I didn't except going to an adoption conference to
change my life. It sounds so hokey. But, it wasn't due to profound insights
learned at the conference (though there were some) or the bonding with other
adoptees and families (though that had
its part). What changed my life was a brief conversation in the bathroom (huh,
I wonder how many bathroom conversations have changed the course of a life?
More than one would expect, I'd wager).
Kate and I decided to go to American Adoption Congress conference at the last minute. We only knew of it because we'd both been attending support groups for people in reunion - she in a birthmother's group, me, an adoptees in reunion group.
The groups were both run by the same woman, a
birthmother who had been in a long-term reunion with her relinquished daughter.
It seemed long-term to me then, but thinking back they probably had known each
other only a few years more than me and Kate.
"In reunion," like "in
therapy," it was more about helping people handle the experience of
reunion, a process that had very little support, resources or even just simple
information. The only source of information I knew of, other than the group,
were Betty Jean Lifton's books. She wrote several books on adoption and the
psychological impact that it has on the adoptee. Like those outside of adoption
and reunion, I had believed all that I had been told about adoption: that who raised
you didn't matter, as long as you were loved and raised in a good home, that
adoptees were no different than children by blood, and that there didn't have
to be issues with being adopted as long as you could accept the world you were
given and just forget about the lost world, your unknown exile.
Lifton's books took those assumptions and slapped
them silly. She said that being an adoptee was like being a dog with a missing
leg, you were unstable, there was something missing that you could never get back.
She pointed out all the issues that adoptees, disturbingly citing depression,
violence and suicides in adoptees.
Kate had given me Lifton's, "Journey of the
Adopted Self," after reading it herself, during the period in reunion,
after the honeymoon, when I started pulling away forcefully and angrily. I
didn't know what was going on with me. Reading Lifton's book was like a secret
tome into my psyche. It didn't fix everything, but it gave me markers and
guides to help explain what was happening in me.
By the time of the conference, Kate and I had been
in reunion for years, and had mostly been living together in
the same town, and for several of those months living together in the same tiny
apartment. We had been through honeymoon, going dark and had starting
integrating our lives in a new way that included each other in them, which felt
to be uncharted territory. There just didn't seem to be much information out in
the world about adoption, very little on reunion and nothing on long-term
reunion.
So, when we ran into Betty-Jean Lifton at the
conference, in the bathroom, I asked if she could write a book on long-term
reunion. I introduced myself and Kate, explaining we had been in reunion now
for so many years and that we went through the drama of it all without guidance
or experience to help us and that it would be huge to have that out there.
Betty Jean replied, "You are the ones who should write the
book."
It stuck with me, with us. I didn't feel qualified.
But, after some time, I realized there was value in just telling our story, our
history, as we experienced it. Maybe it could help someone who was just going
into reunion and didn't know what lay ahead, or someone who was afraid of
reunion and what it might bring up. Even though everyone's experience is
different, if we shared our experience, maybe it would provide some
insight.
And I realized that by writing it I could explain
how after having my adopted sense of self shattered by reunion, I built a new
self a self that was more complete. In telling the story, I could put it in
words, understand it for myself.
It was serendipitous that the conference and
Lifton's comment happened during the time that Kate was going to a
birthmother's group and I was going to an adoptees group. Kate and I would come
together over dinner or drinks every couple weeks and talk about what we were
learning, unearthing, and how powerful it was to be surrounded by people who
understood. It was something we couldn't do together - she had her path as the
birthmother, and I had mine as the adoptee, it wasn't the same path, but it led
to the same destination.
I think that's what gave us the idea that it would
be better, more complete, to write our experiences separately, but together,
she to explain her experience and me, mine. And that putting them together then
would create a story bigger than the two of them alone.
We realized that the only way to convey the truth,
our truths, was to say our experience without the other listening. I knew I
would hold back if I was writing to Kate, or the birthmother in general, as my
audience. So I wrote as if explaining my story to a friend and ignored that
Kate would read it at some point down the road. Kate did the same.
We wrote our story. We're mostly done. But, I
realized when getting critique in the confidence in my writing group that I
still wasn't telling the whole story. I was still holding back. So the last
part for me to be able to release and say everything was TO have Kate read it. I
needed to see that she could take it, that it wouldn't break her, that it
wouldn't hurt us.
So, we finally did. Last week we read sections from
each other's chapters in preparation for the second AAC conference we are going
to. The one we're going to in order to share what the previous conference had
inspired - our story. It wasn't easy, but it was good (more to come on that in
upcoming posts).
***
to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone
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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?
Please comment!