Last Name, First, Middle

With our next Year of Weddings trip looming in late June, I really needed to be to work late this morning. My first order of business? Getting my passport.

I've never had one before. It's just never been needed in my life. Technically, it's not needed for this trip either (to the Bahamas)... yet. But it will make life so much easier. And given that we're all going to need them to get even into Canada soon, better to just bite the bullet and get it done.

Of course, being the procrastinator that I am, primarly due to fundage this time of year, I was left with only six weeks. So yes, sir... tack on that extra $60 charge. Thank you sir. Got my photos taken-- they're actually not that bad. And the postman taking the photo was kind enough to ask me if I wanted to check my hair before taking care of it. I thanked him, but didn't bother-- my hair does what it wants to do, which is usually hang stick straight down.

The hard part? Surrendering my birth certificate to be submitted.

Ever since I was old enough to really be aware of it, I've felt weird about my birth certificate. My official one was issued 18 months after I was born (but thankfully, since it was filed with the proper authorities two weeks after my birth, I can still use it for the passport application). The official one has my adoptive parents' names on them, not my birth parents. I'm sure the original one is somewhere locked up in a Montana child services vault or wherever they keep those sorts of sealed records. It would literally take me a court case to get them opened. And to be honest, while I'm curious as to "where I come from," I'm not curious enough to have to fly to Helena to go through a legal battle over it. Quite possibly having to open up a second area of the case, since my adoption was finalized in California (where my parents were living at the time they opened the application).

So in reality, I have a modified birth certificate that's amazingly official and legal in all respects. I've never seen Scott's birth certificate -- my brother is also adopted -- so I don't know if this is just the common way they handled closed adoption cases in the 1970's. I'm assuming that it is. After all, this was the era when adoptions were final. There wasn't the current b.s. six months (to two years in some places, I've heard) where the birth parents can "change their minds." Adoption papers signed? It's done. Life moves on. Records get sealed.

My birth certificate has allowed me to get jobs. It's allowed me to get my driver's license. It allowed me to get an education.

But it doesn't have my birth parents' names on it. So I've always felt a bit uneasy about it-- is it really okay? Will something happen down the road where it's considered incorrect?

And now I just submitted it to Big Brother to get my first passport.

My over-reactive nature is setting in, fearing that I'll be refused for some adoption records technicality. (yes, I know I'm over-reacting. It's the current political climate in this country, sorry).

I know I'll feel better when I see that blue-covered flipbook arrive in the mail, with the faded green piece of paper sitting next to it in the envelope.