Adoption and Reunion, part 1: Starting the Journey

Like so many things in life, my life certainly, endeavors seem to go in fits and starts. Writing, something I sort of forgot to do for several decades, is definitely one of them. National Novel Writing Month comes around every November. My first year participating was 2010 (maybe ’11 or ’12 or’13?…too long ago to remember). About a week of 1,500 words per day, average, and my spouse’s computer gave up the ghost. He needed it for work and whatever, so I let him use mine instead. By the time we had a new machine for him the month was almost over and it just wasn’t going to happen for me that year.

The upside was that it had kick-started my writing muscles. I was blogging sporadically at the time, but a lot less sporadically than I have been lately. A couple of years ago I started producing a podcast, then two podcasts, for my historian husband. Mostly it was a way to get him thinking about topics for the book he needs to be writing, but it also got me busy using my writing muscles, too.

The last decade or so have been tough for me, energy wise, in that I don’t have any. I have maybe two or three hours of “work time” in me every day, and then I’m all done in. The podcasts have used up my creative juice most weeks. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

This past summer my personal life got crazy. It was mostly in a good way, but it was a huge paradigm shift and an energy suck. As some of you may know, I'm adopted, as are my two siblings. No revelation there. I've always known. I went home with my adoptive parents at eight days old. Half a century later, big revelations about my personal history surfaced in a wacky, serendipitous social tectonic event. The first of these psychological, social upheavals occurred when I was conceived in 1963. The second tremor happened when I was born and surrendered by my birth parents. The third big one happened when I found my birth family this year (well, we sort of found each other), rapidly followed by another shake-up upon losing my birth father just a few weeks after having only just met him 53 years after I was born.

I have an unfinished novel that I was toying with finishing for NaNo this year, but the whole birth family thing pushed that project to the back burner for the time being. A week into November I decided to jump into NaNo with a giant pile of ramblings about this whole adoption and reunion journey. I was actually catching up and had every hope of “winning” NaNo 2017, when I came down with a cold.

That sounds like a weak excuse, but when I get sick I get good and sick. Colds are supposed to last a week. Mine usually go ten to fifteen days, and I’m flat on my back for a good portion of it. I fought back hard this time, taking massive amounts of vitamin C, probably up to 50,000 units/day, plus multiple doses of Lysine, D-3, and whatever else sounded good. Chicken bone broth with garlic and ginger. Hot baths to bring up my body temperature and kill the virus. As much sleep as possible. Saline water sluicing out my sinuses…the works. I had the symptoms pretty much knocked out in five days, a personal record, but it was another week before I had any kind of energy at all. That was the day before Thanksgiving, and with two instances this year (one for my adoptive family and one with my newly-acquired brothers), any writing that might have happened pretty much went out the window.

I had averaged around 1,700 words per day on the days I was able to write, and if I had done that for most of the month I would totally have hit 50,000, but…yeah. As it stands, I almost cleared 17,000. This is not failure by any stretch. Nobody who writes a pile of pages is wasting time. It’s all good, and those 17,000 words are the beginning of my catharsis. Being adopted wasn’t news to me, I’d always known. Feeling like I didn’t fit in and had no place in any tribe was a constant shadow on my life, but I always chalked it up to maybe a bit of aspbergers’ syndrome or faulty brain chemistry. Goodness knows I’d been told enough times as a teenager that “there is something wrong with you” and that I had an “attitude problem”. What teenager doesn’t have an attitude problem? I figured my “square peg” feelings were typical and that I shouldn’t waste energy stewing over a big nothing.

I was wrong.

The more I’ve read and researched the whole adoption thing, the more I’m finding that adoptees, their biological mothers, and our adoptive parents, were pretty much sold a bill of goods during the Great Baby Scoop of the late 1940s to early 1970s. No matter how much we were wanted by our adoptive parents, no matter how much they loved us and gave us stable environments, we had suffered a trauma that went unacknowledged. No matter how birth mothers were reassured that surrendering a child for adoption was the best thing for that child, those mothers still suffered a grievous loss that they were forced to endure in silence and secrecy in most cases. No matter how much adoptive parents felt that they could replace the birth mother/parents, they were in many cases faced with raising children who behaved in ways they couldn’t understand and who presented with physical ailments that made no sense because nobody would acknowledge the separation trauma experienced by that newborn.

As I’ve processed this major turning point in my life the past few months, the most helpful book I have read so far is “The Primal Wound:Understanding the Adopted Child” by Nancy Newton Verrier. This is a must-read for any adoptee, adoptive parent, birth mother, and family member of any of the aforementioned. After blazing through a copy from the library, I ordered one of my own because I knew I was going to be going back to it over and over. Excerpts from this book, and a few other sources, became writing prompts for me to hash out feelings, personal observations, and memories both old and newly dredged up. I’m about 1/3 of the way going through the book, using pertinent passages as prompts.

I sincerely wish I had found this book years ago. It was published in 1993, and I can’t help but think that I might have avoided many pitfalls in my life if I had read it then. I’m pretty sure it would have made a huge difference in my relationship with my adoptive family. My adoptive mother passed away five years ago, and there is so much in this book that we could have talked about, so many questions I would have had for her. Sadly, my birth mother passed away in 1984 when I was just turning 21 and had only begun to toy with the idea of searching for her. In the 80s it was still a monumentally difficult task to match adoptees with their birth parents. In most states this is still very difficult for arcane and illogical reasons. Even if I had been proactive about my search back then, it’s unlikely I would have found my mother before she died. On the other hand, it would have allowed me to be there for my little brothers, who would have just lost their mother. It’s hard not to regret this, and to beat myself up for not trying harder to find my origins.

There are multiple reasons for my procrastination and outright avoidance, not the least of which was the outright obstructionism of Washington State. I was also struggling off and on with depression and the general frustrations of a 20-something college student who was desperate to find her place in the world. Add to that the aforementioned square peg syndrome with regard to my relationship with my adoptive family. All I wanted was to get away and be “me”. I felt no real kinship or closeness with my family, and actually felt like I was a constant disappointment or embarrassment to them, so the thought of yet another familial entanglement was somewhat less than appealing.

What I’ve learned in the past few months is that my feelings of isolation and alienation, and my parents’ confusion and resignation, were not because I was “broken” or “bad”, but the natural feelings of somebody in a social group for which they were utterly ill-suited.

None of this, fairly typical for adoptees, has been acknowledged by social workers, doctors, or even psychologists until the last decade or so, despite studies going back into the 1930s and earlier that revealed the consequences of adoption.

November is over, but I’m just starting to put my thoughts out in a digestible format. I’ll blog about some things a bit here. Most of what I write won’t show up here, as it’s going to be just for me, some for my family, and eventually maybe a biographical piece worthy of general consumption. We’ll see. There’s a lot to process. I thought, at first, that I’d be able to work things out over a few months. What hubris! Fifty-four years of not knowing my origins, of no contact with my tribe, is going to take more than a few months or years to hash out. I’m still in shock, really. My brothers and other biological family probably are, too. It’s nice to feel like I actually belong somewhere, though. That’s a pretty alien feeling and going to take awhile to get used to. I’m cool with that.