Bastard Nation, “Why It's Great to Be a Bastard”

This list of reasons is an ongoing project of the Bastard Nation website. Visitors may send in additional suggestions.

All entries contributed by Real Bastards.

1. Membership in Bastard Nation.
2. We have more names than most people.
3. We are good at lying and being lied to.
4. Two family trees
5. We get to go on this nifty epic search for our roots
6. We develop great research skills.
7. We learn to cut right through the bullshit.
8. We can moonlight as P.I.s
9. We have the ability to use the word f*ck in very creative ways.
10. Some of our “life stories” would make great movies of the week.
11. When someone says, “Hey, you bastard!” we can just smile and say, “Yo.”
12. Cheap health insurance by leaving “family medical problems” blank.
13. There's a type of sword named after us.
14. Whenever an a-parent does something idiotic, the knowledge that there is no genetic relationship.
15. Lust runs in our blood.
16. Some of us have 2 Birthdays.
17. We can always spend our extra money on a new search.
18. Every person we meet could be a relative.
19. If you're real nice Jackie might adopt you.
20. We can't get arrested for marrying our 1st cousins
21. Hell!! We can't get arrested for marrying our sister or brother for that matter!!
22. I am a bastard. I am proud of being a bastard. I am not the product of some 3 minute routine baby-making session between two cookie-cutter suburban twits. I am the product of lust and self-gratifying passion. I like that. It makes me feel special.
23. We might be in for two inheritances.
24. IF we find our birth family we have the chance of having TWO great families!!!
25. If we find our birth family we have a chance of having TWO crappy families!!!!
26. If we find our birth family we have the chance of having ONE great family and ONE crappy family!!!
27 You get to hear *How does that make you feel?* more often than a psychotherapy patient, but you don't have to pay $90 an hour.
28. We get to hear chirpy little twits constantly tell us, “You weren't expected you were selected ”
29 I won't be the first on my a-parent's list to donate a kidney if it's needed.
30. I save time at a new doctor's office because I leave the “family health history” blank.
31. You can blame everything and anything on the possibility of your space alien parentage.
32. You get to say proudly--I wasn't born...I was hatched!
33. You can claim that your mold wasn't only cracked or broken, that YOURS was so strange and bizarre that people came and smashed it all and hit the pieces!
34. You can eat any strange food you wish, and claim it as ethnic and healthful for your people.
35. You can be glad that you did not inherit the mental illness that runs in your adoptive family.
36. You truly have every reason to ponder your navel.
37. You can be surprised every time you look in the mirror and see a stranger!
38. Your adoptive mother could be a serial killer with a perfect alibi as she has a forged document saying where she was on the day you were born. Do you REALLY know where she was that day?
39. You get to be surprised when you are pregnant as you wait to see what kind of genetic mutations you may carry!
40. You can really connect to your minister telling the congregation that you were born in sin.
41. You have the chance to honestly believe you wrecked someone else's life.
42. You KNOW infertility isn't a genetic problem in your family.
43. You were ahead of your time as the ultimate in recyclables.
44. You can take solace in the fact that you were instrumental in helping some attorney make his Mercedes payments.
45. You eased the social conscience of a misguided social worker looking for a sense of personal importance by being a pathetic waif she placed.
46. You get to have your amom shoot The Look at you whenever you ask about your birthfamily.
47. You have your own personal Can Of Worms to open despite all warnings!
48. You can live incognito. After all, that's what your life is.
49. You can laugh at the pseudo bastards when they tell you how much you look like your aparents.
50. When everyone else is running away from the skeletons in their closets; you get to run towards them in your search.
51. You can answer “Probably” whenever someone asks “Do you have relatives in this area? You look so familiar!”
52. You get to meet new people through the placing of long distance phone calls to total strangers.
53. In boring meetings, you don't have to doodle—instead, you can practice forging you birthmother's signature.
54. You have no problem sleeping at night, knowing that you have done your part to keep AT&T's profits high.
55. You develop a close personal friendship with the postman.
56. You can claim all sorts of “affirmative action” and minority goodies, then let THEM do the research for you to disprove your claim.
57. You can read the delightful children's book “Are You My Mother” and cry.
58. You can read the delightful children's book “Horton hatches an Egg” and cry.
59. You can make fast cash by betting people that slavery still exists. You can prove that it does when your a-mother swears on a stack of Bibles that you “belong” to her, and gets angry when you say that you don't.
60.We can take bets on when our actual birth date was, and with any luck, we might actually be able to find out who wins.
61. When you can't answer any of the family medical history questions, you get to go through all kinds of cool tests at the hospital.
62. You can laugh at people who say “You look just like your mother.”
63. You can blame your promiscuity on “genetic destiny.”
64. You can warn those around you that you are probably a “bad seed” and might, therefore, snap at any time. . . .
65. You're the only one who roots for Edmund at a performance of King Lear.
66. You don't have to worry about living up to some potential; anything we achieve is perceived as up from our dark beginnings.
67. Your well practiced at pretending to be grateful!!
68. Someone in this country just might need one of your kidneys.
69. Medical history forms at the hospital are a cinch, advantageous when bleeding to death in the ER!!
70. Your children benefit!! No one can say they look like Great Aunt Edna!!
71. You can explain away any deviant personality flaws as genetic “features” rather than a poor upbringing by your aparents
72. You can try and get out of jury duty by pointing out that, even though you're over 21, the probate court still considers you a minor child and minors can't serve on juries.
73. The photographs of Anne Geddes take on a whole, new perspective (photos of babies nestled in peapods, babies' faces in the middle of cabbages, etc.)
74. You can earn a Geology degree in the process of trying to find out which rock you crawled out from under.
75. When your high school teacher makes your class write essays about their family origins, you can break out crying and be sent to the library to read porn while everyone else is stuck writing books the size of Alex Haley's!
76. You get to see all the nifty faces people make when trying to act casual after you have told them that you're adopted.
77. You always have a reason to be depressed.
78. When you die you'll be sent back to earth because you will always have unfinished business.
79. When caught with a dumb look on your face it can be explained away as simply pondering your roots, true identity, or other related topics.
80. If No. 72 doesn't work, you can confidently state you could easily be related to one of the principals in the trial.
81. You can learn to sign your amother's signature fluently for all those affidavits. You are 35 years old and she STILL insists (even though you know better) that she remembers the labor pains, and that folks keep getting you confused with ANOTHER baby they adopted and returned because it had a hole in its heart. Then *YOU* were conceived. (TRUE STORY!)
82. You can “not live up to your potential” and blame it on your afamily, but act like a smartass and blame it on your bfamily, or vice versa
83. You can read the delightful children's book “Stellaluna” and cry.
84. ?

 

Source: Bastard Nation, www.bastards.org

Page Updated: 2-24-2012
Site designed by:

 
To learn more about The Adoption History Project, please contact Ellen Herman
Department of History, University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1288
(541) 346-3699
E-mail: adoption@uoregon.edu
About the Project and the Author
© Ellen Herman