What would it be like not knowing when the next meal is? I wonder if I will have a roof over your head, when you sleep that night. What would it be like not having knowledge about love. Well I was like that. I worried that I might die today or if there will be a storm but you don’t have  a shelter. I did not know love until I went to the shelter in Cebu Philippines. My parents gave me up for adoption. There is some things that changed when I was adopted. They are my family, the culture and the weather that changed every season.

First, my has family changed a lot because that is what adoption is, the commitment to a new life in your family. My parents changed from the young eighteen year old parents to the fifty year old adopted parents. Another thing that changed in my family was my siblings and extended siblings. My siblings were just Erlyn, my sister. Now there is my adopted siblings plus Erlyn. My siblings are Kalie, Reid, and Jordan. My extended family has grown a lot too. Kalie is married to Travis, Reid is married to Alexandra, Jordan is married to Tiffany. Next is my sister which is not going to happen anytime soon.

Second is culture. The biggest thing that was difficult for me was the change of language. Language was a big thing because I couldn’t understand anyone and they could not understand me either. I came to Minnesota in August and the next school year was in September. I had to learn the basics of the English language in a month. It took me about two to three years to learn the English language. I had to learn how people worked by paying attention to their body language. The next thing that changed for me was the technology. There was way more cars, tv’s and radios. America has way more technology than the Philippines do. They don’t have very many computers or tablets, IPhones and IPads and all the touch screen stuff. The last thing that changed for me was the sports. We had baseball, football, soccer and some other sports but we did not play it as well as we do here in the US. We did not have very much of the equipment or any other stuff that we do here.

The last thing that was way different was the weather. In the Philippines the weather was almost always 98 degrees fahrenheit and at night it was always 78 degrees and it would rain at night every single day. It may rain during the day but it was always hot and humid. Here there is windy, rainy, hot, cold, sleet, hail, fog, snow, and sometimes not very often, tornadoes. But the leaves never changed colors in the Philippines, there was never a white Christmas or snow. Our first year here it started to snow in the middle of the night and and my dad woke me up and we played in the snow till the next morning. there was like only an inch of snow on the ground. It was weird was it started to snow because literally the sky was falling. I thought that that  was pretty cool. I don’t know why I thought that was cool I just was weird back then.

So those are the three most important things that has changed a lot when I was adopted. My family, the culture and the temperature. I now know what love is and I learned that parenthood requires love not DNA. Now my question for you to think about is, were my parents selfish?