Earlier this week, we went to the City Clerk’s office to procure Minor’s birth certificate. The former city clerk is now the Mayor, and the new city clerk (who has three adopted children) has two administrators working for him. All were extremely nice, making it a big change from our last experience, and when they handed me Minor’s birth certificate I was pleased to see that all the apostrophes had been added in the right places.

The fee for a birth certificate is $10, but the admin gave me a replacement for Aitch’s offending document on the house, because, as she said, “You’re the one responsible for getting it changed!” I never mentioned it, so I assume that Port City has that marked in my permanent record, along with “Complains frequently about city merchants failing to shovel sidewalks.”

One odd thing: Husband, looking over Minor’s birth certificate to make sure everything was spelled correctly, noted, “The birth place is wrong. Wasn’t he born in SouthernCity, Korea?”

The clerk showed us that the birth place on the certificate, Seoul, was indeed the city listed on the adoption decree. So the question was, what is the source of the information on the adoption decree?

I assumed this was just a simple mistake on someone’s part, probably mine, as I had signed off on the information at the courthouse. (But let the record show that I signed it in the hall, with Minor clinging to me; I’m lucky I didn’t approve a completely different name.) When I got back home, though, I checked all of Minor’s paperwork. The only document that lists his birth city is the referral, and…get this…it lists two different places, both SouthernCity and OtherSouthernCity.

Oh. So this must be why, whenever someone asks me where Minor is born, I say, “It’s either SouthernCity or OtherSouthernCity, I can never remember.” I can’t believe I never realized that both cities were listed.

More importantly, there is no other official record of his birthplace anywhere in my paperwork. There is a hospital chart from a hospital in SouthernCity for his admission to be treated for jaundice three days after his birth. I assume he would have been taken to the same hospital, or at least a hospital in the same city, so I’m fairly confident he was born in SouthernCity, and not OtherSouthernCity fifty miles away. It would be good to confirm this officially, for Minor’s sake. It’s too weird that his Port City birth certificate not only implies that I gave birth to him, but also says that it occurred in a city he did not arrive at until he was a month old.

I feel like I owe it to the boys to give them as much information about their birth families and their heritage as I can, and yet I can’t even answer Question #1 for Minor, “Where was I born?” With adoption this information is sometimes unavoidably obscured, but damn it, I should not be the one obscuring it.