Yeah, all I've done since I got back from there has been think about them or text with them or send a thank-you note or two. I still need to collect addresses and sort out whose phone number on my text messages is whose. I DEFINITELY want to keep the dialogue going!

Educating Sippy Cupp. Who seems to know mainly that she likes showing off her legs on TV.

Agreed! Well-put, simple, and straightforward. Which means they STILL probably won't get it.

Great line, ret5hd!

"Some say 'speak truth to power'... what takes REAL stamina is speaking 'truth to ignorance'."

A keeper, for sure!

Great to have you with us! I'm so glad to have you with ME in this thread! Love your screen name! I was thinking about DU and how, in one way, it was a minor metaphor for how I felt for such a long time. I discovered this place early in the bush/cheney years. In a different way, I felt so isolated. So alone. And finding this site gave me a place of camaraderie and connectivity - I met others who felt exactly the same disconnected, disenfranchised way I did. Glad you're here! In a small way, seems to me, we're all foundlings here.

airport when they came to pick me up. Several versions of "you'll have to forgive me, all I'm gonna be doing is staring at you all weekend"! And we DID! But we also talked and talked and ate and ate and hugged and hugged and got choked up and then got choked up yet again. I kept thinking about high school biology class and Gregor Mendel's peas! I'd just scan their faces again and again. Just sucking it all up! And when we all went to dinner, and all my brothers and sisters were there, and some of their kids, I just kept looking and looking and looking, wishing I had a Xerox machine in my brain. We took lots of photos and everybody was passing their iPhones around to show the shots they'd just taken. It was WAY too brief. I'm so eager to get to know them more!

Glad you're here! I'm still dumbfounded. I've read about these stories for many years but it took dozens of years to gather up the courage to do something about it in my own case. I guess I was always afraid of failure - afraid that, well, starting a search, getting one's hopes up, and what if I couldn't find anything? What if my search led me to a dead end? I will say this - anybody who would try this, I'd recommend getting professional help.

This woman, this "adoption specialist" with whom I contracted, was recommended to me by a longtime close friend whom I trusted, and she sure was happy with her results. I even tried to search, initially, by myself, and I got back this thick envelope of paperwork from the state of Missouri, and it was frustrating and daunting and I didn't know how to fill a lot of it out, and didn't know anybody in the state government, and it was scary - especially since I frankly expected to fail. You get to that big hard door that's shut in your face - "...it's a closed state" - and it's a hurdle that's put in your way that I think is meant to seem so formidable so maybe searchers will be discouraged and go away, and the secrets remain safe. But heck, those who needed such "protection" may be long gone, and if YOU are the one who's left standing there, and you still want to find answers, well, I'm just so grateful there were options like these.

I hope my journey will encourage somebody else here, or elsewhere, who's hesitant but longing for answers, and may just be fearful that they'll come up empty-handed. Maybe, just maybe, you WON'T!!!

And I do feel rooted. Moreso than ever before. I always felt this weird sense of being artificially grafted-on, before now. There's this sense of belonging that I never really had. Til now. And then to discover that my initially-reticent brothers came around and have embraced me too - and the oldest brother's wife, too. And their daughter called during the Friday night dinner and wanted to say hello to me as well. Funny enough - she, my niece, and I have the same birthday! That one won't be hard to remember, certainly!

It was always one of those "...and we picked YOU!!!!!!!" And it just seemed all kind of okay for a long time. One way, I suppose, to make sure the kid feels special, that's for sure. It did make me feel that way when I was very little. They'd tell me that as a bedtime story quite often. I'm glad they did. At first, I thought EVERYBODY got started that way.

American deaths in Iraq. Oh, THAT was just fine. No biggie. Meh, they volunteered. Now watch this drive.