When I was a kid, my brothers tried to convince me I was adopted. My mother took us out to Wendy's for lunch and my oldest brother started,
"What color eyes does everyone have?"
I looked one by one at each of my brothers and my mother.
"Brown?" I answered for my brothers. My mom corrected me, "they have hazel eyes like me." She took off her glasses and I was confused. Her eyes weren't golden-brown like my brothers', they were light brown and golden and a little green. My brother capitalized on this opportunity.
"So everyone here has hazel eyes" he started.
"No, mine are blue!" I chimed in.
"That's right" he said, "it's because you're adopted."
Here I paused. My friend Sarah had just told me how her older siblings told her that she was adopted, even though she wasn't. I looked at my mom. She wouldn't give anything away.
"No I'm not." I said, trying to sound certain but failing miserably. Am I? I wondered to myself.
"No one else in the family has blue eyes," my brother reasoned.
I looked around the table at three sets of hazel eyes staring back at me. Dad isn't here, I thought to myself. It was the middle of the day and he was at work. What color eyes does dad have?
That night, before I went to bed, I found my dad in the hallway. As you may guess, I asked him what his eye color was. He squatted down to my level and took off his glasses and, quietly, let me look at his eyes.
They were blue. I wasn't adopted.
Years later, I was at dinner with my parents and the man who later became my husband. As my mother and I retold this story of how my brothers almost convinced me I was adopted, my dad chimed in. Now, if you know my dad, he's fairly reserved, easygoing, and content to let other people do the majority of the talking. It seems as though he had had enough. It was at this moment, as we finished telling the last parts of the conversation at Wendy's, that he jumped in and stated quite assertively,
"She's my daughter."
