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Many of you have heard bits and pieces of my story. I am hoping that it will open up doors for me to help others but here is the full story. It is long and can be found in the October 2010 issue of ELLE magazine. Thanks for reading and take care all.
The clues to the great secret
were always there, but
growing up in a neat-as-apin
beige ranch house in
northeast Portland, Oregon,
in the 1980s, Amanda
Campbell could never connect
them. It was like trying
to see the outline of a forest
made of mirror trees. Supposedly
she had two baby books; someone
had half-joked about it long ago—back when
everyone was still talking—but she could
only ever open the pink ribbony one filled
out in her mother’s flawless script, the one
that told how much she weighed, ate, and
slept in her first year of life, that described the
gymnastics and dance classes she took, the
words she babbled before she was five.
The mystery deepened with the color of
her skin. She began life relatively pale, but
by the time she was 9 or 10, she was much
darker than her mother and father and
baby sister, and her hair was kinkier. In
high school the kids would mutter, “She’s
the black girl who thinks she’s white”—but
what else was she supposed to think? She’d
been told she was white for as long as she
could remember. She’d first started asking
when she was 12, and, well, hadn’t her dad
gotten ruddier as he got older, as years of
boozing stacked up behind him? Maybe,
just maybe, there was a recessive African
gene in him, Amanda thought, a gene he
despised enough to call her the N-word
sometimes when he was drunk.
Amanda’s suspicion that she wasn’t her
parents’ biological child was always there,
like a faint bell clanging louder every year,
but she didn’t really push her mother on
the matter until she herself was a mother,
with one young son and twins on the way.
Then, Amanda learned the story that
belongs in her second baby book. She
also learned that while society endlessly
debates which matters more—nature or
nurture—sometimes both are wholly inadequate
to explain why the girl becomes
the woman she is. No matter how much we
know about our origins, the closer we look,
the more we realize that who we are, even
why we exist, may remain a mystery.
Amanda is a caramel-colored, cleareyed
mother of three with a wide smile
and blond-streaked curly brown hair. Her
voice has an appealing combination of
gentleness and confidence, and she rarely
raises it, no matter what her three young
sons are getting into. Thirty years old, she
has her mom’s perfectionist bent, her penchant
for maintaining order inside and out.
Messy feelings go in a notebook she carries
everywhere with her. She apologizes for
the state of her spotless house. Her husband,
Jason Campbell, recently quit his job
as a car salesman, but Amanda keeps the
paychecks coming in and her own spirits
up. There’s a sign on her bedroom door:
EVERYDAY GOALS. The list is drill-sergeant
simple: “Walk. Drink 64 ounces of water.
Read the Bible for five minutes. Organize
for 10 minutes.” In other words, she has the
can-do, will-do armor of a survivor—but
she is more than that. She has a liveliness,
an intelligence, an unfussy kindness about
her that will leave me marveling, the more
What do you do when you’re 28 years old
and you’re certain you’re adopted, but your
family continues to insist you aren’t? Amanda
Campbell struck out on her own to find out
who she really was, and what she discovered
was nothing short of shocking.
By Nina Burleigh
THE RACE
TO FIND
MYSELF
Amanda Campbell, age 12
Hands: Gary Houlder/Corbis; Campbell: courtesy of subject
E L L E 420 w w w. e l l e . c o m
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I learn of her story. The apple was thrown,
hurled, whipped from the tree.
“After I was 18, I just always figured I
was adopted,” Amanda tells me as we sit
in her station wagon in front of the ranch
house where she grew up. She now lives
five hours south of here, in Rogue River,
where she works as part jailer/part counselor
for boys in a state juvenile detention
center. Her children, the twins and their
older brother, are sleeping in their car seats,
sweaty, coated with milk shake. “When I
envisioned my real parents, I envisioned a
white girl who had a thing with a black boy
and her family wouldn’t accept it.”
Her baby book describes a circle of
warmth. On the page for “first birthday
party,” her mother wrote: “A big party. 25
people. Mandy had a Holly Hobbie cake
made for her. Mom made it.” Each present
is listed. Twenty-four people came
to the second birthday, where they ate a
cat-and-mouse cake. Her mom, Amanda
says, aimed for a household of scrupulous
middle-class normality. “She really cared
about how things looked. At Christmas,
we would have to pose for a picture after
we opened each present.”
Young Amanda did her part to buff the
family’s surfaces. She got good grades,
played sports and the flute. Even the
asthma from which she has suffered since
infancy had an upside: She was selected as
the National Asthma and Allergy Poster
Child in 1992, and she and her mother traveled
to Washington, DC, where she got her
photo taken with the first President Bush.
The picture lost some of its shine as
Amanda got older. The family gradually
ceased contact with relatives on her
mother’s side, such that Amanda’s maternal
grandmother just dropped off Christmas
presents at the door and hustled away, never
staying for dinner. As for Amanda, she
kept her “good girl” cred—solid report
cards, no drinking or drugs—but in her
mid-teens, she says, she became depressed.
There were teenage hormones to contend
with, her father’s drinking had accelerated,
and her parents had ugly fights. And
then there was her skin, her inexplicable
dark skin. “Once I started middle school,
almost daily the question would come up,
‘What are you?’ ” Amanda recalls. “In the
beginning, I didn’t even understand the
question. After I figured it out, I’d say, ‘I’m
white, I guess,’ or, ‘My parents are white,
so I guess that makes me white’ ”—answers
that, as one can imagine, made her the subject
of much jeering among her classmates.
“My mother didn’t want to hear about
it,” Amanda says. “I would write little notes
telling her I thought I needed therapy. She
would put them back on my bed, folded
up, and never say anything.” At 15, after a
family argument, Amanda was sent to her
room, where she swallowed 80 Tylenols but
quickly told her parents, who took her to
get her stomach pumped. A social worker
interviewed her in her hospital bed about
the family discord but never followed up.
“That was the low point in my life. After
that, I promised myself I would never let
myself get that down. And I haven’t.”
Following graduation from high
school, she gathered up enough scholarship
and loan money to go to Southern
Oregon University, where in 2003 she
became the first person in her family to
earn a four-year college degree, a bachelor’s
in human communications with a
minor in criminology. She married Jason,
whom she met in a bar, a year later.
A combination of factors drove Amanda
to find out once and for all where she came
from: her pregnancy and the news that
her father had been admitted to a nursing
home suffering from brain degeneration
with a possible genetic component. (By
that point, her parents had divorced, and
her mother had remarried.) Afraid she
might pass something dangerous to her
unborn babies, she ordered her birth certificate
from the state. Eight weeks later,
the envelope arrived. “I was on the phone;
Jason walked in with it and said, ‘You need
to see this.’ ” And there, on the line for
“Mother,” was the name of a woman she’d
never heard of: Katherine Stockton.* The
line for “Father” was blank.
Amanda called her mother, reaching
her in the stands at a hockey game in Portland,
sitting with her stepchildren. On the
cell phone, her mother blurted out the
story. “She said, ‘We never wanted you
to know,’ ” according to Amanda. “Kathy
Stockton was my sister,” Amanda’s mother
continued. “She was profoundly retarded
because your grandmother had German
measles and refused to have an abortion.
Kathy Stockton was raped, and you are
her child.” She added that she didn’t know
if the rapist was ever caught, but that she’d
heard he was “probably Hispanic.” And,
she said, Amanda’s real mother was dead.
“In that moment, my whole life changed,”
Amanda wrote later. “But really nothing
changed, the muffling was gone, and I was
now standing in the bell tower as the bell
rang incessantly; the vibrations made it
hard…to pay attention to anything other
than the loud sound of the bell.”
Reeling, Amanda confided in her closest
friend. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe
my mother or not. I was six months
pregnant. That night, I woke up hyperventilating,
having a panic attack.” She
decided she needed to know more, not
less. She drove to the state records office
in Portland and found that there was no
death certificate for a Katherine Stockton.
She went to the pediatrician who’d cared
for her as a child in Portland. He wasn’t
in, but another doctor in the practice confirmed
the story. It seemed everyone had
known about it but her.
Around this time, CNN aired a documentary,
Where’s Molly?, about a man
named Jeff Daly who’d tracked down his
long-lost sister, a former resident of Fairview
Training Center, a home for the mentally
disabled. One of Amanda’s coworkers
saw it, and Amanda called Cindy Daly,
Jeff’s wife, who’d produced the program
and had vast contacts in the Oregon human
services system. Within two days,
Cindy told Amanda that her mother was
living in a group home in Portland, not
two miles from where Amanda had gone
to high school.
In 1956, Linda Beard, 17 years old and
pregnant, boarded a train from Portland,
Oregon, headed for her boyfriend at an
Air Force base in Georgia. She was a lean
looker with fine Nordic features and had
never been east of the Oregon state line.
Her mother packed her some sandwiches
and told her not to talk to strangers, and
for the next three days, Linda made the
sandwiches last, kept her mouth shut, and
watched the continent go by.
At the base in Georgia, her high school
beau, Dale Stockton,* was training to fly
military jets. After she gave birth to their
little girl, Linda went to work as a nursing
aide in the county hospital. Two years
later, she became pregnant with their
On a cell phone, her
mother blurted out
the story: “We never
wanted you to know.”
*Name changed
E L L E 422 w w w. e l l e . c o m
ELLE READERREPORT
second child, just, it so happened, as she
contracted German measles. The doctors
told her there was a chance that her
baby wouldn’t be born “right.” “They
said I could have an abortion or take my
chances, because I was less than 24 hours
pregnant when I got sick,” Linda recalls.
“They’d traced it down that far. And I said,
‘For 24 hours, I’ll take my chances.’ ”
Linda moved back to Portland to give
birth to another girl, whom she named
Katherine. Within six weeks, Linda realized
her daughter was indeed not right. Her
pale eyes were sightless, she wasn’t growing,
and she barely moved. Dale came home
from service in Greenland in time for the
first of seven operations on Kathy’s eyes and
three on her heart. She survived, but Linda
was told her girl would never function beyond
an infant level.
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Her marriage soon collapsed. He was
a nice man,Ӕ Linda says of her ex, 50 years
on, reminiscing from inside her cat-filled,
two-room, railroad-style house in a ramshackle
neighborhood near the airport in
Portland. Down the weedy highway a few
blocks from her home, theres a billboard
from the Clackamas Sheriff: ғ1 in 4 Girls is
abused before she is 18. Its OK to Tell.Ҕ To
the east, the snowcapped peak of Mount
Hood pokes through the clouds like a mirage.
But when Kathy turned out the way
she turned out, he couldnӒt handle it.
Linda really couldnԒt handle it either.
After she and Dale split, she took a job slinging
burgers at a diner while her mother
raised her older daughter. As for her sick
child, Kathy, Linda took doctors advice to
relinquish her parental rights to the state, as
was still common practice for the severely
mentally disabled in the 1960s. The little
girl was sent to live at the Fairview Training
Center, a massive 1,400-bed institution
made up of clusters of buildings set on
700 rolling green acres. The facility was
located an hour south of Portland, in the
state capitol of Salem, and Linda says she
tried to visit once a month, but she found
the place, and her daughterҒs inability to
recognize her, deeply depressing.
Meanwhile, Dale remarried a woman
with kids of her own and drifted out of their
lives. When Kathy was about 12, he drove
to Fairview one morning and spent the
whole day with her, as she lay on a bed in a
fetal position. The next day, he committed
suicide. Dale apparently had many problems,
but this was how he chose to spend
his last day: saying goodbye to a daughter
hed essentially erased from his life.
In the summer of 1979, Kathy had just
turned 19. She had her motherҒs thick, pale
hair and facial structure and a voluptuous
upper body. The hospital superintendent
recalls her as rather attractive, though she
was only four feet tall, weighed less than 70
pounds, wore diapers, and was fed mashed
food with a spoon. She couldnt speak and
expressed her dislikes by scratching.
For other people her age, it was a summer
of disco, hot pants, ғMy Sharona,
and Jimmy CarterԒs last stand. For Kathy,
it was the season that Emanuel MannyӔ
Sistrunk, a 31-year-old high school dropout,
showed up in her life. Chicago born
and bred, Sistrunk was not an exemplary
citizen. Hed gotten a girl he met in Boston
pregnant, and he was later incarcerated
for a year in Oregon for raping a homeless
16-year-old. Another time, he distinguished
himself with the law by stepping
out in front of then Vice President Walter
MondaleҒs motorcade to protest his joblessness.
Sistrunk landed a job at Fairview
in 1979 under a federal recession-busting
program known as CETA (Comprehensive
Employment and Training Act). His
new employer didnt have a much better
reputation than he did. Established by
the Oregon State Legislature in 1908 to
house the ғfeebleminded, by the 1960s,
when Kathy was admitted, Fairview had
reached its highest population level, with
close to 3,000 inhabitants. Conditions in
the so-called cottagesԗwhich once had
been said to resemble magnificent southern
mansionsӔwere notoriously bad.
Disabled children were lined up in cots
and received the sketchiest of education
and training; assaults among the residents
were common. Sistrunk was put to work in
the cottage for severely disabled women.
In October, Linda got a call at the diner:
דYoure going to have a baby,Ҕ a hospital
supervisor told her. Kathy was pregnant.
The first thing I thought was, I need a
cigarette,Ӕ Linda says. The second was,
IӒm going to kill someone. She drove to
Salem immediately.
Hospital superintendent Jerry McGee
explained that Kathy had been on a special
feeding program, and when sheԒd started
gaining weight, doctors credited the extra
nutrition. Now tests showed Kathy was five
months pregnant. Too late for an abortion,
Linda thought. Kathy wasnt the only one:
Another woman in the same cottage, diagnosed
with profound autism, was also five
months along.
Linda agreed to take KathyҒs baby,
though it was touch-and-go whether
67-pound Kathy would even survive the
pregnancy. On January 25, 1980, University
Hospital North doctors in Portland
delivered a two-pound infant via
C-section. No one knows what Kathy comprehended.
I stood outside the door while
they did it and listened,Ӕ Linda says. She
laughed through the whole thing.Ӕ
Linda named the girl Amanda. Nurses
gave Kathy a doll to see how she might respond
to a baby, but she only held it for a
minute before hurling it across the room.
Kathy returned to Fairview after the
C-section in decent health, but Amanda,
born a month premature, remained in the
hospital in critical condition. Linda and
her eldest daughter stood vigil, social workers
hustling them in and out of the hospitals
back entrances to shield them from
local newspaper reporters whoҒd found out
about the pregnancies at Fairview.
After a month, Amanda was discharged
home, though she wasnt exactly welcome.
ғWhen my dad found out the guy
that raped Kathy was black, all hell broke
loose, Linda says. Her father owned the
house where she was living and threatened
to throw her out. ԓMy dad was the
type who believed white marries white,
black marries black, and theres no in
between.Ҕ At that point, Lindas eldest
daughter, KathyҒs then 21-year-old sister,
volunteered to formally adopt her niece.
Meanwhile, Portland prosecutors
charged Sistrunk with rape. DNA testing
did not yet exist, but the state-of-the-art
blood testing at the time had found with
97 percent certainty that he was the father
of Amanda and the autistic womans baby
boy. Investigators also had statements
from at least four fellow Fairview aides
saying that theyҒd reported Sistrunk to supervisors
(for, among other things, kissing
one patient on the mouth and improperly
Nurses gave Kathy a doll to
see how she might respond
to a baby. She held it for
a minute, then hurled it
across the room.
E L L E 424 w w w. e l l e . c o m
ELLE READERREPORT
touching anothers vagina). Sexual assault
law at the time was tilted in favor of defendants,
and the prosecutors were worried
theyҒd lose at trialKathy and the other
Fairview resident were lousy witnesses,
and their cases couldnגt be tried together
to establish a pattern, as would be routine
now. So Sistrunk was allowed to plead to a
lesser charge. He was sentenced to 10 years
for his crimefive for each woman.
For reasons that Oregon Department of
Corrections officials say cannot be determined,
Sistrunk was paroled in June 1984,
having served only two years of his 10-year
sentence. A few months later, he raped an
11-year-old girl and threatened to kill her if
she told anyone. By the time he was tried
for that crime in 1986, the pendulum in
rape cases had swung decisively in favor
of victims; children were considered reliable
witnesses, for one thing. Sistrunk was
found guilty and sentenced to a maximum
of 30 years. Proving that the pendulum
probably will swing in perpetuity, a threejudge
appeals panel in 2001 threw out a
statement an expert made in the girlגs trial
that children never lie about sexual abuse.
But the panel upheld Sistrunks conviction
anyway; heҒs due for parole in 2015.
In February 2008, an eight-monthspregnant
Amanda walked up the stone
steps of a clean, gabled house nestled
behind a wall of ivy in northeast Portland.
She had Cindy Daly with her for support.
Inside, she found a group home with rubber
floors and caretakers who tend to inhabitants
who can barely walk, swallow, or
talk. Each resident has an aide who serves
as a voice.Ӕ Kathys ғvoice is a lean young
man with magenta-dyed hair and several
piercings. He is trying to teach her to sign
for ԓno instead of scratching.
Kathy, who was moved here when Fairview
closed in 2000, was curled up in an
adult-size jogger stroller, her hands over her
face. Amanda had made her a tiny cloth
book about herself, with bits of feather and
fluff taped in for tactile sensationԗthe kind
of gift youd give to a baby. She sat down on
the couch and started stroking her motherҒs
arm, telling her who she was. After a few
minutes, Kathy crawled out of her jogger
and into pregnant Amandas lap.
The staff and Cindy Daly started to
weep. ғHere was this woman, who has almost
no family contact for her whole life,
Daly says. ԓAnd she doesnt know her own
daughter, but we all saw it, there was this
eerie connection she made with Amanda.
Everyone in the room felt it.Ҕ
For Amanda, meeting the frail, wordless
woman whose body had formed her
was surreal. I am such the mother. I fell in
love with my babies in my womb. How do
you hold something in your womb and not
know you gave it life? I picture her feeling
so alone and being ignored when she was
pregnant and when I was born. What did
she think of the life moving inside? I cannot
believe she felt nothing.Ӕ
Two weeks after meeting her birth
mother, Amanda gave birth to fraternal
twin boys she named Isaiah and Samson.
Isaiah is heavier and quieter and darker.
Samson is petite and blond and strongly
resembles his grandmother. Hes also a
handfulҗAmanda puts him in squeaky
shoes to keep track of him.
When the twins were two months old,
Amanda learned Emanuel Sistrunks
name, again thanks to Cindy Daly. Yellowed
newspaper clippings told the story
of her conception: ғTwo Fairview Residents
Apparent Rape Victims. Amanda
went to the state Department of Corrections
website, where she studied a mug shot
of Sistrunk, bearded and older. There was
her skin color and her hair, maybe even
her eyes. For a while, she considered writing
him, pretending to be a criminology
student interested in his case. She imagined
the clinical fashion in which sheԒd
approach him. From what I know about
sex offenders, most likely heӒd try to groom
me, she says, using the jargon for how
sex offenders soften up potential victims.
ԓThere was a part of me thinking, What if
he starts sending me sick sexual things?
Then she phoned a juror from SistrunkԒs
1986 rape case whod publicly criticized the
attempt to appeal his conviction for raping
the 11-year-old. The juror told Amanda he
thought her father had no redeeming qualities,
that he ғwas and always will be an evil
man. She decided not to contact Sistrunk,
though she plans to attend his parole hearing
to speak out for her mother. She doesnԒt
buy that her mother was a consensual partner,
as a social worker testified in a pretrial
hearing. I have a hard time believing she
didnӒt feel pain, Amanda says. ԓWho
stood by and did nothing? Someone had to
have known something wasnt right.Ҕ
Weve been talking for more than an
hour in the front seat of AmandaҒs car
when the sleeping boys stir in the backseat.
They go everywhere with hereven
though her husband is out of work, the kids
are mainly her responsibility. She unstraps
her sons, changes their diapers, sets them
loose in the playground where she herself
Left: Amanda on her wedding day; right:
Amanda, top row, fourth from left, with her
North Portland soccer team
(continued on page 482)
Courtesy of subject
w w w. e l l e . c o m 425 E L L E
once played, an enchanted forest of towering
Northwest Pines and swings and teeter-totters. As
we watch the twins run, we can see flickers of Lindaגs
strong, angular features, and the more delicate
visage of the mute, bent woman who is Amandas
real mother, and then AmandaҒs own broader,
darker face, all flashing by as the twilight deepens.
Amanda and her adoptive mother are completely
estranged over Amandas determination
to trace her real roots; her adoptive mom, who
asked not to be named in the story and for the
most part refused to comment for the record,
says she didnҒt tell her daughter the terrible
storyӔ of her origins because the officials who handled
the adoption advised her not to. Amanda,
however, says shes still disturbed that she was
kept in the dark about her ғdisabled relative, not
the first time sheԒs employed the curiously general
term relativeӔ when talking about her biological
parents. ItӒs worse than thinking someone is
dead. Its like they were never born, zero acknowledgment.Ҕ
Shell tell her sons about their family
history, Amanda says, doling out the information
as theyҒre able to understand it. They will know
Kathy is their grandmother.Ӕ
Amanda recently learned that Sistrunk has
children from several relationships, and she
has contacted a half-sister, whos in her midthirties.
After being the ғblack girl who thinks shes
white,Ҕ Amanda is anxious to build a mixed-race
family network for herself. Emanuel is evil,Ӕ she
says, but I donӒt believe evil is genetic.
In December, it will be two years since Amanda
first saw the name ԓKatherine Stockton on her
birth certificate. She now gets updates on her
motherԒs care and condition. She learned Kathy
likes to swing, likes to be massaged, and has an unbreakable
habit of licking metal. Amanda, mother
of toddlers, found the last trait ironic. My babies
like to lick metal too. When I first heard that, I
thought, Maybe they can share some spoons.Ӕ
She is still struggling to make sense of the
truth. A child is always a blessing, but was this
child?Ӕ she wrote in her journal, referring to herself,
shortly after she learned about Kathy. [My
mother] should not have been born. To be born
as a shell of a person, only to be raped at 19 and
have whatever humanity or dignity sheӒd had
stripped away. Who could look upon this baby,
this representation of how one man preyed upon
a disabled young woman, and see a blessing?
When she looks in the mirror, she sees the victim
and the rapist, intertwined, from a moment
30 years ago. But she is also beginning to see herself,
Amanda Campbell. ԓIve come to believe
that it doesnҒt matter who your parents are
what matters is who you are,ה she says. Amanda
is too humble to say it, but part of who she is is
someone brave enough to embrace Kathy Stockton:
the first member of her family to regularly
visit her, to speak kindly to her, to touch her, to
rock her in her lap. The first not to try to erase
her. I believe everyone has a purpose,Ӕ says
Amanda, who while in high school worked in a
group home, caring for the paralyzed residents.
And I have a strong sense Kathy needs to be
protected.Ӕ Amanda is grateful to her biological
mother for helping her to discover her capacity
for compassion, she says, though she cant help
but feel overwhelmedҗat times, plain dumbfounded
by the series of tragedies that led to
her existence, not to mention the Gothic strangeness
of it all. דI still have the feeling someone is
going to call me and say, Okay, this is all a joke.
Here are your real parents.ђ
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Hi Amanda,
I have always found your story fascinating so it was very interesting to read your story again as a magazine article (I will definitely have to have a look to see if I can find the US version of Elle at my local newsagency).
That is one thing I noticed about you in your previous post, how compassionate you were towards your bmother; especially when reading about you stroking her arm and back.
I hope it opens doors for you as well!
. But she is also beginning to see herself,
Amanda Campbell. IӒve come to believe
that it doesnt matter who your parents areҗ
what matters is who you are, she says. Amanda
is too humble to say it, but part of who she is is
someone brave enough to embrace Kathy Stockton:
the first member of her family to regularly
visit her, to speak kindly to her, to touch her, to
rock her in her lap. The first not to try to erase
her. ԓI believe everyone has a purpose, says
Amanda, who while in high school worked in a
group home, caring for the paralyzed residents.
ԓAnd I have a strong sense Kathy needs to be
protected. Amanda is grateful to her biological
mother for helping her to discover her capacity
for compassion, she says, though she canԒt help
but feel overwhelmedat times, plain dumbfoundedח
by the series of tragedies that led to
her existence, not to mention the Gothic strangeness
of it all. I still have the feeling someone is
going to call me and say, ӑOkay, this is all a joke.
Here are your real parents. Ҕ
I am hoping that it will open up doors for me to help others but here is the full story.
Thanks everyone for the support! I feel very blessed, in a lot of ways subconciously my previous life experiences prepared me. As a teenager I did cna work and worked at a center for paraplegics. And the majority of my adult working life I have been a juvenille corrections officer with some of that time spent working with sex offenders. So having love for a disabled mother and understanding how horrible of a person my biological father is may have been easier for me than had my life experiences been different.
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Thank you. The journalist that wrote it is finishing up a book on something else but seems to think there may still be doors that open for me to help others. I have found a biological (paternal) sister who's mother had dated my bio father who would like to write a book with me, so maybe someday I can look into his past more. Take care.
Here is the on-line link if anyone wants to read that hasn't.
[url=http://www.elle.com/Life-Love/Society-Career-Power/The-Race-to-Find-Myself]One Woman's Shocking Story About Her Family Past - Read More Personal Stories on ELLE.com[/url]