My Defective Gene

Being adopted hits me in peculiar ways sometimes. Unexpectedly.

There’s the occasional question I get from strangers or acquaintances sometimes. Usually after noticing my unique shade of hair, people ask me if either of my parents had red hair or if my siblings are redheads too. Interestingly enough, Mama did have red hair, although she didn’t give birth to me. But none of my five siblings--whom she did give birth to--have red hair, nor any of their children. I’ve always thought of red hair as that special link between me and my mama, to make me her daughter in spite of the fact that I never swam in her birth waters.

I always feel a little strange at doctor’s appointments when they start asking me the list of questions they always ask about family history. Heart disease? Diabetes? Epilepsy? Schizophrenia? They ask these things even if you’re just seeing the doctor about your bunyons. So I know it must be pretty important, medically, to know your family’s history of disease. I usually just dismiss those questions by saying "I’m adopted" and watching the mild frown of disappointment on the face of the medical professional. It must be frustrating to have to leave all those important lines blank.

Although I know and love my birth mother, I never bother to try and pick through the geneology of murky parentage that shrouds my ancestry. It’s not really clear who begat whom, so it’s of dubious benefit to try and keep track of their diseases.

Today I confirmed after suspecting for some time that my youngest son is color-blind. His older brother, my middle son, who has a different father, is also color-blind. So it struck me that I am obviously a carrier of the color blindness gene.

I did some research. Color-blindness is caused by certain cones in the eyes that don’t register certain lightwaves at the proper intensity. So two colors that look very different to me, look identical to my sons.

I first noticed in both boys at about the same age, when they had mastered the names of all the colors. They would state, with equal confidence, "red" when pointing at the red crayon, "yellow" when pointing at the yellow crayon and "pink" when pointing at the blue crayon (or "orange" when pointing at the green) or vice versa. I found some online color-blindness tests and confirmed it--they have defective cones.

Color-blindness is rare, but the particular kind of color blindness that they have is even more rare, affecting only about 1 in 100 people. Color-blindness in general occurs in 8-15% of males and 0.05% of females. This is because the CB trait lives on the X chromosome and is recessive.

This means that a girl would have to inherit two defective X’s, one from each parent; while a boy need only inherit one from either parent.

My birth mother, Sue, had two boys who are not color-blind so she is most likely not the source of my defective gene. That means daddy did it, which means he himself was color-blind. Whoever he was.

And that brings me back around to the beginning of my blog and how being adopted strikes me in odd ways sometimes when I least expect it. The only thing I know about the man who co-produced me is that he can’t tell the difference between orange and green. Weird, huh?