"Family" Vacations

Family vacations are to summer, what Christmas is to winter - a time to gather family that should be relaxing, beautiful and idyllic but too often is stressful and disappointing.

Two years ago, Kate asked me to join in on a family vacation. She and Steve were playing at a festival in Hood River in July, so she invited me and my birth-sister to bring our kiddos along and join them for the weekend.

In an email, Kate described it as:

"... a wonderful, family-friendly lavender festival on the farm of friends...the best place to get lavender for your garden, essential lavender oil - eat a bunch of good food, see crafts and hear a little music amidst field of purple fragrance - lovely.

It's a beautiful area in the Rowena Wilds on the Mosier Ridge and there are lots of wild turkeys, eagles, deer, an occasional cougar and high desert air. 

If you would like to take this chance to get together, we'd love to have you come out, whether it's for the day, the weekend or a few days. It'd be nice to get the little cousins together."

Lovely, right?


Reading it again now, I can see that Kate was a little too convincing, putting a much harder sell on the idea than there needed to be. I only realize now that it must have been hard to ask me, the relinquished daughter, and my sister, displaced from Kate's life by divorce, to come on a "family" vacation.

Thing is, on a day to day basis, my relationship with Kate feels really quite normal. We're family. Not a simple mother-daughter family, but our reconstructed version of family that's come together as adults. An invitation to a weekend didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for us. It sounded ... lovely.

Unfortunately, I had just started a new job and had a work conflict the weekend she would be there. My parents were also going to be with me for the summer, and I hated leaving them to do things without them. It wasn't going to work. I hate to disappoint, and avoided telling her that I couldn't go.

My lack of communication led to an response from Kate where she'd surmised I wasn't getting back to her because my parents were in town, which she hadn't known about, which distressed her that she didn't know what was going on in my life.


Ah.

We've not yet figured out a way to have a family vacation together. Kate has fond memories of her husband's parents gathering their grown-children and families together every summer either on the beach at the Hamptons or, later, at their summer home in Woodstock. Her own family of seven siblings will have the occasional reunion at her sister's farm. I imagine Kate would like to create that for her next generation.

A year or so following my initial reunion with my birthfather, I joined him for his annual family vacation with his immediate family and friends at a music festival in the woods of Mendocino, California. It was four days of music, camping, dancing, and celebration.


Lovely, right?


Every year since, I've wanted to go back. Once I had kids of my own, I have desperately wanted to bring them there, so that could experience the magic of that experience that I hadn't had myself until I was an adult. Too late, and yet better late than never.

My adoptive parents enjoy a different kind of travel. They like to go to foreign places, enjoying the view of the culture from the safe distance of nice hotels, and fancy restaurants where they eat fine food. I went with them to Hawaii a few years back. We stayed at a beautiful resort on Maui and went to a different expensive restaurant every night. I asked at one of the fancy restaurants where to go for local food. The waitress told me I wouldn't want to, my family laughing at my desire to sample spam and seaweed. At the time, I was hurt. I didn't like getting mocked for wanting to learn about the culture, not just view it from a difference. But, now I see it's just that I like different things than what my adoptive parents like. I like the kind of things my birthparents like.

A family separated most of their lives doesn't come together easily. I have my family - the family Kate chose for me to be with. As much as I wish to be able to have a family vacation with Kate, or my birthfather, I haven't figured out a way to make it fit into my life. I was given to a different family, a family I love. As different as I am, I am theirs, and have the obligations that go along with it.

I am bringing my husband and kids to Florida to vacation with my mom on Sanibel Island later this summer. I've found out the hard way that it's easier for me to compromise what I would like to do, and settle on staying at a resort, than to try to get my mom to enjoy camping (I've tried - it didn't go well).

It's the fate of the adoptee to be in families foreign to them. The similarities and synchronicities of reunion shine a spotlight on that. In reunion, there's validation for who you are, understanding of where your likes, dislikes, and quirks come from. You get to see your lineage, but you still don't get to belong to your original families. After all, you belong to another family, one that is different from you.


Lovely ... right?

***

to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone

***

Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!

Ignorance is Bliss...?

This past week, I've been visiting my old friends in New Jersey. We're back East for my husband's nephew's wedding in Pennsylvania, so took some extra time to visit my life-long friends whom I grew up with in Jersey.

Our first days here were Memorial Day Weekend. We joined my best friend, Olga, on Long Beach Island. I'd spent a lot of time on the Jersey Shore growing up, but mainly at Seaside Heights. Seaside is classic Jersey Shore with a long boardwalk of food stands, arcades, carnival games, and big amusement-park rides. 

I'd loved Seaside Heights as a kid, but the thought of visiting it as a parent was less exciting. I'd pictured the kids being manic, over-stimulated with a lot of running around from one thing to another. But, still, I was willing to go because I wanted them to see a little bit about where I came from.

Long beach Island was nothing like Seaside. The harbor was on one side, walk a few blocks and you're on the other side of the island at the ocean. No boardwalk, a direct walk onto the beach. It was a sweet, quaint seaside where the kids could play at the beach and go for pizza or ice cream after and visit the one, small arcade and amusement rides in the middle of town.

I sat on the beach with Olga, catching up, while my 6 and 8 year old boys played with her 11 and 9 year old boys. Her youngest, a girl, 4 years-old, played in the sand while my husband stood with her husband, watching the kids in the ocean or throwing the football to them.

Olga asked about my mom and, later, about Kate. She asked what the boys called her. I explained that Kate's husband had become "Uncle Grandpa Steve," by the kids, which fit him perfectly. Kate refers to herself as "Grammy Kate," but the boys often just call her Kate. Not calling her Grammy isn't so much about not thinking of her as a grandmother, but that "Grammy," just isn't a word they (we) would use.

"How much do they know..." Olga asked cryptically. I was jolted back into the world I grew up in. Adoption was a dark, dirty secret that wasn't to be spoken of openly. "Oh," I said,  "they know everything...have for as long as they can remember." I shrugged, "They're kids, and it's part of their lives, so for them it's normal."

"Yeah," Olga agreed, "I remember when you found out that you were adopted, you were fine with it, it didn't bother you."

I realized then how much she doesn't know. Olga is one of my best friends, even though we might not talk for a year, or see each other for several years, I know that I can call her in the middle of the night if I needed to (my measure of friendship). Yet, she still knows me only as the person I was before reunion.

We've always been opposites. She is traditional and old-fashioned. While she knows I met my birthmother and father and their family, she doesn't understand the relationship or really why I want them in my life. With every question, I hear her tone of concern for my adoptive parents.

Watching the ocean, I wondered if I should explain more about what it was like for me, have her understand the complexity of adoption and reunion, but that would take longer than a weekend. I just let her comment drift out on the waves.

I thought about when I was in the fog, where adoption was okay and wasn't a big deal for me. When I didn't know what I'd lost. There was a comfort in that. But, given the choice, I'd rather walk in the sun and get a burn than to stumble in the fog.

***

to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone

***

Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!

Jersey Girls - Friends Forever

Today I'll be flying back to New Jersey with all my boys (husband, Dane, and two sons, Quinn and Reed). My husband's nephew is getting married in Pennsylvania, just a couple hours drive from my friends in Jersey.

It's strange going back. I suppose it is for anyone who has moved away from where they grew up. But, for adoptees in reunion, there is the knowing of where you came from that goes farther back from simply, "where you came from." There's what came before, that world that you weren't part of. Last time I went back I was struck for the first time with feeling, I wasn't supposed to be here, this isn't where I was supposed to grow up, this isn't my environment, my people. It's foreign. But, I just hadn't known it as a child. Even though I knew I was adopted, I hadn't gotten what that meant. It meant that I was taken out of my natural environment and put in one strange to me.

But, now, it's where I came from. I still consider the girlfriends that I grew up with to be my best friends, even if we don't talk more than once every couple years. They are who knew me from the beginning, who knew me for who I was before I had a chance to decide who that would be. Just me.

They were the ones who listened to me about being adopted growing up. I don't know how much I really said. I feel like I mostly didn't know what to feel about it, or was convinced I didn't care. But then

at 18 I decided to search, and my friends were there. They offered to go with me to Catholic Charities when I went to find out my "non-identifying information," though I insisted to go on my own. They are the ones I talked to when I came back, having found out she wanted to meet me, and about getting a cassette tape and pictures from my birthmother, but refusing to open it because I wanted to meet her in person first. They are who I marveled to about meeting all these people, my first families, who I had so many unexpected things in common with. About meeting people who "got me." They understood, they already "got me. "

***

Kate never visited me in my home in New Jersey. She had promised to, back when I was living back at home for a year after we had met and been in a reunion for awhile. I don't know what she was thinking, I couldn't imagine her going through with it. Seeing the world I grew up in, the one she chose for me. How foreign would it be for her? How startling.

I can't imagine my kids being raised by someone else. It would enrage me. I am their only mother, only I know what they need, how they should be raised. It's not pride, it's instinct - pure, raw, guttural. Kate has come to that feeling of possessiveness too late. Too late to tell me what's best for me, to point me in the right direction. That's lost, for both of us, when it comes to me. I am my own person, no longer able to be parented, refusing to be claimed.

So as I go back to the world I came from I will be stitching together what was, now alongside what should have been, and doing so claim myself.

***

to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone

***

Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!