Autobiographical Notes

Fourteen months of my life is almost unknown to me. In the first six weeks of life I was kept at the hospital I think where I was "not thriving" and was having trouble with "lactose intolerance." Somewhere along the way I was removed to foster care where I was known as Charles Slade. Apparently I loved it there because I ate and grew cheerful. My foster mom wrote a letter to my adopting parents the day I was picked up. I read it and then lost it. Am still unhappy about that. They called me "Chuckie".
My adoptive brother, John, was a little like me: Japanese and Hispanic. According to non-identifying information I received two years ago, the agency workers were very happy about my placement. I fell asleep on my mother's lap the day they came to take me to my "forever home." Everyone has taken this as a sign of how natural a fit we were. These days I see it as a symptom of reactive attachment disorder.
Going home my parents said that I had "a cold" for a few days afterwards. There's a picture of me and I look sad and bewildered.
When I was with my grandson in July he was fourteen months old. When his parents left my wife and me with him for the evening he cried like mad and bowed to the door in tears until his mom and dad returned. Instead of crying for my natural mom I spent forty-eight years of my life looking for my her, quietly, secretly and ineffectively. My wife knew about it but she was the only one. How did I look? Whenever I entered a hospital I'd look for a Japanese nurse. That was one of the little tidbits handed on by the social workers. In all those years, of course, I knew it wouldn't pan out because she was probably far away. And I don't remember ever seeing one Japanese nurse.
It turned out when I did meet her that she wasn't doing nursing anymore and hadn't for many years.