Guilt

I still haven't gotten past feeling guilty about my relationship with my birthparents, towards my parents. Even though they know I have a relationship with both my birthparents, they know I have a very close relationship with my birthmother, yet I still find myself caging comments and editing myself when I'm talking to them.

They haven't really contributed to the guilt. They will ask about my birthparents and don't seem to have any bad feelings towards them, so why do I edit myself.

Recently, Kate took me to the coast for my fortieth birthday. Had I been going with a girlfriend, I would have told my parents all about it. But, since I was going with Kate, I played it down - made it seem like just an overnight instead of a long weekend, didn't go into details.

And because my parents are old-fashioned and polite, they don't ask more questions than what I offer - they wouldn't want to "pry." But if they did pry, I wouldn't mind - it would make it seem more okay.

I am feeling particularly guilty today because I screwed up big-time with my parents. I didn't call my mom, and didn't do anything for her eightieth birthday. Yes, lovely, I know.

Do I have excuses - sure. Her birthday was the day before our department graduation, an event that I spend a lot of time and energy and stress on and 2 days later was our 5 year old's birthday party and it was all a whirlwind. But, do any of those excuses make my missing my mom's birthday - her 80th - acceptable - of course not.

What made it worse, is that I was spending that day with my birthmom, with her helping us with the ukulele graduation event, doing a dress rehearsal for that. Then she and Steve babysat the kids so Dane and I could go out. All of this while I was forgetting my mom's birthday.

The thing that makes it worse is that I didn't forget - I kept remembering during the day that it was her birthday and I should call. I had forgotten that it was her eightieth, or else I wouldn't have been so careless about it. I kept putting it off and then didn't do it.

I called a couple days later and apologized (still not remembering that it was her eightieth), she was mad. Called again today. She's mostly over it, but my dad's not talking to me. I feel awful.

And I deserve to feel guilty for that, I messed up. I'm human, I suck at birthdays and events like that that girls are supposed to be good at, that my mom is good at. But I suck all the same.

But, I wish I still didn't feel guilty for my relationship with my birthfamilies. I wish I could just talk openly and honestly and have it be normal. Even though I call my birth-sisters my sisters, and Kate's siblings aunts and uncles - I don't refer to them by those designations to my parents (Mary, instead of "Aunt Mary," Abby instead of "my sister." And playing down the time I spend with them and things like that. I don't think I'll ever quite get past that. But, maybe if I try, and nothing bad happens, then I'll get used to it. Maybe I'll try that.

But, for now, I just have to figure out how to make up for my mom's birthday.

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

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Please comment!

A daughter by any other name is still a daughter, but what about a mother?

This week my birthmother, Kate, came through in a big way. After too much caffiene, I had the "brilliant" idea of coercing all of the faculty and staff in my engineering department into doing a big ukulele performance at the end of our department's graduation. The idea wasn't totally crazy - one of my staff guys is an amazing musician and has already performed songs at previous graduations, while Kate and Steve's (her husband) schtick is to teach ukulele to non-musicians. Kate and Steve had 26 ukuleles they could lend us, Jay could sing the song, it was a vision.

The next day when the coffee had worn off, I had started to rethink the idea. But, by then, my wonderful staff had bought into the idea and supported me through it. Two weeks later, Jay (the staffer musician) had written the song, the rest of the staff (women) co-ordinated a simple dance routine and the faculty were told they were going to be given ukes to play and offered lessons from Kate and Steve to get them ready for it and that was that.

This was the result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv7kb_vfQZ8
(I'll try to get a better video up soon. I'm the one in the white dress, and Kate and Steve are on the far right standing and playing ukulele)

Kate was wonderful. She and Steve drove 2 hours down from Olympia the day before to bring in the ukes and do a rehearsal (that I had gone back and forth on). When they got there, I was stuck with how to introduce her and Steve. Most of the people I work with, the ones I talk with regularly, know my story just from it coming up in conversation. You would think by now we would have it down, but when the time came to introduce Kate, I choked.

Earlier in reunion, I was braver. Twelve years ago, when I had a work party at a bar (a goodbye party for me after a layoff in nonprofit), Kate came along. We were already sitting around the table when she came in, so there was nothing to do but introduce her and so I did - as my birthmother. Everyone was nice enough not to comment on it right then, but it certainly put an awkward pause in the conversation.

One of the women I worked with at the time came up to me later when I was alone and asked if I had said that that woman was my "birthmother." "Yes," I replied, a little too bruskly, but by then I had learned that telling the story tended to "sensationalize" it to the listener, even when we were friends. It became marginalized either into a sweet romance of sorts - finding each other again - or a tale of adventure and danger. And while it is all those things, there's a lot of crap in between that's dark and fuzzy and hard to explain to someone who hasn't been though it. So I braced myself for her asking me my story.

It turned out she was an adoptee too and newly in reunion herself. From there, I was the one hooked on her story. It was the first time I could talk to someone so freely and openly about the whole experience and have her understand me instantly (in "shorthand" a therapist who saw both of us in an "adoptees in reunion" therapy group, called it later). So, I was glad I had introduced Kate as my birthmother.

Even though I may have been braver back then, with the fire of first learning about adoption issues lit under me (I had just started reading Betty Jean Lifton), but it was a selfish bravery. Me introducing Kate as my birthmother didn't say much about me that people could judge me about (other than that I was in touch with my birthmother) but now I realize, after getting to know Kate and her experience more, that it gives people a lot to judge her about - being a mother that chose to relinquish a child for adoption carries a heavy stigma with it and introducing her with that in front is very exposing.

Still, it seemed unfair. Kate could (and would, frequently,) introduce me as her "daughter" and have that be perfectly valid. You can have many daughters. Even if you give them away to be raised by another family, it is still your daughter. But, mother has a whole weight on it that's different. I talked about it a bit in the "Mother's Day" blog earlier. I can't just call Kate my "mother," I only have one. But, birthmother, that seemed to work for me, for us. And, without better words, that's what we've stuck with.

And, if it's unfair that Kate can introduce me as her daughter without issue being raised ("she's not my mom," I would retort silently in my thoughts), it's also not fair that I can't introduce her as my birthmother and it automatically raises issues and questions. A few weeks ago, we went to the beach, just Kate and I, for a weekend to ourselves in celebration of my birthday (more to come on that soon), and, again, Kate would introduce me as her daughter and I would just evade questions about us. It's strange, but there's no good way around it.

But there's one thing that's significant. Early on, I would think of her her as my "birthMOTHER." Now, I almost always think of her as my "birthMOM." I've gotten comfortable enough to go from mother to mom with the growth of our relationship, so I think that says something, even if it only makes sense to the few of us who stuggle with this.

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

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Birthmother's Blog

For those of you who might be interested, my birthmother, Kate, is also doing a blog - http://mothertone.wordpress.com/. Keeping in the same spirit as the memoir, we've decided to do the same with the blogs, and not them influence each other's writing until all is said and done. I hope at some point we can converge and comment back and forth on each other's writing, and that will be part of the fun - or, maybe not fun, but interesting and thought-provoking anyway.

In the meantime, it's just too easy to be influenced by the other's memories so we wanted to steer clear of that. What we will probably do is agree on "prompts" or topics that we find interesting and both comment on it from our individual sides, but not read each others' postings - for now anyway!

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

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Please comment!

The Meaning of ReunionEyes

I came up with the name ReunionEyes for several reasons.

The first is that eyes have always held a lot of meaning for me in reunion. Growing up, no one I knew had eye color that was like mine – a strange melding of colors that are neither blue, nor green, nor grey, but something of them all that blended together once could not be duplicated.

The first thing I wished to see in my birthmother was her eyes. I was sure that I would see in hers, the color of my own. But they weren’t. In fact, one of the first things she said to me was that I had the most amazing color eyes. Disappointed, I’d asked if there was anyone in her family she thought they came from. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it.”

Meeting my birthfather, who has brown eyes, wasn’t much more help. Though he said that he did think that he had family with similar-colored eyes, he wasn’t in touch with many of them so there was no way to know for sure.

So, for me, eyes became symbolic of the search for self in adoption and that by looking at our birthfamilies for explanations of ourselves we inevitably find that we are who we are – unique and not easily explained. Part of all of our families, a blend, but not an identical descendant of any one.

That’s the one part.

The other is the idea of Reunion in and of itself. To Reunionize. To talk about reunion and to normalize it. Not that it’s any great mystery in this day and age, except, that somehow, it still is. It’s a unique phenomenom. A time when women were more or less cornered into a closed adoption system where the only choices were abortion (if they conceived after 1970), or closed adoption, or keeping the baby and getting married. No appealing options.

And, again, to talk and have discussions from us who have been in reunion for awhile now. Not that I don’t want to hear about those who are new in reunion. I remember that time, and I empathize with it. It’s an emotional time with honeymoon-highs and lashing lows that send your soul into lightness and darkness that is exhausting and confusing. But this blog isn’t about that. It’s about the bewildering and amazing place that we’ve gotten to that by riding through the storm we come to a place we didn’t know existed so couldn’t have planned to head here that’s mostly calm and holds the sadness and loss and the gifts together as siblings in this strange family.

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

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Mother's Day, Part 2

So, what do you do about mother's day?

For me, it's always been complicated. It's stressful. I struggle between the right thing to do and what feels right. And realize neither are right.

So what feels right? For my mother - my adoptive mother (and anyone in reunion will know that when I say "my mother" knows that I'm talking about my adoptive mother. it still astounds me that someone who is on the outside of the experience will ask, "which mother?" like there's a choice. There is only one to me) I do the typical things - send flowers, call her on the day, or, if we happen to be together on that day, go to brunch.

For my birthmom - I'm still stumped.

I want to honor her. I want to honor the time she had me in her belly, the years she thought of me and the love she does have for me, as well as the relationship we have now. But she's still not my mother. She's my birthmother. So?

What do you do to celebrate your birthmother? The beauty about mother's day is that doing something for your mother - any simple thing - brings such great delight (if they're a decent mom that is. And from my perspective now being a mom, it doesn't take much of what my kids do for me to make it feel like the most amazing special thing in the world). But, the birthmom. Well. There's baggage there, isn't there. And I don't want my mom to know, to think that she thinks I'm honoring my birthmom as my mom. So.

So usually I do nothing. Or little. A few times - times we lived together in the same town - I would do the right thing. Bring a hanging basket of flowers or bulbs. Make a breakfast and include my husband's mom and her. But it always feels a little false, a little forced, and a whole lot awkward.

I would love to hear from other adoptees in reunion to hear how they celebrated mother's day and what feels right for them.

Thanks for sharing.

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

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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!

Mother's Day?

I met my birthmother twenty two years ago. Is that right? 1989. I just graduated high school, was about to go into college and in the middle of all that - we met.

This is my first post to this new blog. I'm wanting it to be a space where adoptees in reunion can talk about their experience. I want to talk about my experience because my experience has a breadth and depth that astounds me. Twenty two years in reunion. We've come a long way, but there will always be issues, always things unresolved, and I still find it all so interesting.

Along the way I've found some friends that are also adoptees, also have been in reunion, and I find it amazing to talk to them. Beause unlike so many other things in life - marriage, kids, parents, work - there isn't much out there about what it's like to be part of this whole big strange family that we're in. Hell, there is plenty out there on mixed-marriages, blended families, gay parenting, all sorts of "non-tranditional" families. But, our strange family - us adoptees in reunion - still feels a little in the dark. It's uncertain, and we all just plod through it on our own. But, when I talk to friends who have had similar experiences as they try to adjust their lives to fit this new, strange, blended family, I am amazed by the reassurance I feel. We are not alone. There are things about this that make sense, that are predictable, that are "normal."

So, I hope to find others out there and hear your stories as well. I don't want this to be all about me. I want to hear from you too. I want to know how other adoptees in reunion handle Mother's Day. I want to hear what it's like for other adoptees in reunion to go to a family reunion. I want to hear your stories and share mine so we all hear what's going on for each other.

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

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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!