Author: AlyWho

The anniversaries of discovery and reunion have passed. I have kept a private journal of reunion events and progress as opposed to writing about them in this forum.

It would be absurd to expect that every feeling or experience I have had in this process has been positive, yet when I detail anything negative – even in a private journal that only I can see – I get a knot of anxiety and a strong urge to destroy what I have written. I have to assume that is primarily fear of rejection – much documentation exists of the ‘good adoptee’ where we feel we must be perfect and agreeable to everyone at all times lest we be cast aside.

My mother, too, goes through her own process. I wonder how much I am able to correctly intuit about her experience. I can sense her pulling away and drawing back toward me, and I want to talk about that with her but the time never seems right. I don’t honestly think she would ever decide it’s all too much and cut contact with me, but I know the fear of that exists anyway, at a nearly subconscious level. I try to draw it into view in order to reason with it but am largely unsuccessful.

I want to feel entirely embraced. I want to feel that my mother is proud of me, delighted to have me in her life, enthusiastic to introduce me to everyone in it. But I know she must grapple with her own process, figure out how to fit me into her life. Decide how to talk about a 50 year old woman who has suddenly appeared. How to address the fact that she relinquished a baby at 17 years old, to people who are not especially close to her but she has nonetheless known for decades. I get that, intellectually. But my heart wants something else.

I have not resolved my feelings toward my adoptive parents, either. I am still very hurt, angry, and resentful that they never told me the truth about myself, particularly because so many other people knew. I know they loved me but now I must also ask – how much did they love me and how much did they love the idea of their child, their family of a certain minimum size. What, truly, was their expectation when they adopted infants so relatively late in their lives? I always attributed their not really playing with us to the fact that they were so much older, and raised in a different time with different ideas about child rearing. And maybe that was exactly the truth of it. Or maybe they would have been different if we had been born to them, or at least adopted at an earlier point in their lives. I can never know the truth and it frustrates me. I want to say that nothing is different about how I feel about my adoptive parents but it’s just not true.

So here I am, a year from discovery, trying to repair the emotional bond with my deceased adoptive parents that has been strained and damaged by the revelation that they lied to me my entire life. Malicious or not, justified or not – they lied to me and hid from me what they had no right to hide. Every individual has the right to know their biological truth and I am angry to think that they never saw me as an individual who had rights to that knowledge. In their minds, they had every right to decide what I was allowed to know about myself – even in adulthood as a wholly independent person.

And on the other main theme, I struggle to be patient as the bond with my b-mother slowly grows, waiting and hoping for the time I might feel enthusiastically incorporated.

For now, on the whole, I feel untethered.

 

A lot of people are doing DNA testing. If you are harboring an uncomfortable secret that DNA testing will reveal, do yourself and everyone a favor and fess up. You can’t imagine how awkward it is to be the person innocently doing their own research who uncovers your messy truth. Don’t think it’s not going to come out. It will, and probably sooner than you think. Don’t be mad at people for accidentally outing you. Trust me, they didn’t intend to do that. If you’ve got something to say, take a deep breath and say it. It will be hard. It will be [embarrassing|uncomfortable|tearful]. But guess what else? It will also be a relief. It will be good for all parties concerned, including yourself. If you love the people the secret affects, you owe it to them to speak your truth. It will be easier for them to work through the truth and forgive you if you tell them instead of some random stranger who happens to be linked to them by DNA. So go on. Make a cup of tea, sit everybody down, and start a journey together.

Love, me

Imagine if you were diagnosed with a disease. It’s not fatal, but it impacts every facet of your life. This disease is extremely rare. Everybody knows about it though, and everybody seems to have an opinion about the disease despite the fact that they have no real information about it. It hurts to have people tell you that it’s good you have this disease, to have to defend the fact that you’re not completely happy about it or grateful for it like you’re expected to be, so you are very cautious about who you allow into your confidence. Right after you were diagnosed you were incredulous and frightened and assumed that everyone would at least be basically supportive if not sympathetic. But you’ve learned better by now. And really, there have been a lot of good things that have come from having the disease. Maybe even the majority of the impact has been positive. But there are days, many days, when negative forces take hold and you find yourself sobbing for no apparent reason, unable to even find the sounding board that other types of disease sufferers can find to help them navigate the frightening times. Except for other sufferers of the same disease. But you mustn’t focus too much attention on them, lest you be judged harshly for that.

That is what being an LDA feels like to me. It affects me on a deep level, and at the same time I am ashamed to admit that it does. My ability to focus. My ability to trust. My essential perspective on the world is going through a seismic shift, invisible to everyone but myself. It’s like I was standing in the middle of a hurricane that only affected me, and only a very few people who have been hit by the same hurricane or were particularly sensitive could even sympathize. The rest of the world was befuddled or downright angrily insisting that I wasn’t standing in the middle of a hurricane.  And now the storm has passed and I am sorting through what it left behind, standing in the wreckage and trying to salvage the best of what was and what is and what will be, hiding from those who insist I am still standing in a perfectly sound structure that now has a nifty new addition on it!

I’ve tried to write this post many times. There is something significant for me in my inability to satisfactorily frame my thoughts. In previous posts I’ve alluded to struggles I’ve had as I sought my truth. Occasional struggles caused by people who were clinging to decades-old lies and shame. I have specifically omitted commenting about my adoptive brother’s path in these essays since that is his truth to tell if he chooses, but I have been actively helping him (Or perhaps pushing him? I worry over that.) in his searching and uncovered somewhat more instances of this in that effort, because his story turns out to be far more complicated than mine. When I hit these roadblocks in my efforts for him my feelings of guilt and shame are magnified greatly, and I fear I am hurting him and hurting his chances for success as much or more than I am concerned for the person clinging to their lies. But with those people I find I am doubly ashamed to have crossed a boundary, exposed unhealed wounds, created awkward situations for people who are not only complete strangers to me but to whom I have essentially no relationship. And then I feel indignant that their lies are impeding our understanding of the truth, angry that there are more lies for us to accept in addition to the lie we have been told our whole lives. And then I feel pity and shame again – what right do I have to stomp in like the truth police and demand they face it, ready or not. But we just want to know the truth about our own origins and the lives of our families…. and so round and round I go.

One of the things that has been delightful for me is the artistic similarity between myself and my mother. My adoptive mother was creative but in a crafty sort of way rather than an impulse to create something for the purpose of expression.  I do not mean to denigrate that, only to point out that they are two separate things. My b-mom is a sculptor and potter, a painter and a sketch artist. Her artistic ramblings and mine are almost identical in terms of medium, albeit our subject matter is colored by our own personal drives and views that give fuel to the artistic impulses. The other day she and I were discussing the mechanics of laying out a particular type of design and the pros and cons of different layout software packages, and even while I was engaged in the conversation part of me stood aside and did a gleeful little jig. I always feel a level of anxiety when I show her my artwork. I want her to think it is well executed, of course, but more than that I want her to understand what is being communicated. In a way I am hoping that she understands better than I do myself, and can help me decipher what my subconscious sometimes keeps from my conscious mind.

I made a series of digital paintings in the early 2000s. It was a time of great emotional upheaval for me. I had failed in my marriage and was struggling to re-invent myself and support our two daughters. Many of these paintings made sense to me even as I was creating them, but some of them only became clear (to various extents) after the image was finished and I had some distance. Most of these paintings I have put on my Facebook page or otherwise published, but a few of them I kept to myself. They make me uncomfortable, even now. I hadn’t thought about these in years but for some reason they floated into my consciousness a few days ago. Submitted without further commentary:

 

I wrote the following in response to a very well-meant encouragement to adhere to the usual party line: that my a-parents loved me and cared for me and were my parents, not the genetic donors who are my b-parents. This was meant in kindness, for I had been sharing the difficult time I have been having parsing through my grief over my reunion with a grave and all the strangeness of feeling these emotions over someone I never even met. I was surprised at the passionate outpouring of my response, so I thought I would share it here as well.

** excerpt of response begins here **

Regarding my adoptive parents, please don’t feel that I harbor a great deal of anger toward them. It is simply not in me to cling to anger. You are absolutely correct in that I’m sure their position was that I was theirs from birth and that was that, and I don’t see any malice in it. Thoughtlessness and possibly arrogance, but not malice. There is also no point in supposing that my life with my biological parents would have been better or worse. It would have been different, that is all that can be known. My adoptive parents were 42 when I was born, and I was raised in a household more suited to the 40s than the 70s. My father was harsh and authoritarian and my mother was the compliant helpmeet. I was expected to grow up and be a housewife, and to that end I was not supported or encouraged to go to college or develop a career. When I left my husband my father started encouraging me to find another husband literally the day I moved out of our apartment, and years later got so incensed at my persistent singlehood that at one point he threatened to cut me out of his will unless I remarried. It was inconceivable to him that I would choose to remain single – to his way of thinking the whole point of women is to be married to men and so I clearly was Doing It Wrong.

Society’s narrative for the adoption story goes like this: the birth mother is the noble, self-sacrificing relinquisher doing what’s best for the baby and the adoptive parents are the noble, generous benefactors of the Poor Unfortunate. The adoptee is the loving, grateful beneficiary of mother’s sacrifice and adopters’ largesse. The reality, however, is more along these lines (especially for the millions of adoptions that occurred during the “Baby Scoop Era”, which my adoption solidly was): young unwed mother is shunted through a systematic maternity home/relinquishment path with virtually no options. She is usually scarred and grieving and offered little or no support for her trauma and loss. Infertile couples line up to adopt, to build families which the post-war burgeoning middle class held was the correct and conforming thing to do. Infertile couples were somehow suspect, considered lesser-than. In my own adoptive parents’ case, they both came from very large families (9 and 10 children) so the fact that my mother was only able to successfully carry and deliver one child must have been agonizing for them both.Then the entire adoption transaction was legally and socially sealed and hidden, to cover the shame of both infertility and bastardy. The adoptee was usually told, but often in the spirit of ‘this is a horrible secret that must never be discussed’. If my adoptive parents had told me as a child it would almost certainly have been in those terms, so I am glad they did not introduce what would inevitably have been an additional challenge to my sense of self-worth, already suffering from their attitude toward females in general.

I don’t mean to sound Dickensian about it all. Honestly I had a mostly pleasant and uneventful childhood and I accept that everybody’s decisions were logical and without malice. My adoptive parents assuredly loved me and I them. The grating thing is that the adoptee’s feelings or needs are never allowed first consideration, if they are allowed any consideration at all, and the birth family even less so. I had no participation in the decisions surrounding my adoption and was never given an opportunity to form an opinion, let alone have my needs considered, particularly should they be in conflict with anyone else’s. Even now, at 50 years old, I am to discard my own feelings about the situation in favor of everyone else’s. Even with my adoptive parents dead and gone, their feelings have precedence over mine. It is all well and good to support the accepted narrative, but if it were so cut and dried then why do most adoptees seek their birth families, and why do most birth families desire reunion? You say that my father gave me genes as if it was inconsequential, and yet I see now that I am far more like my birth parents than I ever was like my adoptive parents. You can’t imagine my relief in finding the many, many traits I have that were wholly unlike anyone in my family (my writing, my art, my interest in the arts generally) that have parallels in my biological parents. I never suspected I was adopted, but I also spent most of my life feeling like I just didn’t fit in and my interests and abilities were merely tolerated. I always ascribed that to the age difference, but I think the real reason is clear now.

As far as what effect my birth parents finding me might have had on my teen self, I don’t think it would have been bad and it would likely have been particularly good if they had been an influence to tell me it was good to want to develop myself, but it seems a waste of time and inviting more irreconcilable angst to think too much about it. I’ve given the matter of not being told a great deal of thought and my conclusion is that my parents should have told me (and my adopted brother) when we became adults. I think it is so strange that we can accept our innate ability to love multiples – children, siblings, cousins – but somehow it is believed that we are incapable of loving two mothers and two fathers. It feels to me like possessiveness in the truest sense of the word, of the individual themselves but even more of one’s position as “mother” or “father” – the only relationship in life that is expected to be so permanently singular. It seems to me that our discomfort bespeaks our inherent understanding that the accepted social narrative is very, very wrong.

I stare at the stone and the ground
An impenetrable wall between us.

Through time
My mind flows backward
Touching on all I have learned

Through time
My heart flows backward
Yearning for love denied.

Did our eyes meet through the glass
An impenetrable wall between us?

One of the experiences that I think is particular to the LDA is the sudden change in the understanding of where one fits in the complex web of relationships that surrounds every person and also the relationship with each individual – relationships that outside the adoption world develop naturally over lifetimes, but inside the adoption world the development is temporally skewed. I feel a deep connection to my mother and brothers, but really we are still almost complete strangers. I want so much not to feel like that.

I feel like I’m just plunking myself down at the dinner table uninvited and expecting to be served. There’s not really even a place set for me. I’ve brought my own best dish for the pot luck but only my mother has taken a full serving of it. My brothers and grand-uncle have taken a taste and seem appreciative and wanting seconds. The rest of the family just eyes me warily. Some of them still don’t even know I’m sitting at the table, and others know but are not ready to nod my way. I see the dishes being passed around but none get handed to me. I’ve snatched a taste off of a few of them as they pass, but feel guilty and greedy for doing it. I know I should wait politely for an invitation to sit down, but I can’t seem to do that.

 

I have jumped with both feet into my gene pool and the ripples are spreading. Mother-Father-Siblings-Aunts-Uncles-Cousins. Steps away from the Mom/Dad ground zero to ripple over grand aunts and uncles, over cousins x removed, over friends, lovers, co-workers, and acquaintances, mostly on my father’s side. I try to tread carefully among the inhabitants of the small towns to protect my mother’s privacy until such time as she declares the need for secrecy is over, but I am eager and sometimes obsessive and it doesn’t seem like that big of a puzzle for the curious to solve. I harbor a knot of anxiety over this but I can’t make myself stop searching for whatever remnants of my father exist. I fear that they are disintegrating all the time and when I find them they will be like the ash of a newspaper that will crumble in my hands before I am able to make out more than a word or two.

I have also found decades-old conflicts and heartaches that ripple forward from their points of origin to become landmines or obstacles for me to overcome. A box of pictures is precious, irreplaceable knowledge and connection to me, but reduced to being a hostage in a power struggle between others. Their conflict is almost meaningless for me so I delicately try to negotiate with both sides, hoping against hope that I can tease my precious treasure free and leave them to find other weapons.

I no longer have any perspective on how I am likely to be perceived. I reached out to a 2nd cousin 1x removed because we had been linked via DNA, and despite that it took some convincing to assure her that I was legit. She was the first one to demand proof and her suspicion almost discouraged me – and also made me unexpectedly indignant. I still feel a little awkward with her, mostly because her suspicion caused me to stop and review myself and in so doing I discovered that a part of me feels ashamed of myself for being so pushy, for asking to be acknowledged with little more than my own word for proof, for asking people to share their memories and their pictures when I have nothing to offer in return except a relationship with me should they want that. And why should they? Especially when my ripples touch people who are very distantly related or even almost entirely disconnected from my father’s memory now.

Warring with the shame and anxiety is anger and indignity… this is my father I’m asking about and I have every right to at least pictures of him if not memories. Especially since to pretty much everyone else, such things have little or no value. And I know now that he wanted to find me and had tried several times. The wanting to find me changed the course of his life, because he refused to have children with his wife because of me. When he was alive the government and society stood between us, and now it’s just time and indifference and a little bit of suspicion. So I will continue to make those phone calls and send those emails, hoping against hope that someday I might have more than two pictures of him. That’s all I have now, two pictures. One from high school and one from the late 70s that his ex-wife shared with me. I continue to reassure myself that it is OK to want more.

Some days I just feel blue, and my mind swims around in the fog and tries to attach itself to something solid to explain why I feel down. Ideas flit here and there and occasionally I feel like I am nearing an idea or a conclusion or a definition, but never actually get a firm hold on it. Most of the time my unhappiness is revolving around my father and in a related sense the decision of my adoptive parents to keep the truth about me from me. It makes me so sad to think about the lost opportunity to know him. I am trying as best as I can to know him through the eyes of others who knew him, but in a way that is a terrible tease that can never be relieved. Then I feel angry because I wouldn’t feel this way at all if they had just told me, even when I became an adult. I could still have known him for 10 years before he died. It makes me feel frustrated and angry to think they didn’t know me well enough to know I would have wanted to know, or honored me enough to accept that I deserved to know. Or maybe they knew that and just were too stubborn to change their mind about the decision they made when I was an infant. It’s all so unfair – all of these monumental decisions made that affect me that I never even had a chance to consider how I might feel about it, let alone participate in the decision.

I do believe there was no malice in the decision, and that they probably truly felt it was best for them and for me. In that light I can accept it, but still comfort with it eludes me. I think that is also because I can’t find a way to reconcile how my adoptive parents thought about my biological parents and how they must have disregarded any potential for pain they might have. If the APs believed that the BPs were just irresponsible children who wouldn’t give a second thought to the baby they created, that feels like a harsh judgment, and -the more I learn about both of them – an unfair and simply wrong one. If they believed my BPs were better than that but that they would just move on with their lives and forget all about me, that feels like a negative assessment on me – that I am easily forgotten. Transferable.  And also that I would never have any feelings about it, or right to even know.

It seems to me that the way adoption was practiced in this country (and still is, to some extent), the only parties that actually have any rights are the adoptive parents. They are the only ones whose feelings are considered, and they are the ones who are protected by law and by practice. And it’s just not fair.