Free The Amish Nanny by Mindy Starns Clark Page B

that I thought about it.
    At that moment I realized something, and it caught me with such force that the smile faded from my face entirely. Of course. How could I have missed it before? No wonder I didn’t feel like a real grown-up much of the time. I’d never had the chance to go through rumspringa and experience that transition time from child to adult. Now that I was twenty-four, my loved ones were getting impatient for me to go ahead and join the church, to bring an end to my rumpsringa .
    But how could I bring to an end something that had never really begun?
    I sat back in my chair, thinking of my teenage years as I watched rolling fields, tall trees, and white-capped mountains go by. I’d always been too weak and too tired to make it to most of the group sing-alongs, volleyball games, and picnics with my friends. Sometimes I’d wanted to give participating a try, but I always held back, knowing that the danger was too great, that such activity could cause irreparable harm. I knew there was some big secret about my condition, something my parents were aware of but had chosen not to tell me. Knowing that terrified me, sometimes with a paralyzing fear. In my heart I just knew I was sicker than they let on. Whenever I engaged in any sort of physical activity, I expected the worst, that I might drop dead at any moment.
    What else could the secret be, unless it was that I would never be able to teach or to marry or have children—a life sentence almost as scary as death itself. Whatever the secret was, it had to be pretty bad for them not to have told me.
    Then this spring I found out exactly what they had been keeping from me all these years. Much to my astonishment, the big secret had nothing to do with my medical condition and everything to do with my parentage: I was adopted. Mamm was not genetically my mother and Daed was not genetically my father. Instead, my birth mother had been Mamm ’s sister Giselle, the aunt I’d never met. When I was still a newborn, Giselle had given up both me and my older sister, two-year-old Lexie, and fled to Europe. Lexie had been adopted by a Mennonite couple from Oregon, but I’d been adopted by my mamm and daed and kept right there at home in Lancaster County.
    Lexie had been raised knowing she was adopted, but I’d never been told a thing, not until this spring, when she showed up asking questions about the identity of her birth parents. Ultimately, she had received the answers she’d sought, and the secrets of our whole family’s past had finally been brought out into the open. Lexie had gone home with a real sense of closure, her lifelong quest to find her birth parents finally satisfied.
    I, on the other hand, had been left with this bizarre knowledge about my biological mother and a trillion new questions. At least I’d also been given new insight into my health and a more realistic perspective on the seriousness of my disorder. As soon as I understood that I wasn’t going to drop dead at any moment, that I actually could have a chance at a normal life, my health began to improve. The folic acid and other supplements went a long way toward my recovery, yes, but I knew that my mind-set had much to do with it as well. Once I realized that the big secret wasn’t about my condition at all, I started forcing myself to do more even when I didn’t feel like it. As my body grew stronger, I even began to allow myself to dream. I started thinking of the future.
    And those new dreams and hopes were making me feel restless, incredibly restless, for the first time in my life.
    My mother had thought this trip would settle that restlessness, but in fact it had served to do the exact opposite. Now that I had seen what I was capable of—that I could get on a train and go across the country, spend a week without the hovering concern of my parents, walk into a dining car, order a meal, and scold two total strangers in a way that ended up