Adoption and Reunion, part 2: Abandonment and Acting Out

(Most of the excerpts quoted are from Nancy Newton Verrier’s “The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child” unless otherwise stated.)

Three adopted munchkins.

Being adopted is something I always took for granted growing up. My sister, brother, and I always knew we were adopted. We were informed of our “non natural” state at such a young age that I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of our identities. The first friend I ever made, at the age of four, was also adopted, as was his sister who became my little sister’s best pal for years. As a child I pretty much thought everybody was adopted. More precisely, the word “adopted” was almost meaningless because it was just the way things were. When I was around five years old I remember a friend announcing that she was going to have a sister or brother. When I asked her which, she said she wouldn’t know until her mommy had the baby. The idea that a human mother was pregnant, like a cat or a dog, was shocking. Up until then I hadn’t known that could be a thing. I was only two when they brought my sister home, but I was just big enough at five years old to remember going to the hospital to look at my little brother in the maternity ward at Swedish Hospital in one of those classic glassed-in rooms full of babies in boxes. For years I thought that’s how you got a baby: you went to the hospital and picked one out, like going to the pumpkin patch for your Halloween jack o’ lantern.

There was no shocking revelation later in life. There was no stigma about it. We were raised like any other kids. We weren’t less a part of our family, or spoiled to compensate for some vaguely unfortunate beginnings. The only drama that occurred, according to my adoptive mother, was when I cried when I was told that I wasn’t Norwegian like them, but some combination of German and other European background. I have no recollection of that incident, although I remember a brief time when I toyed with the idea of being Irish for some reason.

That story used to make me chuckle. Poor little kid crying because she found out she wasn’t a Scandinavian: awwww. The more I learn about adoption and its consequences, the more sympathetic I am to the disappointed little kid I once was. I wanted a connection, to belong, to fit in and be an intrinsic part of a tribe. Somehow I thought that even though I was adopted into another family after birth that I was still at least somehow similar to my legal parents in some way. Nope, I was an alien. A much loved alien, but “not us” nevertheless. Personal identity became a fluid thing, since I didn’t really have a concrete one of my own. This does not make for a secure mental canvas. Despite what we were told back then, adoption is not the clean, easy, pain-free solution that the social workers were selling during the Baby Scoop era. There were consequences on all sides.  

Abandonment Issues and Acting Out

“For love to be freely accepted there must be trust, and despite the love and security our daughter has been given, she has suffered the anxiety of wondering if she would again be abandoned. For her this anxiety manifested itself in typical testing-out behavior. At the same time that she tried to provoke the very rejection that she feared, there was a reaction on her part to reject us before she could be rejected by us. It seemed that allowing herself to love and be loved was too dangerous; she couldn’t trust that she would not again be abandoned.” (Verrier, p. xiii)

I see this in myself, as well. As a small child I had dreams of being abandoned. The recurring one I remember most was usually short but traumatic. Mom would be driving us to a store with a big parking lot, implying a grocery store of some kind. Sometimes it was both mom and dad, but at any rate the parent is driving. As folks often did back in the day, we were instructed to wait in the car while mom ran in to pick up a few things. I/we would wait and wait, until I would finally decide to go in and look for her because it was taking so long. Just as I reached the door of the store I would hear the car start up and I would turn around to see it pulling away. I would scream after them to wait, but the car always drove off without me.

I usually woke up crying.

Later on, in my teen years, my subconscious turned the tables and I became the abandoner.  In my dreams I would overhear family, and sometimes friends, talking about what a problem I was, or how disappointed they were by me, or some such thing, and I would feel crushed by rejection. At that point I would either jump out a window and fly away, or leap into the trees and swing off into the deep forest like Tarzan in the jungle. Sometimes I would then feel the people who just rejected me giving chase, grabbing at my feet, but I would kick them away and struggle to keep ahead of them in a panic of flight. Sometimes it would be a breathlessly clean escape, and I would feel the exhilaration of freedom as I soared over the ocean or up into the mountains. These were often the last dreams of the night. My dreams were, and are, usually quite vivid, and the last one of the night will color my mood for the morning and sometimes the entire day.

Verrier talks about her daughter, and other adopted children, developing “testing out” behavior. I don’t feel like I did much of that beyond the average moodiness of the typical teenager, but I do think I began to pull away from my adoptive family as I entered puberty and began to feel the “I don’t fit in” feelings of adolescence. In later years I just chalked that up to the vagaries of puberty. Most of us go through a phase of feeling that nobody understands them. For me this angst was definitely aimed at or received from my immediate family. My adopted sister, a classic extrovert to my classic introvert, definitely manifested “testing out” behaviors. A typical strong-willed child (after the James Dobson model), Cheryl befuddled our parents by constantly pushing and testing boundaries. I befuddled them by turning inward, isolating myself, rejecting classic “girly” pursuits, and falling into periods of depression that became clinically problematic by my late teens.

As a young child I occasionally resisted attempts to integrate me into childrens’ activities at church, like Christmas pageants and the like, and would deliberately perform badly at rehearsals in a feeble attempt to be removed from the program. This must have been aggravating in the extreme for my mom, the church organist, who knew I was more than capable as a performer. At one point I grew so fed up with my piano teacher, an old-school battleaxe with a penchant for corporeal punishment, after she once again rapped me across the knuckles for making a mistake, that I exploded and mouthed off at her. I have no memory of what little bratty me said, but I definitely remember the dressing down I got from my father when he got home from work and heard about it from mom. I was told what a rotten kid I was, and that I was way out of line for acting so badly to my teacher (no argument there). Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I was told that I had an “attitude problem”. There was no commentary about the knuckle whacking habit of the teacher. I heard about my “attitude problem” a lot in those years. Any time I was depressed, or sad, or confused by my math homework, or generally being a sulky kid, I had an “attitude problem”. This resulted in me 1) hating the word “attitude”, and 2) increasingly convinced that I was broken.

One summer, on one of the last “family vacations” I ever endured, teenaged me was experiencing a particularly blue patch and keenly missing my Sea Scout friends and other chums back home. I was not happy about driving hundreds of miles a day cooped up in a hot car with a father who struggled with anger issues on a regular basis when either the car broke down or he just got tired of driving cranky kids around. We ended up in Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Vancouver one day, a truly beautiful place, but it was utterly lost on me. I was lonely, feeling hopeless about my life and my future prospects, and in the middle of a two week road trip with people with whom I had little in common other than living in the same house. Everything was colored, or more accurately de-colorized, by a particularly bad bout of yet undiagnosed depression, and the beautiful garden seemed like a complete mockery of my feelings of hopelessness. I made the grave and untactful error of declaring “This is depressing” within earshot of my parents. Not unsurprisingly my dad blew a gasket. He ranted at me, barking “There’s something wrong with you!” with no attempt to hide his disgust, generally indicating that I was a blight on the landscape and a discredit to the family escutcheon. That fit in perfectly with my already bleak outlook and general sense of worthlessness. In hindsight, part of me was probably trying to provoke that very response and get that dreaded abandonment in motion. I think I thought it was always looming, so why not get it over with?

My parents did the best they could with the three of us, but they were at a real disadvantage. They both came from Scandinavian-American backgrounds with huge, tight-knit extended families contented with a seasonal round of family picnics, holiday gatherings, anniversary celebrations, and other large gatherings where the kids played in the yard and the grown-ups sat around a table and played card games. They went to 9-5 jobs, got married, had kids, went on fishing trips, attended a couple of different Lutheran churches, and avoided drama of any kind. This was fine when I was very small, but as I hit my teenage years I was longing for adventure and excitement. I was a Sea Scout and never happier than when out on a boat or at least working on one even tied to the dock. Both my sister and I were and are avid readers, with me leaning toward action-adventure, sci-fi and fantasy. My sister, an extrovert, can talk to anybody about pretty much anything, and was always busy at family gatherings. I found myself increasingly turning inward as the years went by, and found it difficult to engage with anybody because I could never seem to find common ground. Great folks, all of them, but our interests just didn’t overlap and I would find myself out at family functions sneaking off to read or play with the family pet.

Some of this can certainly be chalked up to “surly teenager syndrome”, but not all of it. Most of the time I wasn’t crabby,  just generally ill-at-ease and longing to be left alone. Mother repeatedly badgering me to “Smile and be pleasant!” didn’t help, especially when she surprised me with that admonition at times when I felt I was being perfectly sociable. I was more than likely doing a really bad job of masking my misery, never having had a particularly good poker face. Poor mom and dad: there’s nothing quite so discouraging as complicating those hormonal teenage years with undiagnosed grief manifesting as depression and abandonment issues.

By my mid twenties I would be officially diagnosed with chronic dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder) coupled with occasional major depression.

“According to 1985 statistics used by Parenting Resources of Santa Ana, California, although adoptees at that time comprised 2-3% of the population of this country, they represented 30-40% of the individuals found in residential treatment centers, juvenile hall, and special schools. They demonstrated a high incidence of juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and running away from home. They have had more difficulty in school, both academically and socially, than their non-adopted peers. The adoptees referred for treatment had relatively consistent symptoms, which are characterized as impulsive, provocative, aggressive, and antisocial.” (Verrier, p. xv)

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.

Sticks and Stones

Ever get on a roll where you feel like you're really getting things done and checking off the boxes on all those lists? That's been me, lately. Getting to household projects, garden projects, barn projects, cooking great stuff, starting to get quality sleep, actually dropping some excess weight, seriously tackling the household budget...feeling great about all of it. ...And then out of nowhere somebody says something(s) that totally undermines all that momentum. Words can hurt, because words represent attitudes and intentions. Be kind and supportive to people around you.

I'm going to spend the rest of my day re-building momentum, because I am NOT going to throw in the towel in the face of contempt.

"Darling Beast", by Elizabeth Hoyt

Don't judge this one by its cover!

Darling Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not a big romance reader, but I enjoy the occasional indulgence of one the same way I do the occasional rich, chocolaty dessert. Well, if it's it's good, anyway. If it doesn't grab me then I'm not shy about quitting a few chapters or pages in. I had the opportunity to pick up a copy of "Darling Beast", a charming historical romance, directly from the author this past weekend at the 2015 Emerald City Writers Conference. Ms. Hoyt is a hoot, and we spent a few happy moments commiserating about costuming in historical TV and film.

Having now read the book, it's obvious that she has put in the time doing research on the material and social culture of 1740s England, where the novel is set. All the historical research in the world won't help if the story is clunky or boring, however. I'm pleased to say that in this case the research is coupled with likable, interesting characters, an intriguing setting, and a bit of mystery to solve.

Oh, and there's just enough steaminess to keep a person warm on a cool Fall evening. Maybe enough that at a few points it felt like TMI time, but then I'm happy with "less is more". That said, although there are some HBO-worthy moments of passion, I never felt uncomfortable enough to skim and "get on with the story". Perhaps it was the grounded presentation of the lead characters, warts and all, with attendant touches of humor, that kept me engrossed even in their most private moments. Whatever the reason, I ended up binge reading the 321 pages, winding it up around 0300 and wondering where the time had gone.

This never happens to me with a romance. Well, hardly ever. Not only that, but I'm excited to get my hands on the next one in the series, and not just because it features a former Captain of Dragoons from this novel whom I found just as intriguing as this one's male lead. (clunky sentence penalty)

Anyway: If I chose to I could probably find something to nitpick about, but it would be infinitesimally minor. I think this is worth anybody's time. I'd love to see this as a film, as the setting(s) would lend themselves to a lush cinematic treatment, and the characters are varied and unique. Two thumbs up!

View all my reviews

Start of Autumn

Autumn is just about here, and it's not fooling around. We could here it roaring in the distance this last Saturday, when a sudden storm blew in with gusts in the 50 mph range. It's been so bone dry, with only a couple of real rains all summer, that the Puget Sound area looks more like southeast Oregon than its usual perpetually verdant self. The trees, in an act of self preservation, went into drought crisis mode and shunted what little moisture they had to their trunks. This left the branches dry...and brittle. You can guess what happened when that gale blew in.

We were across the bay in Port Gamble on Saturday, where History Pundit Spouse was giving his Historical Firearms talk at their first annual Steampunk Festival. It's a perfect place for something like that, it being a mid-19th century logging mill town frozen in time, one of the last real mill (company owned) towns in the country. Our "lecture hall" was the parlor of the Walker-Ames mansion, a magnificent pile in need of restoration but still in good enough shape for the occasional ghost walk or Steampunk convention. As I ran the Power Point for Gordon, I could look over his shoulder and see huge swells rolling northward up the bay, driven by the constant south wind. The power only flickered once (yay!) during the talk, in the wake of a massive gust that shook the house, and caused the projector to re-boot, but we made it.

A spot of tea sounded delightful, so we packed up our gear and repaired across the street to meet friends at the Tea Shop...and the whole town went down. The thoughtful chef bagged up some scones, jam, cream and lemon curd for us to take home. Stopping to chat with the fabricator of a spectacular Steampunk armored car, we snapped some photos and then noticed the power was back...so it was back to the tea shop for us! Many goodies and a veritable cask of Monkey Snow Plum tea later, we finally turned home.

The many, many downed trees and large branches we passed did not bode well, and sure enough our power was out when we pulled in to ye farm. Our one mechanical clock indicated it had gone out at almost precisely noon, which was about when we'd felt that giant gust across the bay in Port Gamble. We heat with wood, a stove we can cook on if necessary and the weather's cold enough to warrant stoking it, we have plenty of oil lamps and candles, but what we do not have is a water tower or hand pump for the well. When the power's out, we have no water. Luckily it was raining and the rain buckets and barrels were full, but it's still a pain when you're trying to get water to horses, chickens, and, most importantly, the toilet.

Apparently around 500,000 people were without power in the area. Yeah, Fall is pretty much here. It took three days and a couple of phone calls to get our power restored. Having no electricity delayed our already bumped episode of the History Files podcast. It also meant I wasn't able to start the detox/cleanse/healing diet I'd been longing to start the minute PAX was done, but it wasn't exactly a crisis.

The weather, despite the occasional thunderstorm, is actually pretty mild right now. I love this time of year and always have. I love going barefoot in warm weather, but I also love pulling on fluffy socks and wearing lots of loose layers. Fall means notebooks, pencils, art supplies, new clothes... ok, those are childhood happy memories, but Fall still means the smell of maple leaves, wood smoke, seeing your breath in the morning air, birthdays (for me and my sister), and the thrill of coming up with a costume for Halloween. The cats are growing their winter coats and are already starting to look fuzzy instead of svelte and shiny. The chickens are slowing down their laying, and the grass is greening back up after looking like the Sahara for months. I have a pile of apples to process in the kitchen, blackberries in the freezer to make something with, and the squash will be ready to start eating soon. I love this time of year.

Last Days of Summer

It's the middle of August here in the Pacific Northwest, the East side of Puget Sound, to be exact. This afternoon around 5:30 I stepped outside to give the chickens some scraps, and instead of a blast of heat at the end of a blindingly sunny Summer day, I was met with a soft, barely cool breeze. What a difference from the years I spent in Northern California, where I pretty much just hid for six months of the year until the heat wave passed. Right now in Stockton and L.A. and Sacramento people are cranking their air conditioners day and night, while up here we manage to keep things under control with an "open windows at night, closed and shuttered during the day" policy. Usually this means just closing up whichever side of the house is in sun at the moment, and leaving the other sides open to the breeze, unless it gets over 80 F at which point I batten the hatches and turn on a couple of ceiling fans.

As a native-born Washingtonian, this is a time of year I loathed in California. After months of unbearable heat which never seemed to abate, I was ready to jump in front of a bus by August, knowing that the worst was far from over and probably wouldn't be until darned near Halloween. As a little kid growing up near Seattle, my memories of Halloween involved much whining about having to wear a coat over my costume to go trick-or-treating. Now I'm just grateful that I'm back where Autumn actually means "cooler weather", and "back to school" clothes involved new sweaters, wool skirts, courderoy pants, and a new coat of some kind. Ordering socks and sweaters from the Sears catalog was an end-of-Summer ritual that heralded both the advents of the school and Holiday seasons, as well as in our household both my and my sister's October birthdays.

The landscape, especially this year with the crazy dry weather, is scorched and brown, but the daytime high temperatures are manageable for even this heat weenie. The breeze even at midday is refreshing. The sun is setting at a more reasonable hour. The leaves on the maple trees are browning early because of our unseasonably hot and dry Summer, which adds to a feeling that Fall is just around the corner. The apple tree is full, and it's just about time to get picking before the crows get into their annual "take just one big bite out of each apple" routine. Time to fill the kitchen with the smell of apples and cinnamon. Extra perk of not being a little kid anymore: I don't have to wear a coat over my Halloween costume if I don't want to.