That’s my name. So why do I always feel like an imposter wearing someone else’s name tag?
I was four-and-a-half months old when I was adopted by Ralph and Lou Beare. My new father was a respected doctor and surgeon, and my new mother, a proud doctor’s wife. They’d already been married fifteen years. They decided to adopt after Lou had a hysterectomy at the age of forty and had to give up her last lingering hope of having “her own.” My parents named me “Janice Lucinda.” My mother said they chose “Janice,” because it couldn’t be shortened into some “gawd-awful, nickname.” and ”Lucinda,” after her own first name.
I felt like ducking whenever anyone called me “Janice.” I felt that I, like my name, was the next near thing to “gawd-awful.” I reasoned that since being adopted was second-best, perhaps I wasn’t deserving of a name that my mother thought was beautiful. I liked my middle name, “Lucinda,” because my mother had given me her own name, which she thought to be beautiful. As I grew, I realized that she was telling the world I was her own child. I began to think of my middle name as a wishful badge of ownership that she had attached to me, much like a name tag sewn into underwear.
My father never called me “Janice.” He had two names for me. “Kiddo” and “Damn Ignorant.” He adored his “Kiddo.” But when I didn’t know something that he thought I should, he would rant on cruelly about how I was “Damn Ignorant.”
From the time I was able to walk, he took me with him everywhere, and everyone in town came to know me on sight as “Doctor Beare’s Daughter.” Of all my names, I thought this one was the best. People showed the same respect to Doctor Beare’s Daughter as they did to Doctor Beare. And Doctor Beare’s Daughter was privileged. Her daddy gave her things and opportunities the other kids didn’t have. However, she was an imposter, played by little actress—me.
When I was fifteen and applied for my learner’s permit to drive a car, they asked to see my birth certificate. I hadn’t known that I had one. When I asked my mother for it, she gave me instead, a “Certificate of Birth Registration.” This official-looking, piece of paper, was accepted by government offices in lieu of an actual birth certificate. It states the date and place that Janice Lucinda Beare, a female, was born. That’s all, folks! There was no mention of parents, adopted or otherwise. Every time I looked at it, I felt like I was Voldemort, in the Harry Potter books—a villain so horrible that he was referred to as: “He-who-must-not-be-named.”
When I went away to camp and to college, I introduced myself as “Jan.” It still didn’t feel quite right, but it seemed somehow to be a bit more me. When I married Jeff Jones, I was happy to take his surname. It identified me as belonging to someone that I had chosen. And yet, the feeling of being not quite “gawd-awful” stayed with me.
When I was in my mid-thirties, my parents died. Only then, did I feel free to inquire about getting my birth certificate. I learned that adoptees born before 1964 in Ohio could apply for a copy of their original birth certificate, only if their adoptive parents had never requested an amended certificate showing them as the child’s birth parents. Fortunately, my parents had never requested one. That action would have wiped out access to my birth name forever.
When my original birth certificate came in the mail, I ripped it open and there it was: my birth name. And it was beautiful. And it was so much more. It was the key to my history. I’ll reveal my birth name in the sequel to Dr. Beare’s Daughter.