I speak to you with silence

I am horribly slow--as in months behind--at reading my Sunday NYT, but last week I finally got around to the edition from February 6. In the Book Review, one author opened her critique by quoting from "Dedication," a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:

You whom I could not save
Listen to me. 
Try to understand this simple speech
     as I would be ashamed of
     another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of
     words.
I speak to you with silence like a 
     cloud or a tree. 


I was introduced to Milosz's work some 18 years ago, as a newish grad student at Berkeley, where Milosz would spend part of the year as an emeritus. I went to his readings in the small Maud Fife Room in Doe Library, and sat transfixed by the eloquence of his words and the soft cadence of his voice as he read aloud. His poems often speak to damaged part of me, the part I try to keep locked up and safe.

I was unfamiliar with this particular poem, but it has resonated through me these past few days. His sense of speaking with silence is intensely meaningful to me. There are so many silences in adoption: about birth, about relationships, about what adoptees and aparents and nparents feel or don't feel. Adoption is deeply rooted in painful emotions that are buried, things that are difficult to put into words and that cause pain and controversy when voiced. It is hard for me to accept this silence. My post from last week attests to that. Trust is difficult when there aren't words of support and affirmation from those I love. I have also thought of C's silence as saying the same kinds of things that Milosz touches on in these few lines. She saved me by sacrificing me; was I really saved? She would like to think so. She doesn't mince words, and she doesn't speak unless she has something to relate. She doesn't lure or adorn with false praise. I admire her for that. And she does beg me to forgive her for the long, bitterly cold silence during which I suffered such excruciating pain from her rejection. I do, of course, forgive her.

She called me today, on her birthday, out of the blue. For the first time I was able to wish her "Happy Birthday" and have her hear me say it. She thanked me with a laugh and told me she needs eight margaritas to deal with being 64. She wanted to tell me about her trip to San Diego. For the first time she said that she feels she wants to meet me (and my children) in the not-too-distant future. She told me how happy A is that he has a sibling, at last. She told me how much A likes Mark, and how she hopes to meet him, too. She apologized for being locked in the 1960's view of herself for so long. She told me that she appreciates how I am letting her direct the course of the reunion, and that she feels safe that I am not judging her. I don't, or I try very hard not to. I love her, although I cannot tell her this yet; it suggests that the stakes are higher than she wants them to be. It is still too much, she says, to think of me as her daughter. She said she felt terrible for not being able to see me as a human being until last fall. The defensive wall has come down, she said, and she is happy for it. She cannot be happier than I am. She laughed as she told me that A told her that he, she, and I are all from the same mold: stubborn, fixated, and up to a thousand things at once. Noses buried in books, curious about everything, loyal.

She also told me that A told her that I am "scary smart" and use vocabulary words he's never heard of. I will take the compliment, but the conversation then led to A's and my discussion about the contingency of our relationship and how much I feared that contingency. I didn't want to get into the grittier parts of this equation, but she immediately said that she supported me 100% in setting boundaries and asking him to choose either to be in or to be out. As she put it, I "deserve so much more than to be kicked around by someone indecisive." I can get behind that, and I love that she gets it.

While her 11-year stony silence was brutal, she is not going faster than she feels comfortable. She is clear about what she can do and what she cannot offer. Since she committed to talking to me last December, she has kept her word. She has reached out to me at least as much as I've reached out to her. She has been more reliable than A, when I look at the big picture. I think I am really less afraid of her leaving me than of A cutting ties. I feel that she respects me, which is a very big deal. She isn't the one keeping secrets and not telling me where she is.

It is unnerving to want to trust her. It is safer to keep people at arm's length, but it is also seductive to have her draw me in closer and make herself vulnerable to me. It is wonderful to hear that I might meet her before too long, but I am of course terrified that I will break down in front of her and become a quivering mush of emotions. It's one thing to talk to her on the phone and keep myself detached, but in person? To stand in front of the woman I most look like--and from whom I was born--and be nonchalant, just like I am meeting a pen pal? I don't think my adult armor is quite strong enough to protect and mask the lost little girl inside of me who is still her daughter.