protected. Wouldn't the world be a much happier place if that actually happened? Just food for thought. I'm off to bed. Night.

BBC list of 100 books everyone should read

Well as a person who loves to read (although admittedly, I always hated it for school) I looked at a facebook post that listed 100 books that the BBC thinks everyone should read. They estimate most people have read 6. I have read several but I wanted to re-read those I read in school because as stated earlier, I hated them and didn't care, and I want to read those I haven't read yet. The list is as follows:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So here is what I am going to attempt to do: I am going to try to read all of these. I don't want to set a time limit because I am in school but I AM going to read at least a little (preferably at least one chapter) every single day. I will post on here what I am reading and any thoughts I have on the subject. There are five exceptions to this... I have read the entire Harry Potter series repeatedly and will challenge anyone to a battle of trivia. :) I just read To Kill A Mockingbird this past semester for school and I have just re-read Anne Of Green Gables and The Chronicles Of Narnia for fun. The last exception is the Bible because I have read it several times and honestly feel parts of it are very boring (____ begat ____ etc) and there wouldn't be much to say about them. Please don't be offended, I'm not saying anything bad about it at all, I just don't want it to be a part of this.

This project of course does depend on my ability to find these books without purchasing them since both Jason and I are out of work. I have a program on my phone that lets me view books and I have a library card so hopefully I am all set.
Well, I think I am going to start with Jane Eyre.

Just in case you were curious; I have already read 25 of them at some point in my life but many should be re-read as an adult. See you in the stacks.

How to deal with sibling treatment

My sister told me yesterday that because I was stolen and lost so early in life, the family watched everyone with her. She was not even allowed to hug her own father or sit on his lap because it was deemed inappropriate. That is horribly sad to me! I was held and hugged and loved all the time. I always knew I was adopted but I was never treated as if I was. They truly raised me as if I was their own child. I never had to wonder where my clothes or meals were coming from as oppossed to my siblings. I want to meet my brother Chris. He is hating the fact that he is in prison while I am here. I hate it too. Everyone has said that he is not allowed to live with them when he gets out and I worry about that. If he has no support network and no where to live, he will stay where he can and that means he will be living with his old drug buddies and how can he possibly stay clean there? I know he has done this to himself but I do want to help him stay clean. I feel like it is a new start with me and I want him to really understand that. At the same time, I have no patience for the type of trouble he has gotten into before. Amanda says that when he gets out, he will find a way to Charlotte to visit me. I hope he does it the legal way, it would break my heart if he used me as an excuse to break the law.

I have told him that he is important to me. I have told him I love him. I have told him I want to meet him. It's all true. It does drive me nuts though that he talks all the time about how hard his life has been. Okay so your life was hard. Get over it and move on, don't use that as an excuse for your bad choices. I feel like by saying that, he is avoiding responsibilty for his actions. My sister is going to take me to meet my great aunt tomorrow. My grandmother's sister. That is going to be amazing.

It hits me all the time that I am with my birth family but there is so much pain at the thought that I never got to meet my mother or father. They both passed too early. I wish Momma had just written me a letter telling me how she felt about me. I know because everyone is telling me, but I wish I could hear it from her in some way shape or form. It is amazing to have this large family I never knew but my adopted mother doesn't talk to me and I always dreamed of having a mother. It breaks my heart that I was too late to find her. I'm going to sign off before I get too emotional.

Spending Time With Family

Well, I am in Georgia, spending time with my family and introducing my husband to them. I love being here absolutely and I feel accepted and like I fit right in with all of them. I love it here with them. I have two beautiful nieces and a nephew. My brother Marshall made up a photo album full of pictures of our childhood to share with my birth family. I never expected that! I'm so happy. My adopted family seems to accept and be happy for my finding the birth family. I have more emotions than I could ever actually state but my biggest one (other than joy) is guilt. I feel guilty for the way my brother and sister were raised as opposed to the way I was raised. I had a privileged childhood and my siblings struggled and went without. I know that I shouldn't feel guilty because I had no actual control over it but I still do. I'm worried they will end up hating me for it. I don't know what I would do without Amanda, Christopher, or the kids. Gabby, my little snugglebug is curled against me at present and she is going to put on a special show for me. She is acting and directing it and I can't wait. I have an advanced ticket! I am just so disappointed that Chris can't be here for all this. I want to spend time with my brother too. It isn't right that he has been left out of all the fun. Well Amanda has made us dinner so I'm going to sign off for now and write more later. I will just leave it at, God must have had a plan. Amanda just said that she and Chris might have ended up in the foster system and had more of the things they needed but then we might never have found each other. So God has a purpose for everything, we may just not be aware of what it was. That is all for me. Peace out.