Growing up adopted with nothing to complain about.

In an nutshell, up to the age of 17, my life as an adopted child was great!!  My parents did an awesome job of making me feel special, I never felt that my parents loved my younger brothers, who are their natural children, any more than they did my older brother and I who were both adopted.  My parents always told my older brother and I that we were adopted from before we could even understand what it meant.  I believe that this was and still is the best approach.   Leaving a child to find out "later" that they are adopted sets them up for a world of identity crisis, pain, mistrust etc.....  I was always "different" and looked different from the rest of the family but this is something that just became part of who I was and never felt like an issue.  My dad was an officer in the US Air force and my mom stayed at home with the kids.  They are decent, moral, Christians who love each other and are still married now.  They gave us all everything we needed including a lot of love.  Of course, with parents being on the conservative side, we caught a lot of hell for the music that we listened to, some of the TV shows we wanted to watch and so on, normal stuff that leads to teenage angst.  Anyway, the point of this blog is that I had a normal, loving childhood and am blessed beyond belief to have been adopted in to this family.  Years later when I began to wonder what the hell was wrong with me and went in search of my own truth, I learned more than I could have ever imagined about the effects of adoption regardless of upbringing and a whole lot more....I'm a 43 year old woman and this is the first chapter of my adoption story.