As if You Were Our Own"

It was 1947 in Celina, Ohio, when Dr. Ralph Beare and his wife, Lou, childless and in their early forties, adopted a four-and-a-half-month-old orphan. “Janice” knew she was adopted, because her mommy read her a book about how the Beare's chose her out of a Home. "We chose you, but we love you as if you were our own." However, her mother never seemed to forget she was adopted, especially on Mother’s Day, when she couldn’t look at Janice without crying.

A Lucky Orphan

Janice learned that most grown-ups in town knew her as "Dr. Beare's Daughter." Her daddy took her everywhere and people stopped to stoop down and tell her how he had saved their lives. The nuns from church would pat her on the head and tell her how lucky she was to have been adopted by such wonderful parents. Her struggle to become that elusive golden child that she imagined her parents really wanted came with the erasure of her own identity.

A Privileged Child

Before she started grade school, little Janice was used to socializing at adult parties with her parents' influential friends. She traveled with the pit crew of her daddy's hydroplane racing team, named after her. She spent every February in Florida, and had traveled the U.S.

Branded a Snob

On her first day of first grade, she learned she was different from her classmates.

“I have red hair and ugly freckles, I'm adopted, I'm rich. My dress is nicer than theirs. I talk like an adult.” Unused to being the brunt of teasing, she kept to herself. She was branded a snob when all she really wanted was to belong.

"Their Own was Something I Could Never Be"

In spite of her best efforts to be her parents’ perfect child, there was a small voice, deep inside her, that popped up at the most inconvenient times, saying, "I'm here." Try as she might to silence it, her true self often slipped out to take charge, and then there was trouble.