If there was ever a doubt that life is full of odd coincidences, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Here. In this measly blog post.
Scene: double birthday party in the neighborhood
When: a few weeks ago
Who: a large group of smart, lovely folks and me (me, the one stolen, sold, you know the drill, woman) AND….. Wait for it….. Who do I meet?
Guess. Seriously, guess. Please?!?
Ok, I’ll tell you.
I met a writer of the show Finding Carter. Not familiar with this tv show? It is a new show in MTV about a teenage girl, Carter, who was kidnapped as a baby and found by her birth mom, hence the title, Finding Carter.
I stumbled across the show one night about a month ago when channel surfing and for at least 20 minutes, sat at the edge of the couch with my jaw hanging open in shock. There it was, a tv show, about my story. Ok, not exactly my story but certainly closer than I’ve ever seen.
Fast forward to this evening and there I was, sitting across from the head writer. Me, a real live kidnapped woman who found her birth parents and living through it all, sitting directly across from a writer, a person who is charged with telling this story from the kidnapped girl’s perspective. Is this not a crazy coincidence????
So what do I do? I jump right into it, of course! If you’ve ever met me, well, you wouldn’t be surprised. I was thrilled to meet this woman. After all, she could likely be the only person in earth who thinks as much about baby stealing as I. Jackpot!
Turns out she knew my story! She read MY blog! Holy moly! I didn’t even need to give back story. Double jackpot! We could dive in – I could share what I was experiencing, she could share what she was thinking in terms if the character. It would be nothing short if brilliant. I was SO EXCITED!!! So of course, I was dying to compare perspectives and see if she wanted to know anything from, you know, a real-live-kidnapped-passed-as-adopted woman.
This is what she wanted to know: what I was told growing up. If I was told I was adopted. (I was.) Understandable. Totally understandable. Ok, next question… so excited, bring it!
So next question? Nothing. She had zero follow-up questions for me. None. Nada. Zilch.
To be honest, I found myself having a hard time with that. While none of this may be rational, and my perspective is almost always highly skewed and lord knows it may rarely be consistent, I found her lack of interest to be, let’s just say, surprising.
Surprising? Well, imagine you were writing a story about building houses on the moon. A topic there are not many primary sources and suddenly you find yourself chatting with someone who is not only in construction, not only home construction versus, say, industrial construction, and has, in fact, just finished a development project on the moon! Unbelievable! That one part you weren’t sure how it should go, the one about the entire screw supply floating away, you could ask. Total score!
There I was, an actual woman who was, in fact actually kidnapped as a baby, who knew the mother who raised her (like the main character, Carter) and knew that her “mother” knew she had a stolen baby and still kept her, sitting right in front of the writer of a show which has an almost identical construct. Right there, eager to chat. Amazed to be sitting with this writer. Smile on my face & open to chat about the gory details.
Oh well. Another time, right?
