Crazytown

Having just returned from my 20-year college reunion, I feel rather marinated in my own past. I had a wonderful time, no complaints. I love my alma mater. The sourness I felt back then has been magically ameliorated by time. What did I know back then? I was pampered and spoiled. I had access to wonderful faculty, and I was surrounded by brilliant women. It wasn't always fabulous, but it was pretty good.

I spent an hour with my dear friend in the trenches Amanda: too short! too short! And during the weekend, I found myself (unsurprisingly) surrounded by many classmates who are adoptive parents and their children. I didn't talk much about my adoption, but when I did, as usual, conversations ended up being superficial. There's no need to burden people with my own Gordian Knot, and when I do try, it's usually misunderstood. As it stands right now, I am hovering on the razor's edge between thinking that I really benefitted from it, but there's always the loss, the dark, dark loss. I don't like it when people brush the loss away and say, "Oh, it all worked out for the best!" I may think that myself, although I feel guilty when I do because I love my natural family and I wish I were welcomed and that the situation weren't all that crazy. And that I didn't have the loss in the first place. It's not a zero sum equation. Moreover, it's not like my afamily isn't without its fair share of Midwestern crazy. It's just a different kind of crazy. Upper Midwestern crazy as opposed to Midwestern-Southern crazy. (Can you imagine a Southern version of me?)

It's also about coping mechanisms.

I saw a friend today, a wonderful artist friend who is very complicated himself. He does a thousand things brilliantly, and one of those thousand things happens to be cutting hair. I was sitting in his apartment having a cut and color, recounting the events of the past few months, while he was sharing some things in his own life (quite exciting things, like having his sculpture published in a scholarly journal article and becoming an uncle). He has watched me search for my family, enter into reunion, be welcomed, be rejected (I saw him the day I got the brutal e-mail from A), and struggle back to sanity. His own family is riddled with substance abuse, and he told me that he is trying to be cognizant of his role as caretaker, having been told from childhood that his job was to "bring sunshine." I told him about adoptees often feeling they have to shoulder their trouble and everyone else's, and he said he could identify with that. He recently started going to Al Anon and told me that he thought I could benefit from the three things Al Anon teaches family members of alcoholics: You didn't cause it. You can't cure it. You can't control it.

It does sound a hell of a lot like reunion and the havoc and capriciousness it seems to bring to our relationships with our natural families. There's no predicting what will happen, is there? Our families have their coping mechanisms in place, and then we turn up, as Emmett said, like shiny coins. We confound whatever rusty mechanisms they have, which might have been working very well if not touched or scrutinized closely. We upset the balance and can be neatly scapegoated for the chaos that ensues; why didn't we just stay gone? Before we know it, we're in crazytown with no directions.

We look for rational answers. It would be nice to get some, but often there aren't any because we have walked into something that is nowhere close to rational. We have no hope of understanding it unless given a great deal of time and some sympathetic individuals somewhere in the mix.

I know that some reunions are not at all like this, but more often that not, we're dropped into plays that are more than half over and we have no scripts. People frequently don't want to communicate with us, when they do sometimes they lie, and feelings get hurt more reliably than the sun rises in the morning. Many adoptees will walk for miles and live on crumbs for months. We will endure emotional cruelty for a few words of endearment.

I am no exception.

I live for those times when my natural family acknowledges who I am to them. It shouldn't be all that big a deal, but because I am insecure it has become huge. I am insecure because I do not trust that they will be in my life tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Past experience haunts me. It hurts to say that, but that's the truth.

So when A texted me last week at the end of a conversation and said, "Will do, big sis" I just about melted into the floor of the hotel. That's exactly who I am to him, and who I want to be. Who I always should have been.

This is why I hate the crazytown of my reunion and why I hate the crazytown of non-discussion among different parts of the "constellation."

This is why I hate that talk happens ABOUT adoptees, not with us. I don't like it when adoptees are exploited or pushed aside, especially when they're still children. I don't like it when some aparents and nparents see it as appropriate to "school" adult adoptees as though they're children. We are all adults. Where the hell is the respect? Can you put your feelings aside and be a parent? Can you think about how your child feels for a moment? Really? No? Okay, I should have known better than to ask that question.

Several different people have posted recently that there are more important things in life than adoption. Three or four of them were natural mothers, and one was an adoptee. All of them were privileged. How fortunate for them to have better things to worry about. As a privileged person, I suppose that I can worry about better things, as well, although I believe that there is still a long way to go before adoption reform can be declared a done deal. Aren't we still lacking our OBCs?

In the spirit of thinking about things that are more important to me than whiny, self-righteous people in the blogosphere, here is a happy Tobey. How fortunate he is that he will never have to wonder who his parents are, although his life will always be torched touched by adoption. He inherited a clotting disorder from an unknown grandfather, lucky him!