TWO BIRTHDAYS?!?

me at 6 mos. (assumed age, but 9 mos. real age)

I was born in Carson City, Nevada on Christmas Day in 1935. My birth mother (Leona nee Edwards) was 18 years old and my birth father (James Joseph Carroll) was 54. I was my birth mother's fourth child. My birth name was Dora Ann Carroll.

Shortly before she died, Neveal told me this: that Elaine and Red (who I grew up thinking were my parents) wanted a child because Red was infertile; in 1935 that meant he was less than a man. So a child would prove his masculinity.

When my story begins, Elaine, Red, Neveal, and her husband at the time, Paul, lived in a small town named Hawthorne in Nevada. They may have been in the military, but I'm not sure now. Paul was in the military at one time and I know he served in Panama, but I don't know about Red.

Elaine and Red decided to adopt a newborn and pass it off as theirs. Nobody in the family was around except Neveal (who was Elaine's older sister) and Paul, and they would keep the secret, too.

Elaine told me that she heard of a family in Carson City who had several children, all up for adoption. She and Neveal took a trip to Carson City to see if there was anything they wanted. This is the story as I remember it being told to me by Elaine.

"We walked into this place that was like one big room and there were kids everyplace. I told her that we were looking for a newborn baby, but she said the youngest she had was 3 months old. I said that was too old, but Neveal said she wanted to see the baby anyway. So we saw this little blond baby in a crib and she was just about the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen."

The baby, of course, was me.

"You were sound asleep," continued Elaine, "and Ned (Neveal's nickname) touched your head and you woke up. You had these great big, blue eyes with an almost black ring around the iris, and when you woke up you didn't cry or anything. Neveal picked you up, and then I held you for a while. You never cried once, and when we left, we took you with us. It was just like picking a puppy from a litter.

"You were really little, and even though you were almost four months old you weren't very much bigger than a newborn."

I only weighed 5 lbs 4 oz. when I was born, so probably weighed around 6 or 7 pounds, which is a newborn weight.

"We changed your name to Jacqueline and Ned and I decided that we would tell everybody you were born on April 2nd, 1936, because our Dad was born on April 1st, and we thought it would be too suspicious if that was your birthday.

"When we had you for about five months, we moved back to Seattle and told everybody except Grandma that you were Red's and my baby, and then you were about three or four months old according to the April 2nd birthday and about the right size for that age. I guess everybody believed us.

"The only time there was a problem was when you sat up everybody thought you were only about 5 months old, and I told them that girl babies developed faster than little boy babies. But then you started talking when everybody thought you were six months old! You were talking in sentences right away, and that was a little hard to explain. You didn't start walking though, until you were almost two so we just said you developed fast in some ways and was slow in others."

Um hmmmm--

So what's missing in this story? How about that I was ADOPTED? I went to Carson City shortly after learning of my true origins, and they had nothing on record showing adoption proceedings involving a family named Carroll.

Did Elaine and Red want a baby because they loved children? No.

It seems I just "fit the bill" doesn't it.

And being taken like "a puppy from a litter?" Elaine didn't even realize how depersonalizing that was -- I was just the cutest little puppy in the batch.

Like I said on the first page, I didn't learn any of this until I was 33, and as my story unfolds, you'll learn that I knew it all the time, how I knew, why being told the truth was not a revelation (or release), and how I literally forced Elaine and Neveal (co-conspirators) to tell my story.

And the last problem: If my birth name was Dora Ann Carroll and my name was changed to Jacqueline, then who is Kendra Noel Stoddard? That's the next chapter.