Fragments

I had the wonderful experience this week of having lunch with someone I greatly admire and whom I hadn't seen in 14 years. We were in grad school together back in the dark ages, and she always made me smile, even though we were in a bloody shark tank. She is brilliant--one of the smartest people I know, but like me, she is often loath to bring attention to it.

As we sat together and talked about the time we spent together from 1992 to 1996, we discovered even more things we had in common. Academic faux pas we had made, how we often felt we had nothing to contribute to conversations when we were around certain people, how the cliquishness and back-biting were beyond belief in the magnitude of their cruelty. I walked into the department sight-unseen, coming from an undergraduate college where students were always encouraged to think independently and develop their own interests, rather than groomed to be clones of professors. My friend had been an undergraduate in the department and decided to stay to pursue an M.A./Ph.D. Graduate school is murderously feudal: basically it's indentured servitude, with your adviser controlling your finances and future. If you are unlucky in your choice of adviser, you are pretty much screwed. Especially when your adviser is not the strongest player in the department or field at large. The 10 years I spent suffering there was definitely not the best time of my life, although meeting a certain handful of people and having unfettered time to read and research came closest to making me feel at peace with myself.

I remember writing my M.A. thesis, on a topic that I really loved, and getting wonderful feedback from this friend of mine. Her field was ancient art, which had been my focus for my B.A. Classical scholars tend to be very focused, with photographic recall of thousands of ancient texts. I definitely do not have the same access, nor did my friend. We were quite green together, and having her with me in seminars and lectures was lovely.

She is also 10 years older than I am, and I appreciated her maturity at a time when I was all over the map with myself. My 20's were definitely a lost period in which my adoption baggage was compounded by self-hatred from feeling all at sea in graduate school. The unwanted adoptee advisee.

When my friend and I were talking on Friday, she said that she sees me as more mature (one would hope) but very much the same in terms of my interests, openness, and sunny personality. When I told her that the personality was a mask, she was stunned. She listened to everything that's been going on with such love and support. It felt comforting on many levels, and I do hope it won't be 14 years before we see each other again.

Some comments she made about me being the same have fueled introspection. I've been trying to figure out what parts of myself are molded by my aparents, and which are genetic, from my nparents. Then I realized I forgot a something big, something I often forget: there is also the variable of ME. Some things are just me. I am not a clone of them, just as I had a bad time in graduate school because I refused to be a clone of anyone.

When I was talking to C about the curious way I stand with my right leg out at an angle, it makes sense that I got that from her. She agreed. She didn't agree that she passed along her facility for languages to me. She doesn't believe in genetics for things such as interests and talents. I told her that my aparents aren't into languages the same way that she and I are. She pointed out that her parents weren't either. While I disagree with her about the genetic component of language skills, I do see her point about reading too much into genetics. After all I am a intellectual, latte drinking left-winger who lives in the Bay Area. My nfamily is Republican and conservative, dyed-in-the-wool.

My amom was an English teacher and a stickler for good grammar. Rightly so. I write well in part because of what she taught me, partly because I do so intuitively, and partly because I have done quite an apprenticeship in thinking and writing over the years: from daily writing assignments at my high school that had to be corrected and corrected and corrected, to crafting my Ph.D. thesis in painful increments over five years.

Surrounding myself with smart, witty people was probably also a helpful act. People who love me, warts and all, and who know me inside out. It never stops amazing me that I have such compassionate friends who let me know how much I mean to them. I understand that most all people deserve love, but I just can't get over the hurdle of accepting that *I* am worthy of people's love. I seem to keep reaching for those green figs on the tree that are out of reach rather than enjoying the rich bounty of what I have. Regret and self-doubt are terrible, destructive vices.

I am stumbling around trying to deal with the fragments of myself I've been collecting. I feel like I have discovered increasing numbers of these fragments, sometimes in unexpected places. My current task is to try to reassemble them in a way that is meaningful and helps me feel less anxious and depressed. I know I will never feel complete, and the cracks will always be there, but sometimes imperfection has its own beauty.

Pain

I have emotional pain related to all my adoption fun and games, and physical pain, which is tangentially related to my adoption because the source of my problems is hereditary.

I spent most of Thursday in the ER at the hospital at UC San Francisco. It is a friendly, efficient ER; I got into a room within an hour and a half, was seen by an intern and got some much-needed IV pain medication. I was in terrible pain, the kind that makes you want to die if it won't go away. My abdominal pain has been chronic for about two years, with good moments and bad moments, but mostly bad moments since last March. You see, I got a new clot in the vein that feeds blood to the liver from the intestines and stomach. Clot = decreased blood flow = lack of oxygen to tissues = pain. On Wednesday I had taken 80mg of my long-acting narcotic instead of my usual 30mg, along with 80mg of my narcotic for breakthrough pain, and the meds hadn't touched the pain at all. I was lucid and writhing and screaming. I felt my body was like a prison, and I was being tortured.

I didn't want to go to the hospital because I knew what would happen. I would get IV pain meds; the MDs would order labs; I would have either a CT scan or an MRI of my abdomen: and then the MDs would say, "You have two clots, and there's nothing we can do. Stay anticoagulated. Come back if you get a fever and start vomiting." My wonderful primary care physician insisted, however, because she worried that the drastic increase in pain might be an indication that my intestines were not getting enough oxygen and were infarcting. Necrotic bowels are something I'd rather like to avoid, thanks all the same, so I grudgingly agreed to go to the ER.

I had to go alone because Mark was working and my closest friends were wither ill themselves or had small kids to take care of. I ended up not minding being alone too much, though, as I was placed in a quiet corner room and was able to read for most of the day. The IV pain meds (ah, Dilaudid) precluded me from thinking too intensely about anything, although it struck me that once again, I was facing my demons with no help beside me. I was in the hospital because of who I am genetically (a Newman), not because of who I was raised to be (an Olsen). My body is part of a web of attachments from which I have been torn and exiled. It would be nice one day to be able to fill out a family medical history form completely. Well, I can now do my maternal side, which is an improvement on a few years ago, but my paternal side is a big blank, guarded by C's nasty, insistent, "I don't KNOW." Like hell she doesn't know. She just doesn't want ME to know. And if I die as a result, that's my fault, not hers. Sigh.

A very tired intern came in to take my history and do an perfunctory exam. She sat down on my pile of clothes and didn't introduce herself, diving right into questions. My case is pretty complicated, and after about 15 minutes of half-dozing off and backtracking, she threw up her hands and ran to the attending. I didn't mind. I wasn't exactly a dragon, but I wasn't in the mood to play nicely, either. I am sure the intern went home and reread all about hereditary spherocytosis, portal vein thrombosis, and Factor V Leiden. I was a teaching opportunity! I just didn't feel like teaching her myself. She did kindly order the Dilaudid and Zofran before giving up on me, and for that I am thankful.

I have found it rather difficult to be alone with myself over the past few months, but it was a bit better that day I spent in the ER. Was it the addition of Wellbutrin to my anti-depressant cocktail? Was it that I am coming to some preliminary level of acceptance about my health and the lack of support from C and A? Was I finally finding a place within myself that seemed less restrictive and lonely than the island that I occasionally try to escape? I don't know.

So perhaps drugs, friends, and a good book can keep me going. If the clot doesn't do away with me.

And speaking of Harry Potter, I went to the midnight show after I was released from the hospital. One particular line chilled me, although it wasn't in the book. Harry is in the village where his parents lived before they were killed; Hermione asks if he wants to adopt the disguise of Muggles. He says, "This is the village where I was born. I don't want to return as someone else." I have been to the small town where my roots are, and where I was conceived. But I did have to return in disguise as someone else. How very, very sad.                                                                                                                                                          

Dignity

I found a great new magazine in a store when I was visiting my friend this weekend in Santa Cruz. It's called "Whore!: Fast, Feminist, and Feminine." I love this on so many levels I cannot even begin to explain. It had quite a few thoughtful essays, and is definitely worth a read.

What caught my eye immediately, however, was a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I tend not to like my husband's people all that much, with notable exceptions, of course. Goethe being an important one of those, along with a lovely group of German friends--all of whom except three live in the US or the UK. Enough said. Goethe wrote, "There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desirable, that calls for art or character." That's what's lacking in so much of adoption communication. Dignity and respect. There is not enough love, too much judgment, way too much sniping, and not enough acknowledgment of pain. I was thinking that so little has changed since Goethe wrote this, and it's shameful. Truly shameful.

My time with my friend Thomenon this weekend was wonderful. It is such a relief to be with someone who has known me inside out for 18 years. Who has been with me through thick and thin, who is loyal as hell, and who would take anyone on for me. Who speaks the same academic language that I do, and to whom I don't have to explain all my references. To laugh about our uplifting New Year's Eve in 2000 in which we watched both "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." He thinks I am Maggie the cat, which I take as a compliment. She suffered with dignity. He gave me a knowing nod, and said, "Yep, you're still driven by the literary," when he saw that I keep my subscription to the Times Literary Supplement current. We are both nerds and very proud of it. He prefers the term "intellectual," but I am happy with "nerd."

When I told him about how I have felt therapy wasn't helping me, and that I left each session feeling slightly discouraged, he gave a brilliant excursis on the limitations of empiricism in dealing with trauma, drawing both on Descartes and Stuart Smalley. You can't will yourself to feel differently inside. You learn to accept how you feel and integrate that into your life. Not that it's easy to do, by any means. He also pointed out that all my denial that I want the love of C is self-protection: I may say that all I need and want is my brother, but Thomenon is right. I *do* wish that C loved me. It's a huge wound to have your mother deny you and hate you. And yet that's my reality. I cannot change it. What I can do is try other routes and take care of myself as best I can. Although it's hellish right now, I feel more whole knowing about who I was born to be. While I argue with my brother's statement, "It just wasn't meant to be," because it's a choice, not destiny, I can't argue with how my brother and mother feel toward me. It simply is.

Thomenon and I also had a thoughtful discussion about therapy and how it can create a skewed power dynamic. The therapist is trained, has credentials, and should be there to guide the client through things, but too often they can abuse their position as a pulpit, offer useless advice, or just don't listen. I have friends who I know are great therapists, but there are plenty of them I've seen who became therapists to deal with their own issues, and are driven by insecurity.

I don't dislike my therapist, but I have left nearly every session wondering why I was there. I have seen seven or eight therapists in my life, and the "talking cure" hasn't worked for me at any juncture. I think my problem is that I need to have enough money to see a psychiatrist who is smarter than I am, but I can't afford such a luminary. So I am opting for peer therapy, medication, and retail therapy right now. Not necessarily in that order.

I did feel free to give feedback when I "broke up" with my therapist today, most of which was taken in good spirit. The only thing that truly annoyed me was that my therapist, although I corrected him numerous times over the months, persisted in calling me "Kare-ah." That is not how I pronounce my name, although I recognize that it's the more common pronunciation. I have stopped correcting people who mean nothing to me, because there is no point. When I am polite and redirect people, the majority don't take it in and compute it. It usually comes down to my friends fighting the battle for me, especially in classrooms, because they care more about defending my identity in public than I do. But in a therapist-client relationship, it should be about respect. Seriously. His excuse for messing up, week after week, was that he has a daughter whose name is pronounced "Lare-ah." Umm, okay. But that's not my problem. I recognize that humans make mistakes, but if you have a relationship with me and say my name incorrectly, I will note it if you don't take my correction and apply it. It means you don't give a shit. Yep. I notice, really notice. I used to want to jettison my name, not that I think it's terrible or anything--I like that my father chose it for me--in favor of my middle name, "Jane," which is hard to screw up. And yet I wonder if "Jane" were my given name, would people still eff it up? Probably. I have that vibe.

I have also been thinking about how, inevitably, when people are going through their shit, they tend to make proclamations about what everyone else should/shouldn't do in light of their shit; in other words, they are masking their own shit in pretty demeaning rhetoric. I read blogs and can tell what kind of crises people are having by their blanket proclamations. "Adoptees feel no trauma," yep, you got some. "Adoptees shouldn't say they love their aparents to fparents," umm, does your kid not love you the way you want to be loved? In competition with their aparents, much? "People shouldn't self-diagnose with PTSD, and if they are truly mentally ill, they are 'prohibited' from hurting others." Did someone tell you to move on, so everyone else has to?

That's why I admire people who live their lives with dignity, don't put their baggage on others, and support people where they are, without offering prescriptions or proscriptions. My friend Thomenon is one. My friend Lori is another. She has always taken responsibility for her actions, told everyone about the son who was *taken* from her, wanted him back with a vengeance, and has built a wonderful relationship with him. She told any man she dated that he had another son out there, and they came as a package. THAT is dignity. No excuses, lots of love.

Can't wait to see Harry Potter 7 at 12:02 Friday morning.