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.

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

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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.

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

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The Many Sides of Mother's Day

It's been twenty-four Mother's Days that I've been in reunion with my birthmother, Kate, and I still haven't found a way to celebrate it.

My own boys are 8 and 6, so, as a mother, I am in my prime years for Mother's Day enjoyment. They look forward to Mother's Day. They make me gifts at school, and enjoy making them. They will bring me coffee in bed, and then we'll pick an activity that we all enjoy -  a hike or drawing pictures or playing basketball. The best part is that I get their appreciation for the things I do for them the rest of the year.

As the adopted daughter, it's easy for me to celebrate Mother's Day with my adoptive mom. I send flowers and call her and we both seem good with that. I get to appreciate all she's done for me.

As the relinquished daughter, I am stymied. I don't really want to rejoice being relinquished. I don't imagine Kate associates joy with being a desperate and isolated pregnant teenager who is giving away her daughter. Appreciation the years of care and nurture and sacrifice - well, that doesn't work either. And I've come too far to fall back into the old, tired and inaccurate mantra of the birthmother's noble sacrifice to give me a better life.

I love Kate, and am happy to have her in my life. I wish I could acknowledge her in some beautiful way, but I can't seem to find a way to do it. Over dinner last month, while discussing the difficulty of finding the right word for who she is to me (I find birthmother as a term to be weak and missing the whole picture, Kate down-right hates it), Kate insisted that she is my mother. "It's just as a matter of fact," she explained, "I am your mother." She was trying to get across that biologically, it's just fact. I gave a small shrug, unconvinced. While I could see her reasoning, it still didn't ring completely accurate.

Kate  has only been in my life during my adulthood. While she became a mother when I was born, I became the daughter of my adoptive mom by the time Mother's Day came a month after my birth. Although I existed for Kate, though I was out of her life, she didn't really exist for me. Certainly not in my child's mind. To me, she was more imaginary than literal. Saying that I had a birthmother was akin to saying there is a Santa.

While I know Kate is my mother, I can't acknowledge her as my mother because I wasn't mothered by her. Mother is both a noun and a the verb. If the verb isn't part of the relationship, does the noun still stand? In one way but not the other. It doesn't fit.

Yet, there is still pressure to acknowledge the day in some way. Mostly, all I've been able to manage is a phone call to say, "Happy Mother's Day," while trying to keep the question-mark out of my voice.

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

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The Men of Reunion

It seems that men often come as an afterthought in reunion conversations. One of the attendees at our talk at the American Adoption Congress asked if I have a relationship with my birthfather. I said that, yes, I do, and that we have a good relationship. But, I also explained that my relationship with him just isn't loaded like it is with my birthmother. I said I don't know why exactly, aside from the obvious part that relinquishment wasn't his decision (he didn't have a part in the decision). But even when it comes to the connection to the larger family, my connection with my birthfather feels less ... important isn't the right word ... less heavy, less significant, less immediate. That's it - less immediate. It feels one step removed.

I talked about this with my birthfather, John. when we spoke a couple weeks ago. He was saying that he finally got it and that it's because the father is NOT the mother. That the relationship with the mother is so fundamental, that it's just a different thing.

I get that, but it still doesn't quite satisfy my curiosity about the difference in relationship with not only my birthfather, but the men in reunion vs. women in reunion. In addition to my birthfather, I have a birth-step-father, Kate's husband, who I've known nearly as long as I've known Kate. There are my uncles, my grandfather (Kate's father is still living). Kate's husband's father just died this past week, and he was more a part of my life than Kate's own father. I feel that loss so much right now and it makes me want to have a stronger connection to the men in my life.

Maybe it's just that men are different than women. Maybe that's as simple as it is. Because they're different the relationship isn't as complicated, isn't as intense, isn't as loaded. And maybe that's okay. It doesn't mean they're not important, it's just that it's easier. And with adoption, I'm totally okay with anything being easier.

After all, my boys will soon be men, and my reunion is theirs as well. They are a part of all of these families in a way that will come much more naturally to them than it has for me. I don't think they'll question their connections with the families in the way that I have. It will be easier.

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

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Thoughts from the Conference

In 1997, eight years into our reunion, Kate and I had been through many dramatic ups and downs and deep challenges. There were times that we didn’t know what would happen, or if our relationship would survive. After years together working through it, we got to a solid footing with each other. Not perfect, but stable.

It was at that point, we decided to go together to the American Adoption Congress Conference in Vancouver WA, hoping to gain more insight into our experience.

Now, seventeen years later, we got to experience the American Adoption Congress Conference again. This time, even deeper and longer into our relationship. And, we were going to present, as well as listen.


The introduction to the conference took me right back into the swirls of amazement in being with people who have an instant understanding of what you are experiencing. It's the experience of being enveloped in honesty. Considering that what we are experiencing 
- questioning the good of adoption, discussing the wounds and issues it causes - are topics that aren't acceptable in our society, it felt like an act of amazing bravery.

It made me realize that in presenting, I would be speaking those unacceptable truths. Despite my time and experience in reunion, and no matter how much of a rebel I may feel that I am, once I was about to cross that line to talk in public about something that's passive-agressively forbidden by society, my heart started racing and my head began swimming. I couldn't eat and couldn't sit still.


That anxiety morphed as we began the talk itself. We went into the very large conference room with lines of chairs and I worried that no one would come to the presentation (Kate and I joked that we would have one person there, and we could sit on either side of them, reading our parts to her one by one). 


Once the room filled with people and we began our talk, I worried that people wouldn't related to it, or that we were droning on too long, or that this was all just ... wrong. 
Then we were done. And we had questions from the audience. And we had conversations. Suddenly, we were all there together, all going towards the same goals, holding similar values. I felt full, and right, and heard. 


We were able to speak the unspeakable. Nothing came crashing down, the world didn't stop. 


Of course, the world didn't change overnight to knowing the truth about adoption and reunion. But maybe our little talk will cause a ripple that will go out and on. I want people to talk about their experiences in adoption and reunion. Everyone's story is important. More than that, everyone's story is interesting. 

What was different at this conference was the variety and depth of the adoption and reunion experience. No longer was long-term reunion unusual - there were lots of people in our talk who were in reunion as long as we've been. And there was a talk on donor-conceived children who have such a similar circumstance to the adoptees with so much of the same issues. They were all there because they want the openness and honesty about the experience. 


I'm sure I'll still feel the pressure that we shouldn't speak out, but I'll just get used to doing it anyway.  :)

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

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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

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First Read - The Truth

Writing my truth about reunion has been exceptionally difficult. Surprising, even. When I go to write about something painful, I find that although I can remember how I felt, describing how I felt is a whole lot harder. I have the benefit of working with a writing critique group and their help has been priceless. Whenever I think I've really "gone there" emotionally in my writing, my critique group comes back with comments that it's not enough, I need to go deeper, and get all my gory, icky innards on the page in order for the reader to be able to feel what the narrator (i.e. "me") is going through. 

Part of my issue was that I knew Kate would be reading my writing. That was the point - I would tell my side, she would tell hers. We would write it separately without reading the other's part, but then eventually put it together. And, a few weeks ago, that's what we did. Because of the conference presentation, we had to read each other's side to coordinate the presentation.  

I had my trepidations about what Kate had to say about me. After all, I was 22 when I first came out to Portland to live with Kate. At that age, I was that ever-so-desirable combination of being both self-absorbed and clueless. Not the best part of myself that I want to project to the world. But, I know that is true, it was who I was, and I wouldn't be who I am now, without having been there then. In order to tell the story, Kate needed to write the truth of who I was then.

Finally reading it was surprising. I wasn't offended by the less-desirable descriptions of my behavior or my embarrassing actions. In fact, I found those were the things I wanted to hear MORE about as a reader. 

But I was more afraid for Kate to read what I had written. Thinking badly of someone else or feeling hurt by them is not something I like to talk about. But here I had to lay it all out there. I was afraid it would hurt her. When we met she was in a phase that was anything but motherly - staying out til the morning hours playing music, having the party come back to her apartment afterwards... you can get the picture. It was great in the terms of a college-grad coming out to stay in Portland with someone fun, but maybe not the best set-up for a reunion with your mother. 

So when I read it my sections for the presentation for Kate, she listened, and she didn't fall apart. In fact, she seemed rather serene about it. She was annoyed at some of the things she had done that I had described, but didn't seem bothered that I had put it out there. 

I started to understand what my writing group had been telling me. Describing the experience externally - telling the reader what happened, describing the scene, even getting into what you thought, is nothing if you can't get to how you felt. And not just surface feeling, you have to get to the deep dark ugly feeling that you don't want to admit, even to yourself...and then you have to tell it to the world. 

But, now that I know Kate can handle the bad things I say about her, I think the world will be able to handle the bad things I say about me. I just have to get there myself, first. I think our final round of revisions will be about getting down there, into the dark matter. And, that will be what makes the story good. 

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

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Kathleen~Cathleen Present in San Francisco

In just nine days, on April 10, 2014, Kate and I will be presenting sections from Kathleen~Cathleen at the American Adoption Congress Conference in San Francisco. I am really excited to share our story, in person, with other people from all corners of the adoption world. I am so eager to know how people will react.

As we mentioned in our previous post,"The Quest," the first AAC conference we attended in 1997 was where the idea of our memoir was conceived. Now it's come full circle. 

The American Adoption Congress is a group committed to adoption reform and promote honesty, openness and respect for the lifelong process of adoption. I feel like our story is at home in this community. 

We are doing a workshop on "The Birthmother Experience vs. The Adoptee Experience in Long-Term Reunion." We will take turns reading from our chapters that reflect mutual turning points in our relationship in long-term reunion. 

We'll let you know how it goes!

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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!