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.
