Someone who has made my life hell

It is hard to choose just one nasty person to talk about here when there have been so many: the childhood bullies, incompetent and rude teachers, people I studied with in graduate school and nursing school, coworkers at a plethora of jobs, ex-boyfriends, frenemies.

Given this bounty, however, I will choose my graduate school thesis adviser. She managed to pull out all the stops to show me that she thought I was a piece of shit, over and over, for nine years.

I went to a small liberal arts college for my undergraduate degree. It was a supportive environment, and I flourished there intellectually. After I decided to walk the humanities path in my first year of college, it naturally followed that I would go on and get a Ph.D. in whatever I was studying. I arrived at college thinking I would major in French or Russian, but I fell in love with Near Eastern archaeology my very first semester. I set out a careful trajectory through my undergraduate years to make sure I was prepared for graduate school. 

My junior year abroad changed this. I was at Cambridge University, which has an excellent archaeology department. Near Eastern studies was not part of this, but instead in the School of Oriental Studies. I found myself in method and theory courses and thrown back into things Hellenic, which were not necessarily my passion. Bronze Age Greece is interesting, but the later it gets, the less I admit I care. Even today--shame, shame--my command of Greek history is sketchy. But that is off point.

I had an epiphany one cold winter night in Cambridge: I didn't love archaeology, I loved the visual studies aspect of things. Archaeology is the science; digging is wonderful, but it didn't dovetail as nicely with my literary bent as art history did.  

I returned to Bryn Mawr with the new goal of going to graduate school in art history, and decided that I wanted to follow my passion for things English by becoming an expert on Norman art and architecture. My home department couldn't help me with applying to art history graduate school to become a medievalist, so I took a few art history classes to make myself a viable candidate. The art history faculty didn't know me very well, but the medievalist suggested a few places to study that might appeal to me. I didn't realize--naively--when I applied that graduate school is about apprenticing yourself to someone. That someone had better like you and support you, or you will not get ahead. 

I applied to Berkeley, Northwestern, Michigan, and Chapel Hill, and was accepted at all four. When asked for advice on which to attend, everyone pointed me to Berkeley, then the American Mount Olympus of art history. So off I went to California, sight unseen. In retrospect and with better advice, I would have been much happier at Michigan with Ilene Forsyth, who focused on the Romanesque. But my bad luck held. 

I arrived in Berkeley to find myself a fresh medievalist with three other women, none of whom were very friendly. And so the evil game began: competition, backstabbing, jockeying for money and acknowledgment. 

The medievalist at Berkeley at that time was an extremely limited, insecure man who had a love for pretty much nothing except 13th century French manuscripts. When I told him I wanted to work on Norman art, he brusquely said that England was a province and not worth paying attention to. Anything truly worth studying was in France proper. Why look at Durham cathedral, he opined, when there was Caen? I am not one to hold my tongue or opinion when I am intellectually frustrated. I did not get along with this man, and very early in my first semester I decided there had to be a means of escape. 

I threw my lot in next with the ancient art specialist, feeling that perhaps I had overlooked certain charms of Classical art. Well, yes and no. I wrote a very good paper on how certain Hellenistic kings viewed and depicted the Celts in victory monuments, suggesting that there was a missing Celtic component to existing studies of these works of art. That became my Master's thesis, but I was still restless. I had no great longing to give over the next five years of my life to becoming fluent in Greek and Latin and spending the rest of my life contemplating visual and textual minutiae of Greece and Rome. 

In my second semester, I was taking a museum studies class and was confiding in a very senior graduate student about my apparent inability to find an adviser who thought that Britain was a worthwhile focus of attention. This graduate student worked with the Americanist and was completing her dissertation on John Singer Sargent, one of my favorite painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She suggested that I seek the counsel of her adviser. So I optimistically did as she suggested.

I set up an appointment and went to this professor's office. She is an East Coast blueblood, and looks the part. Whippet thin, conservatively dressed in well made outfits, a museum person who had sued the department for tenure on the grounds of sexism, and had won her suit. She had returned to the department and was--I would later discover--almost universally loathed by the other faculty members for her anti-Semitism, snobbishness, and less than exciting research. I would turn out to be a pawn in an unpleasant game of chess over the next nine years. 

This woman took me on as her student but had no time for me in office hours. She eviscerated my writing, told me that I was a second-rate thinker, and hated anything I did that wasn't based on "common sense." When I said something about Oscar Wilde's dress designs, she wanted to see receipts for the materials he had bought. She put me down for knowing things she didn't, didn't help me to prepare properly for my orals (which I passed, anyway), and although I was training to be a specialist in British modern art, she gave the teaching assistant slot for her British art class to someone specializing in 19th century American art--one of her darlings. 

If it hadn't been for Thomenon, who was caught in a similar web of deceit and nastiness with his own adviser, I would have murdered someone or committed suicide. I also found a relatively sympathetic soul in the body of the South Asian specialist, who took me under her wing and helped me broaden my knowledge of the Empire and how the Empire, in turn, affected the metropole. At one point, Thomenon said that I was a chick among the ducklings. I never properly fit in, and no one fought for me, either. 

Years dragged by, I researched without guidance and floundered. My adviser threw back version after version of my first chapter. I felt lost. I was hemmed in by a material culture dissertation that wasn't what I wanted to write. Finally, about five years into Ph.D. hell, I was in London trying to research. An avuncular soul took me aside and warned me that my adviser wrote nastily about me in her letters of "support," and that I would be better off to find people to write for me who wanted me to succeed. I had no idea that my adviser's already questionable ethics had sunk so low. I knew I was the poor stepchild in her intellectual home, but when she took me on, I thought that she would have the balls to back me up and find me a job. Nope. What hope did I have?

I decided that I couldn't drop out without the Ph.D. and let her win. It was a struggle, but at last I found a way to write my dissertation in a way that embraced my literary nature and my engagement with larger ideas of intellectual history. She was also being pressured by the department and university to get her students finished and out the door for statistical reasons. 

Although there was another tense moment on the day I was filing my dissertation--the department had not filed paperwork necessary to allow one of my untenured committee members to sign off on it--a deus ex machina in the form of the Dean of the Graduate School added himself to my committee by fiat and I was finished! At last.

I taught at various universities around the SF Bay Area while polishing my CV and applying for tenure-track academic positions, but I was told, again and again by my adviser, "Oh, no, I can't support you for that job. That's for X other student of mine." Never for me. I did, at last, get two interviews, one for a job at the University College Dublin, and one at Yale. Funny how I could get interviews there, but nothing at Iowa or other small colleges. Maybe it was that I was from Berkeley, maybe it was my "interesting" trajectory. Maybe it was that my own adviser told them that I was a piece of shit. 

So in many ways I really, really despise my "adviser" who advised me not a whit. In other ways I pity her for being piranha in a shark tank with Great Whites who really didn't like her and made her life hell--how awful is that? But I am far enough out of that mess now to see that what while what she did to me was horrible, she never managed to break me. I am still standing. She can rot in the hell she made for herself, all by herself. She will never quite be the superstar she wants to be or thinks she is, and delusion is far worse than knowing and accepting the truth.

I can smile about that. 

Someone who has made my life worth living

Without a doubt, my boys are who make my life worth living. Before I had them, I was living in a fog of no direction and a miasma of self-hatred.

When Callum and Tobey arrived on the scene, my life was no longer just about me. I had to turn myself outward and find a way to give them what they needed. I remember thinking that from the minute Callum came out of my body, seven years ago on Sunday, I became a bit player in a larger story. At first  my relegation to the wings this seemed strange, but then it made sense. It was now my job to nurture and raise a brand-new person, as frightening as that was for someone who had never really been able to attach successfully to anyone before.

Callum was so sick. I didn't know what was coming as the days passed. I sat by his warmer in the NICU, holding his hand as he lay under the hot, bright bili lights, and marveled at the first person I'd ever met who was related to me by blood. And sadly, I had passed along a gene for some not-very-good blood that landed him in this poor health. But we were in this together, and if I could survive, so could he.

My emotional defenses melted. I loved spending time with him, watching him grow, reading poetry to him. Our favorites were Christina Rossetti and William Blake. When I was in a bad mood, we read Dante. He sat on my lap and gazed at me with eyes--my eyes--that said I had to be strong for him.

When Tobey came along, I felt more ready to rise to the task of mothering, and I was delighted that Tobey looked just like my baby self. Finally, my eyes and smile were registered in another face (and as it would later turn out, generations of Newmans). Tobey was--and is--my snuggler, always happiest when he was held close in my arms. He is an old soul, that boy, wonderful and perceptive and fragile under his gruff exterior.

In the year after Tobey was born, I began to test my boundaries with other people more and more, cutting people out of my life who were thoughtless and rude and who hurt me. I didn't need them around because they made me less than I thought I should be for my children. This would be a footnote not worth mentioning in most people's lives, but my new sense of groundedness and self-esteem was huge in the narrative I've lived. Friends who have known me for a long time will attest to this as the period in which I stopped taking other people's shit.

I have been watching Season Six of Weeds over the past few days, and there is a particular episode in which Nancy, on the run, calls her husband to tell him that his attempt to kill her and her elder sons has failed. She is a mama lion, she says, and no one is stronger than a mama lion whose cubs are threatened. I get that now on a visceral level.

I don't think I would be half the person I am today without Callum and Tobey. I wouldn't be a nurse. I wouldn't have persevered in my search for my first family. I wouldn't be writing or thinking as thoughtfully as I do. They have been the catalysts for so much good. I need to remember that when I want to wring their necks for being cruel to each other.

I owe them everything. Although it's not their job to save me, they have.

Something I hope never to do

I hope beyond measure that I never have to plan or attend the funeral of either of my children. I don't know what I would do; the grief would be too immense.

When I heard about the shooting in Tucson and the nine-year-old girl who died, I was lying a hospital bed, recovering from pneumonia and two pulmonary emboli. I wasn't well, and I was hopped up on meds, but I lost it. I absolutely lost it. I couldn't imagine holding the lifeless body of my child, the loss of the hopes and dreams, the potential, the sweet words, future.

I work at a job where there is death. Not all the time, but more than you'd probably think. Many people say, "Oh! You're a labor and delivery nurse! How fun and happy." Well, most of the time it is. But when it's bad, it's really, really bad. I have had both moms and babies die while in my care. Both are terrible. Usually the moms pass away up in the ICU, so I don't have to do postmortem care for the mothers' bodies. I do, however, have to perform postmortem care for the babies who don't make it.

I wash the infants, measure and weigh them, get a set of footprints and locks of hair for the parents, dress them, and try to take tasteful pictures of the wrapped babies, with and without their parents, depending on the parents' wishes. I usually cry and talk to the dead infants while I bathe them, tell them what I'm doing and why, just as if I were talking to a baby who was alive. It's partially an issue of respect for me: this was a person. Partly I am probably trying to suppress what I see before me.

I have done postmortem care for babies born as early as 21 weeks of gestation, and sadly on term infants who almost made it, but not quite. But death is monumentally difficult, no matter what.

I simply cannot imagine how gut-wrenching it would be to lose your own child. Callum, my elder son, somehow pulled through with a true knot in his umbilical cord. The MD at the birth told me that Callum was lucky to be born when he was because in another day or two, he would likely have died from lack of oxygen. Sometimes Mark and I talk about that and cry with relief that it didn't happen. I cannot imagine not knowing my strong-headed, often very annoying, but very fabulous Callum.

My heart aches for parents who have lost their children. It must be a tremendously awful burden to carry.

Sons

When I found out--twice--I was having boys, I freaked out. I am an only child, and had been a fairly quiet, very obedient, bookish girl. I had some boys as friends in childhood, but mostly they were boys who weren't testosterone-driven demons.

In some ways I am a tomboy. I am definitely not a girlie girl. My makeup skills are cursory. I do go to the salon to help manage things and get pedicures a couple times a month, but that's pretty much it. Sometimes a nice soak in the tub is great, but I don't think I've done that in at least three years, either.

Anyway, I must admit that I am befuddled, and probably will remain befuddled, by ways in which boys and men communicate with each other through deafening silence or through physical contact, preferably of the violent variety that involves sending bodies crashing through the air. I hear it's normal, but it is still foreign to me.

As my father (who really wanted a girl) said to me today, I failed in giving him two grandsons. I told him to blame my husband for the gender malfunction. My father is teasing me, of course; he loves my boys wholeheartedly although they have been among the chosen few able to make my placid father truly angry, and incidents that bore that mark were very rare, indeed. I can recall perhaps two or three times in my childhood that my father raised his voice to me. Well, the boys have already surpassed that from him, long ago. His "look,"  which withered me, does NOTHING to them.

So basically I am screwed. I am learning, they are learning, but I remember the refrain of one of my mother's friends (a mother of three boys) who would quietly lament the absence of scholars and gentlemen from her brood. She got Marines with death wishes. I would like to imagine that one day my two will  be scholars and gentlemen, but more likely Callum will be a political and/or high powered lawyer and end up like Eliot Spitzer for thinking that the rules don't apply to him, and Tobey will be some rugged professional football player who will cry about cruelty to animals but be murderous with anyone  who tries to ask him what he's feeling inside about anything else. Particularly anything personal.

We will see! I am sure it will be an adventure. And I love them with all I've got.

The Truth for Day Five

Something I hope to do in this life

After all the heavy stuff for the past few days, I will keep this short.

I hope to travel more. My peregrinations have been very curtailed over the past few years thanks to my little men. I encourage Mark to take them to Germany--alone. I haven't set foot in England since 2004, although the lovely trip to Rome when I turned 40 was glorious, even in the grey February rain. Ah, the churches and ruins. I was in heaven, connecting to a past that I know I fit into, somehow.

I would very much like to travel to Southeast Asia with my friend Thomenon and my boys, and explore Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.

I want to watch my boys explore the temples of Angkor Wat with the expert guidance of my friend. I want to see the River of a Thousand Linga that he taught me about so long. I want to eat the great food Thomenon telegraphs home about when he's abroad doing research, stay in hotels that pamper us, and ride on a boat along the Mekong River.

If we can get into Burma, I want English high tea in at The Strand in Rangoon.

I also hope to return to India with Thomenon, particularly to the north, and see the beautiful hill stations of Simla and Darjeeling, seeing ways in which the colonial landscape is melting into the postcolonial world.

I have found myself becoming quite nostalgic about my research in British colonial history. I recently bought a friend's wonderful book, Empire Families, about how the Raj had--and has--continuing and deep influence over the notion of nationality and class in Britain, seen through the lenses and experiences of parents and children. I will bid you adieu and go bury myself in that, or perhaps some Kipling short stories. If I can stay awake, that is.

Forgiving someone else

I am not nearly so bad at forgiving people who hurt me. In fact, most of the time I used to assume that they were correct in hurting me because I must have deserved it. Again, thanks adoption.

I know that forgiveness is something that is given. You can forgive someone to help yourself process what happened and move on. I learned in my 30's that you don't have to forgive and forget. Sometimes you just forgive, because forgiveness is mostly to prevent eating yourself up with pain.

I shall talk here about my marriage. I have forgiven, but perhaps not completely. Or maybe not forgotten.

My husband is a very closed off person. He doesn't listen well (perhaps it's cultural, perhaps personal) and can appear icy if you don't know him. I know that he loves me.

And yet for the first 11 years of our relationship, I was basically invisible. As I have written elsewhere, he put his mother ahead of me and let her abuse me. So did I, but I excuse myself because of my self-loathing issues and because it is difficult to stand up to a domineering mother who isn't your own and who speaks another language. It was also shocking to me because my mother is so very different. I was not raised to treat guests and family in a way that even mildly approached rudeness. How was this happening? And yet when I brought things up to him, he told me I was imagining it. Great.

We had two children. He wasn't present for me, wasn't emotionally there. I told him over and over that I was alone and doing all the work. He promised to change, but didn't.

I felt myself slipping away. There finally came a crisis, and he committed to changing. He has changed, slowly. But not in ways that make me feel loved. It's really hard for me to stay engaged. I really like him, and even love him, but truth is, he will probably never love me the way I need to be loved. If I had known things about him at the time and had more self-confidence, I probably never would have married him. But I did.

We talked about divorce on and off. In some ways it seems unthinkable, in others, the only right answer. Ah, life is complicated.

I have committed to trying a little bit longer, taking things day by day. I need to forgive him for how he was those first 13 years. It is not easy. I struggle with it.

Forgiving myself

Something I have to forgive myself for

Today's topic is difficult. I wear guilt like jewelry. I don't easily forgive myself.  I am not Catholic, but I have always identified with the sense of purging guilt through confession and pilgrimage. I took my husband on the medieval route to Santiago de Compostela ten years ago--justified by my being an art historian, but fueled also by my desire to take a journey to self-discovery and forgiveness. (My atheist parents are horrified by my Catholic sympathies, which I admit adds to the luster of my preoccupation.)

I usually forget peccadilloes after a long time of self-flagellation, then remember and feel tremendously guilty all over again.

Then there are those low-lying, constantly present, subconscious things that cause continual discomfort. I know they're there, like an something rough in my clothing, chafing my skin. These are the times when I've let people down. Not just forgetting to return telephone calls, but actively hurting people who love me deeply. I don't think there are good ways to hurt people, but sometimes there is conflict and it must happen. My problem for years was fear of rejection, hating to reject others, and yet doing things that were even more hurtful, and not honest either to them or to myself.

I am thinking of one particular time in my late teens and early 20's. It stands for many other similar situations, and in some ways I have forgiven myself for what I did. I absolutely regret what I did, but the person I hurt was devastated to the point that although we tried to be friends afterwards, we now haven't spoken for almost 14 years. This saddens me, but I can't control what he does.

This is, of course, colored by my being adopted and my self-loathing.

Without boring people with too much backstory, I used to be very, very, very very (is that enough very?) insecure. I had attachment problems. I always felt that there was something about me not good enough for anyone really to love me. I had the normal teenage girl drama with my BFFs (your usual backstabbing and betrayal). But what I wanted so desperately for was a boy/man to love me, for me, all of me, and be as attached to me as I was to him. I wanted not to be abandoned.

I decided early on that one particular boy was "it" for me. But this story is not about him, although he set the bar for what I thought I needed. He always lay behind my quest and was the unattainable ideal, like my absent fmom. If only he loved me forever, I told myself, I would be fine. If that were the case, this would be a Disney movie and I wouldn't be writing any of this blog.

But he wasn't available, or was only available sporadically. I became really good at toying with boys' emotions. I fed off their attention like a leech. I needed them to feel good. I knew how to entrance them, then I'd throw them away like garbage. Or not, and lie about my constancy when I was anything but. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, blindly and stupidly. And all of the time I was sinking deeper and deeper into a hole of self-hatred and loathing. Why couldn't the "right" person love me?

I never left a relationship without having another one lined up. God forbid that I had to stand on my own two feet and love myself. I had no idea in the fog that in order to love anyone the way he needed to be loved, I had to love myself first.

So when I was 18, I created really huge drama, ending my high-school romance by becoming engaged to one of my acousins. Yep. I did. It's not as creepy as it sounds because my afamily is huge. We had never met until he was 20 and I was 18. He grew up a California beach boy, blond and worldly by my Midwestern standards. We had chemistry, and being adopted, I acted on it. I didn't really think about what it meant for my afamily, for him, for myself. We are so very, very different, but when I was 18, all I could see was the smile and feel the love.

He is a very good person. He loved me with everything he had. He was generous and kind and would drive for 12 hours just to spend 12 hours with me before driving back to where he lived. Who does that except someone to whom you mean the world? Time went by. I was in college, he was in the Navy. I wanted to go to graduate school. He wanted to settle down and start a family.

I did what I always did. I made decisions for myself (which isn't necessarily bad) about studying abroad, felt myself putting my emotions elsewhere, withdrew, and started a relationship with someone else. Without really breaking up with him. How horrible is that?

He found out, there was painful family fallout (obviously), and it took me a very long time to get over him. I did love him, we just weren't meant to be life partners. Why didn't I tell him how I felt earlier? Why didn't I finish one thing before starting another? It was heartless.

We resumed a friendship after we both had had some years to settle into our lives apart. I thought it was going well. We both lived in Northern California by this time. We talked about what I'd done to him as he saw me do it to someone else. He was rightly angry with me that seven years down the road I wasn't learning my lesson.

Then what seemed like one day to the next, he completely withdrew from me. I called him to wish him well on his 30th birthday, and my aunt and uncle called me back to say that I wasn't to call him anymore.  I am not quite sure why this happened, but he got married two months later, and I suspect it was because I was an ex and he needed distance. It hurt, however, that he couldn't tell me himself. Well, I suppose I deserved it.

That was 14 years ago. I heard things about him through my parents occasionally; I wish him no ill. I have been struggling with bad health issues over the past several years, and last summer I saw that he'd written a very sweet e-mail to my dad, asking about how I was doing. I decided that I would write him an e-mail, wishing him all the best for his birthday and saying that I am open to friendship if he ever changes his mind. I heard nothing back.

I am married. I truly have no secrets from my husband, and I've done some not-so-nice things to him, as well. We have lots of problems, some that might be insurmountable. There is no clear path to happiness, but we are doing our best. He loves me with everything he has, and I do the best I can to reciprocate.

I need to forgive myself for not being true to these men--and also not true to myself. Problem is, I was blind and lost and very, very confused. I have grown up a great deal in the past 22 years, as one would hope. I wish I could go back and talk to my 18-year-old self and tell her that she had it in her to be strong, all by herself.

An interesting challenge

A blogger issued a challenge to other game souls to consider exploring 30 difficult truths, one each day, for 30 days. Since I gave up therapy, it would seem a useful exercise to engage in thoughtful self-evaluation. I am one day behind, so I will talk about the first two truths in this post.

Something I dislike about myself

It's difficult to come up with just one thing, but I regret the times when I retreat into my shell and neglect to return telephone calls and e-mail from friends and family. I am letting them down, I feel terribly ashamed as the days tick by, and then I fall into a spiral of self-loathing that prevents me from contacting them for even longer. I realize that as much as I hate to be ignored by friends, I am far from a paragon in communication myself. I tend to focus on things people I can't have in my life and let the people who really do love me suffer for it. The upside is that in saying this, I can take small steps in trying to change my behavior. Return the call or e-mail. And if I can't, think about why I can't, and set myself goals, one of which would be to ask for forgiveness in those times when I do fail. I am only human after all, and not just human, but adoptee: a half human, half mythical creature who responds very sensitively to (perceived) attacks and interprets discussion as dismissal.

Something I love about myself

I love that I am curious and open to new people, ideas, experiences. I enjoy meeting people, reading books, traveling, hearing others' stories, and finding adventure both in the everyday and in far-flung trips abroad. My education, and in particular my life as a perpetual student, attest to this. I am thrilled to have been to Egypt, sailed on the Nile, and found my favorite sculpted panels on temples I had only seen in books. I love that I went alone to Greece in my early 20's and made a pilgrimage to Epidauros so that I could sit on ancient stone and witness the theater's exquisite acoustics. I sat in the sun and listened to excerpts from Euripides' tragedy Medea whispered in the proscenium as they floated with immediate precision and enunciation to the top rows.

I challenged myself in college and succeeded; spent a year in Cambridge and found a mental zone on brutal morning rowing practices that mitigated the freezing air, icy water; took a ferry to the most far-flung isles of Scotland to be with sheep and sea birds; I never stop finding new things that I am passionate about.       

Part of this admiration of self plays into being courageous, making the first move in relationships, giving all I have to the people I love, and not necessarily giving up when relationships encounter moments of conflict. In my adoptee incarnation, I am proud of myself for refusing to walk away in the face of harsh rejection from my first family--for believing that there was more to be learned and that we could all benefit from learning about each other. I am proud to engage in dialogue with and to support those in my adoption community, whether adoptees, first parents, or aparents, as they struggle to make sense of the tangled webs we live, often fraught with pain and trauma and a multiplicity of experiences. By being well educated and a critical thinker, I am strong. By helping others, I both draw on this strength and ground myself in new adventures with them.

Now if only the breakfast table with my two adorable sons was more of an adventure in good manners and eating than another testosterone whirlwind free-for-all.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

PE

No, not gym class. Pulmonary emboli. Clots in the lungs that prevent the oxygenation of blood. Really bad stuff I learned about in nursing school but didn't think would happen to me. Then again, why would I think that I *wouldn't* get them?

The week started out well, but in true Kara fashion, here I sit in the hospital at UCSF as a patient--not a nurse, looking through the fog at Golden Gate park, waiting to get permission to get off the cardiac monitor to take a shower. Yep, I need permission to bathe.

I went back to work Monday. I had a fantastic shift with my preceptor from my nursing-school internship. We had a great delivery, with a cute 9.1lb healthy baby boy. The poor mom ended up with a third-degree tear, which means that she ripped almost through to her rectum from her vagina. Ouch! Of course the delivery happened at change of MD/CNM shift, of course it was with a midwife who didn't feel confident to repair a third-degree tear, of course the mom was Hep B+. The baby had to have an immediate bath so that he wouldn't get his mom's blood into any of the injection sites from his initial medications or the blood glucose check (because he weighed over 4000g). I needed 10 arms because by the time the MD started doing her repair, I was already engaged in baby care. The MD called for a gram of an antibiotic to be given IV while I was trying to check the baby's vitals, she didn't think I heard her call, but I did and quoted it right back to her. :-) There are so many tasks to juggle and prioritize; delivery is probably the most stressful time, especially if there is any spanner in the works.

Despite the deluge, however, my beloved coworker and I managed to get mom and baby transferred to postpartum in just over the regular allotted time for recovery. This was great because 1. the patient had an extended repair, allowing for extra time anyway and 2. I remembered how to do my job!

Triage that first night back was filled with patients with severe psych issues as well as pregnancies; I was very relieved to have had a fairly straightforward delivery and not have had to admit a patient who sadly didn't know her own name--and not from substance abuse.

The second shift I took an admission and spent the evening with a lovely couple having their first baby. The census was low, so I didn't get a second patient--which I normally would, and if I had a second admission to do, I would not have been so calm and collected.

I was enjoying the groove and was all set to do another day of training on Wednesday with a senior RN whom I adore. She is intelligent, fabulous, and very laid back. But at noon I started to ache and get the chills. I took my temp, and it was 102.5. I was not fit to be around tender youth, and I abashedly called in sick. Really? Sick on day three?

Thursday I woke up and felt completely drained. I had slept poorly, and still had a fever of 101 as well as shortness of breath. I drove Callum to school, sloped home, and called my MD's office for an appointment. She has told me in the past that because I have no spleen, a fever has to be watched more carefully and I should arrange to see her. I couldn't make it into SF for any of her morning appointments, but was set to see on of the NPs in the office in the early afternoon. I took Finn (my lurcher baby) to daycare because there was no way I could exercise him properly, nor did I know when I would get back from the city. A triage RN from my MD's office called to check in, and she asked if I'd listened to my chest myself. I told her that I thought I detected diminished breath sounds in my right lung, so she asked if I could come in early for a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. I said I would, but promptly fell asleep on the couch and didn't awake until just before time to leave for my appointment. As icing on the cake, I forgot I had set my glasses on the floor and stepped on them, breaking the frames. Argh.

So I schlepped to the city, dragged my sorry ass to the office, and collapsed on the exam table. My heart rate was elevated, and I had a low-grade temp. The NP listened to my chest and said that she heard slightly diminished sounds on the right and sent me off for the x-ray. I walked slowly across the street, got the x-ray, and went back to the MD's office to await the results. About half an hour later, the NP told me that the x-ray was negative for pneumonia, but that the attending MD and radiologist thought with my history of clots that I should get a spiral CT scan to rule out pulmonary emboli.

By this time, I was EXTREMELY short of breath, had pain on inspiration, and just wanted to go home to bed. I reminded the NP that she'd told me I could have the CT done the next day. I felt myself pluning down the well of anxiety: I had brought no pain meds with me, I was at the end of my strength, and I had to drive across town in RUSH HOUR to the other UCSF campus for a CT? Now? But she was insistent that the MDs thought it best, and wrote me a note for work saying that I had the flu. She gave me a prescription for pain meds (how in the hell was I supposed to fill this in the next 40 minutes and get the CT, I don't know) and a broad-spectrum antibiotic. I was pissed and felt really angry at this woman--not entirely without reason, it turned out.

I found my way to the other campus and had to park the car in a huge underground lot and climb four steep flights of stairs to get to Radiology. Anyone who knows me IRL can attest that I am an active person. Climbing four flights of stairs is usually not a big deal. And yet I felt with each step I couldn't breathe and wanted to die. Flu, my ass. Chest pain is not the flu.

Got the CT, limped back to the car, and joined the thousands of other people trying to cross the Bay Bridge at 5 o'clock in the evening. Right before I drove past the last exit into the city, the on-duty primary care MD called. She told me that the CT indicated that I had both pneumonia and two clots (those pesky pulmonary emboli) in my right lung, and that I was to turn around and come right back to the ED. Keep in mind that I was partially delirious, not well oxygenated, and very tired. I asked if I could go home first to get some things--I was also worried because my phone was running out of battery. She said that no, my driving in the first place was not such a good idea and that I needed urgent medical care.

So turn around I did, and found myself fast-tracked into the ED. It helps to have problems related to airway, breathing, and circulation. I was admitted, started on antibiotics, and trains of people started to see me. UCSF is a teaching hospital, which is great, and also annoying when you tell the same story to 20 people all in a row. All day. All night. Plus my case is "interesting." You don't want to be "interesting" in a teaching hospital, but that's another story.

The house was full, so I lay on my ED gurney for 19 hours before being moved to my med-surg unit. Now I have a delightful 80-year-old roommate whose health problems eclipse the hell out of mine, but it also sucks to be with someone whose lungs make possibly some of the most revolting sounds I have ever heard lungs make, and who is incontinent. Every hour or two there's a team in here, cleaning up her and her bed. Not to minimize her problems, but it makes it hard to rest when lights are always on and people talking and clanking loudly and flushing the toilet by my bed.

I am on obligatory, continuous cardiac and pulse oxygen monitoring and cannot do much other than go to the bathroom by myself without a physician's order. And I am still sitting here, an hour later, waiting for permission to shower. Great.

My pneumonia appears to be resolving with the huge amounts of antibiotics that have been thrown at it, and I am now on increased dose of anticoagulant, to be administered twice a day. That makes TWO painful injections a day. The boys will be thrilled because I let them help me give myself the shots. Twice a day means that they each get to stab me once. No more punching each other over injection territory, I hope.

So I am happy that I didn't get a clot in my brain, that the clots weren't larger, and that I am not so bad that I am in the ICU.

I am unhappy that the NP diagnosed me with flu (!) and would have sent me home. And that the MD was freaked out by my driving anywhere, but the NP was having me tear across the city and tax myself. Looking back, I think hope that if it had been my patient with shortness of breath, I would have encouraged taking the shuttle, and telling her to wait for the results.

It gets me so mad to think about the flu diagnosis that I must not think about it.

In other news, no less painful or unpleasant than a PE, I finally spoke with my brother A about his plans for visiting me. He had cancelled in December, citing the reasonable excuse of pneumonia, but then after saying he would come in January or February, I had heard nothing more. I get so tired of doing all the work, and I'd decided to tell him that if he was saying he'd come only to please me, not to bother.

I called him with the courage assistance of IV morphine last night to check in after we'd played phone tag for a few days. He was polite and concerned about the PE, and we had a decent superficial conversation until I brought up the visit--except I didn't like to hear that he's not telling his son that the Christmas and birthday presents are from us. Yes! Let's poison yet another generation with lies. But I digress.

Our conversation got back to how busy he is. I told him that I'd been doing a lot of thinking about how one-sided our relationship is, that yes we were raised in different families but we need to be respectful of one another, and that I don't want him saying things to make me happy and then reneging. I would rather have no relationship than one that makes me feel constantly on edge and rejected. He said that he would come the last weekend in February. I asked if he wanted to come. He said he would come. I said that he wasn't answering my question. Sigh.

We will see. I will believe he's coming when I go to the airport to pick him up and he's actually THERE.

Why does being adopted mean that these relationships are often such a freaking mess, and that it's so hard to trust? Ah, that legacy of abandonment.

Then to add joy to this already surreal past few days, the hordes of medical students, interns, and residents either review my medical history orally in front of me or in the hallway, and it's of course peppered with "adopted" "adopted" and more "adopted." The reason I sit here, waiting for permission to shower, is because my body is a Newman body and is giving me Newman problems. But I am not a Newman by Newman standards.

There is no escaping this. Just no way.

The best thing about my hospital experience this time, other than the view out the window: I say I am in excruciating pain and people BELIEVE me. And give me wonderful drugs that make me just that little more relaxed so that I don't have to think about much at all.

Bitter

It's January 3rd. I return to work this afternoon. I am both apprehensive and excited about it. So much to remember, although I love my patients. As we say in the medical arena, a good shift is when no one dies, so I'll aim for that. It's reasonable.

I am feeling bitter. Adoptees who speak out are often labeled as "bitter and angry" or "anti-adoption" when we speak out about things that are seamy in adoption; things that could be changed for the better for most people involved in adoption; things that aren't necessarily about being grateful for having a home and strangers willing to take us in and love us as their own (if and when they can); things that are ambivalent.

But I am not bitter because of my adoption issues today. I am bitter because the procedure that I had to help stop the pain didn't work. So here I sit, saddled with the same pain I've been battling for nine months, and I don't know what to do or where to go from here.

The next step may or may not be surgically implanting a pump that permanently bathes my nerves in narcotics, which would allow me to stop taking oral narcotics (not that they have much effect on me anymore, other than stopping my pain--I function normally because my body has become used to them). But that's more surgery with a big question mark attached to it. Will it work? Or will I have a pump in my abdomen that does nothing?

Last night I was so depressed and suicidal that I didn't let myself get out of bed. If I had, I would have thought seriously about an overdose. At least I was able to fight with myself and the "good" Kara won. For now. I can't deal with therapy. I have tried.

I am having a hard time envisioning a life in which I have to struggle with this pain, every day, forever. I am tired, irritable, and anxious. I don't have much left to give anyone, let alone my patients. We will see.

Many of my friends don't know what to say anymore. I have told them not to say "Chin up, things will improve." That is rainbow-farting, and I can't process it right now. It only makes me more angry. Yes, one minute at a time. But having lived the last nine months one minute at a time, the minute-by-minute thing has become very wearying.

Sometimes you just have to sit with what you've got, accept it, and soldier on. I am a good soldier, but my heart isn't in it anymore.

To be honest, the only thing keeping me breathing right now is my dog. He's adopted too, never says "be grateful," and is a warm body when I need one beside me. He isn't bitter.

Chains

I saw "Black Swan" last week, the new film by Darren Aronofsky about the psychological struggles of a young ballet dancer. In part it's a horror film, in part it's about losing one's mental defenses to pressure. A huge theme winding through the film is that of perfectionism, and the price that perfection exacts from you.

I identified in many ways with the young protagonist, Nina. She holds herself back and is afraid to feel, wanting technical perfectionism. She begs for notes from the choreographer, who keeps telling her that she is technically perfect but passionless. In one scene he says to her, "You could be brilliant, but you're a coward."

She fights within herself, not knowing which way to go, or even how to find her footing, whether in dance or in relationships. Her overbearing stage mother treats her as a childlike doll, keeping her in claustrophobic emotional proximity and pushing her own feelings onto her daughter--not unlike many stories of adoption.

In a sense, Nina was chained by insecurities and others expectations, and her escape from her prison--through perfection--was tragic.

I have moments in my life when I feel my own strength, or when others notice it. Professors told me that they were impressed by my insights; while I would feel hubristic to call myself brilliant, there are moments when I feel that my ideas are transcendent and powerful. And then I retreat, like Nina in the film, to the prison in my head where voices tell me that I am not good enough, I will never be good enough, and that I am awkward. Thus cowardice. Why is it so hard to stand up with my own fire in my belly and tell others to listen to ME?

Friends and family keep telling me to write my story. Again, cowardice. I am afraid to put myself out there to be eviscerated. I wish that I could brush off the opinions of people who don't matter and who make a point to be rude. I am doing better at this, but I feel handicapped by the palimpsest of life experiences in which I was demeaned, devalued, and bullied. I wonder how so many people out there appear to be so strong. Some is arrogance, some is masquerade, some is stupidity. The more insecure the person, in general, the more rude and vicious they are, and the more they'll argue their point as being the only one worth merit. And of course, one of my gifts, courtesy of adoption, is the ability to read people's emotions with exquisite accuracy, even when they try to mask them. So I know when people are bullshitting me, and I say nothing.

I have decided, though, that it is time to face down my cowardice and do what I feel is right. To say what I feel, even though it may hurt other people. To take care of myself instead of carrying other people's burdens, especially the burdens of people who are irrelevant to me.

I am petrified to return to work tomorrow. IVs and procedures aside, it is an environment that can be extremely rude and nasty. I was talking to my dear friend N on New Year's Eve (she works in an Emergency Department) about how many MDs treat nurses like we're idiots who do inferior work. She said that when she began at her job last year, she applied the "killing with kindness" method, but only got railroaded and treated even worse. The MDs were either too arrogant or too heinous to read between the lines of what she said. So she moved on to telling it straight up: "You have your job, and I have mine. They are both hard. I don't treat you rudely, and having an MD doesn't give you a license to treat others as lesser than you are. Get over yourself." I will try this. I am wayyyy too nice for my own good.

Sorry for the spoiler that follows, but it's relevant. In the final scenes of the film, Nina dances the role of the Swan Queen. In the end of the ballet, the Swan Queen commits suicide because that's her only release from a lifetime of pain. It's an acted death--or should be. But to be perfect, Nina stabbed herself before dancing the Black Swan, and she dies at the end of the act, just as her character does. She needed escape--and perfection--and got it. As Hamlet said, "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." I understood Nina's (and the character's) motivation, but haven't yet made that leap off the cliff.

I struggle with my perfectionist tendencies and feelings of self-loathing, internalizing the cruel words of others. I can understand all too well how Nina felt. Living a future filled with darkness and self-doubt is not a prospect to be welcomed. The chains are heavy.

Life Support

I am preparing to return to work after being on medical leave for nine months. I am excited and nervous, worried that I've forgotten too much, that I will be even worse at placing IVs, and that the crush of responsibility will wear me down in a matter of weeks. Being an RN means that I am the eyes and ears of the MD or midwife when they're out of the patient's room. I have to make quick judgment calls, ask for appropriate meds, and be alert and vigilant for 8 hours straight. I work in a high volume, high risk, high stress unit. Never a dull moment, which is both good in terms of learning and bad in terms of feeling like I am drowning. In my first month on the job I had a patient hemorrhage with an inverted uterus, a neonatal code, several fetal demises, and more than one emergency c-section. I am fortunate that I work with a team of exceptional nurses who support me; I am not completely alone, although there are shifts when we're understaffed and I might as well be. One such time there was no Advanced Life Support RN for the baby, and no resource RN at delivery. I had to dry off and assess the baby, do APGARs, and simultaneously get everything that the MD wanted for the patient (hang new IV bag, get sutures and lidocaine, etc.). THAT made me into a huge stress monkey. Too bad I don't have 10 arms.

Because my job often takes me to the OR, I have to be certified in Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS), which is a fancy way of saying that I need to be prepared to run a code when someone goes into cardiac arrest. I have to recognize ECG rhythms, know which ones are shockable, which drugs to use when in what amounts, and how to delegate and check in with team members to make sure that my orders are being carried out as directed. It is pretty complicated, although there are algorithms to simplify things. I spent the better part of five days trying to remember heart medications and proper treatment for myocardial infarctions and stroke. I spent one day in a classroom going over the algorithms and being coached, and then on the second day, I had my big test, called a megacode.

I am a nervous person at the best of times. Polite people call me vigilant; less polite people call me jumpy. I am a perfectionist with a low startle threshold. I can forget to breathe. You can imagine what being in charge of a megacode did to me.

The tester usually began by asking where the team leader worked and what kind of job they did before coming up with a scenario. I was hoping that I would be asked, so that he could come up with some OB scenario in the OR or labor room involving bleeding out. That I can handle. But I wasn't asked, and my "patient" was a 38-year-old IV drug user, coming into the ER with heart palpitations and dehydration. I had my team put my patient on the heart monitor, checked the rhythm, and ordered an IV start and labs to check blood count, electrolytes, kidney function, liver function, and drug toxicology. The tester informed me that my RN was unable to start an IV, so I had to order an intraosseus (within the bone marrow) line. Then the tester asked me where I worked, and the paramedics and ER nurses chuckled because I had forgotten that toxicology screens have to be checked from urine. Oops. I didn't order a Foley catheter. Then I forgot to shock the patient immediately when he went into ventricular fibrillation. I guess I looked frazzled, because the instructor said, "It's okay. You're doing fine. Remember your algorithms."

I got back on track and passed. It was nerve-wracking, but having been in real codes that were less well handled, I feel as though I can contribute more meaningfully. I hope. Practice and faith in oneself really does matter. And in a real-life situation in the OR or labor room, I would NOT be running the code. Hooray for having three MDs in the OR and a code team to call!

Then I got to thinking about the algorithms. If you follow the boxes and answer questions, things are simplified. You know what to do when, if you constantly reassess the patient and make decisions based on that information. Very few people actually survive codes, but there is a best practice to be followed. That is reassuring.

It made me wish that there were some algorithm to follow when trying to sift through the complicated, clotted emotions that come along with adoption. There are theories (such as the primal wound, and modified Eriksonian crises), and there are examples (such as the interviews that B.J. Lifton published in her books) of other people's searches and reunions. But no adoptions are alike, no adoptees are exactly alike, no first mothers are the same. There is no algorithm for coping: we do the best we can, muddle through, and hope for the best. Sometimes I feel like I am performing CPR on myself, pounding on a chest in which the heart has stopped beating for lack of an emotional home. Sometimes I wish I could give myself epinephrine to give myself a better chance to reset my heart's nonperfusing rhythm.

Over the past few years, I've been given a lot of advice. "Say this, say that, never say that, don't contact, contact now, demand that, ask politely, give more time, show up on her doorstep," and so on. Problem is, there is no script to follow that works for everyone. We all have to write our own as we go. I remember someone telling me not to tell my fmom in a letter that I wanted anything less than her love, and that she had mine. Well, turns out that my fmom isn't the loving kind of person who wanted to hear such words. As she put it, "I feel nothing for you as a child of mine, but you are nice, and if I met you in the line at the grocery store we could have a nice talk. Let's work on a friendship like that." So I am a stranger--that's a given--of no more importance than someone met incidentally while running errands. I will take it, although it wasn't the reception I had hoped for. One step at a time, one step at a time.

Then I sink back into this terrible sense of feeling alone. I have an amazing family, loving friends, and I belong in many ways. I don't belong in my nfamily, at least not yet, and probably never in the way I'd like. How is it that I slipped down a rabbit hole and ended up here, where I can't enjoy what I do have?

Although I become annoyed by people who are so scientific that they cannot begin to understand or process human emotions, I do wish I could pull a card out of my pocket with an algorithm that outlined life support for me in more concrete terms than taking antidepressants, thinking happy thoughts, doing things that bring me joy, and surrounding myself with loved ones. It's these things, oddly, that often reinforce how alone I feel.

In ACLS, there are some rhythms that are shockable, and some that aren't. Can't shock dead, they say. They may shock a flat line on TV, but it doesn't restart the heart. There has to be the right combination of electrical activity, oxygen, circulation, and chemicals for that heart to pump.

Right now, I am not in a shockable rhythm.

ABC. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. It can keep you alive, but to what end? What is life vs. quality of life? Oh yeah, there's no algorithm for that one, either.

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.

Trust

Trust is a precarious thing. I like to believe that I see the good in people until they prove me wrong, protecting myself as much as I can in the meantime. But still, there are people who beg for second chances and trust, but who don't deserve them. They may be wonderful people--with others, but not with me.

Of course, being adopted makes my trust baggage even worse, but there comes a time when enough is enough.

That's all I have. I can only take care of myself, and for now, that's taking as much energy as I can muster.

I think I feel betrayal all the more keenly because I try--although I am not always successful--not to betray others. I can think of some pretty awful things I did to people as I was swimming blindly in my late teens and early twenties, just trying to find myself but not knowing how. Knowing that I wasn't getting enough out of a relationship, or even the right thing. Letting others abuse me, but being passive-aggressive and hurting them back.

I think one healthy thing is that I have at last discovered my bottom line. There are friends of mine who aren't there for me always when I need them, but I know they love and care for me. I trust in their friendship. Then there are those who say they want to be there, but only do so to use me. And they think I don't notice. Well, I do.

I wish it didn't burn as badly as it does. It hurts, but it does feel better in the end to cut people out than to question their commitment to standing by me as a friend, no matter what.

Speechless

I am not one usually to run out of words. I have been known to be quiet and withdrawn, but the events of the past two days have truly knocked me sideways.

I have been deeply depressed. This is not news. I have been fighting my health problems and feeling suicidal for over six months. I have been suicidal before, but I usually stuffed my feelings down and made it through by making myself numb. I have lived most of my life appearing cheerful, but feeling like a zombie inside.

On Monday night, I finally decided that if I was going to die, I should tell my brother how very angry I was with him. So I sent him a text that basically said that I was sorry I was born and caused such misery to everyone in my nfamily, but that I had expected more from him. Thanks, but no thanks. He won no prizes for being a gentleman.

Shortly after I sent my text, his wife called me. She had refused to answer an e-mail I had sent her last September, and she had left me high and dry after my visit with her in April, after she moved in with my nmother. I picked up, and she asked if I was okay. I said no, I wasn't. She then said that A (my brother) would call me when he could get out of the lab. I said fine, and then told her that I had been horrendously betrayed, that I didn't trust her, and that basically there was nothing left to say. I hung up.

A called a bit later. He asked if I was okay. I said no. I also told him that I was really angry that he hadn't answered my e-mail in October, or bothered to tell me that he had made it home safely from his tour. He said that he was tired of being in the middle (as if *I* put him there!) and that no one in the family was going to have a relationship with me until C and I worked it out. He had told my cousin to stop communicating with me; I had suspected as much when my cousin stopped responding to my texts and messages. The straightjacket of such an arrangement insisting on complete family harmony made no sense to me on multiple levels: I wasn't doing any of the obstructing, and why can't adults have relationships with other adults without the blessing of everyone on the planet? I brought up how honoring thy father and mother doesn't mean committing murder; where do you draw the line? He asked for some time to think, then said he'd call me back. I answered very sarcastically, "When? Six months? A year from now?" He told me he'd call me the next day, and call our mother that night.

I felt sad beyond measure yet again. I really had done nothing but be born into this family of people I couldn't begin to understand. I wasn't asking for anything more than friendship and respect. I cried, lay in the fetal position, felt more alone than ever, and wondered what in the hell I had done to deserve such treatment. And sadly, this kind of thing is not foreign to me, in love relationships, friendships, and otherwise. You'd think I could find a pattern in myself and fix it, and I've tried, but there is no way I could have created this situation with my nfamily. If anything, my problem is being stubborn and not letting go, but I think I hold onto things for a reason.

So I got the kids ready for bed, took a Xanax to help me sleep, and woke up at midnight with my body and emotions in a knot. I checked my phone and noticed that C had called me. Great, I thought. I am going to get reamed again for contacting someone or upsetting A.

The next morning, I was getting the kids ready for school and saw that C had called again. I couldn't pick up because I was too busy tracking down shoes and jackets and homework and trying to get Tobey to brush his hair. I had an appointment right after I dropped off the kids, and hashed it over on the phone with a friend who is trying to get over a breakup. He advised me to do as he is trying to do, simply to walk away. But I couldn't, I just couldn't.

I got home, arranged myself with Kleenex, a warm blanket, the dog, and the phone, and then called C. She picked up immediately and began to ask what was wrong, why I felt so bad, and what could be done to change it. I told her that I'd been unhappy pretty much all of my life, stumbling through it, never valuing myself. I asked her the three questions I'd forgotten to ask last time: Did she hold me? No. Did she name me? No. Did she listen to Edith Piaf while pregnant with me? No. We talked about how she was drugged for my delivery and doesn't remember anything of it. She was horrified to learn that I'd been in the NICU without a primary caretaker for six weeks; she'd been promised I'd go home with a family right away. She was angry to learn that the agency had lied to my parents about her prenatal care and about my father. She told me about hiding her pregnancy so successfully that she did her whole semester of student teaching and no one noticed. She told me about the day she screwed up the courage to tell her parents that she was pregnant with me.

Our conversation flowed for over an hour. She wanted to know about my parents, my childhood, my experiences. We joked about how we both suck at housework and would rather read books. How we're stubborn and good liars. We compared medications for depression, she asked about my boys, and we talked about how marriage is really hard. I told her that I'd left flowers for her father, and she was happy that I had done so. I asked why he had no flowers while the other family members in the cemetery did, and she said that she kept meaning to do it on her visits, but never got around to it.

At one point she said, "This is a nice conversation. Look, we can talk without yelling at each other!" I agreed. She said that she didn't feel like my mom, but that she would be interested in pursuing a friendship. She encouraged me to call her if I felt sad. I really *want* to talk to her. We do have a lot in common. It was so odd but wonderful to have shoved all the garbage off the table and to be able to interact just as people.

She told me that she had told A that she had no problems with our relationship, but that he insisted on this whole family reconciliation thing. She told me that she'd call him to clarify, and she told me to text my cousin saying that I'd spoken with Aunt C and that she was absolutely fine with him getting to know me. My cousin texted back and said, "Thank God! What a load off." C explained that my aunt and uncle want to approach me, but aren't quite ready yet. I think it's a relief for C now that everyone in the family knows. We can move ahead, take things slowly, and be friends--I hope. I never thought I would be able to say that. It feels wonderful.

A and I are figuring things out. I was so angry, angrier than I had originally thought I was. All those months I fretted about having him back in my life and wondering what I'd done--while knowing I had done nothing except exist. The enormity of his betrayal ripped me to shreds. It will take a long time for me to be able to trust him again, although I really want to get there. I asked him if he'd come visit me so that we can spend time together and reestablish our footing. He agreed, and will hopefully get up this way the weekend after next. My boys are thrilled: Callum said, "I think Uncle A owes me an apology, but then I want to hug him." Tobey just said, "I can't wait to meet him and show him all my Lego. And thank him for Alfie [the Elf on the Shelf A gave the kids last year]."

A assured me that he feels terrible for what he did, and that all of what happened was because of the situation, not because of me. Sound familiar? Oh yes, the situation that *is* me and for which I get punished, over and over and over and over....

But mostly I can't wait to hug him and cry and be happy that he's home safe and sound from Afghanistan. I also told him that he's too Southern and military and has to stop saying, "Yes, ma'am," to me unless he's teasing me as my little brother. I am too young to be "Ma'am."

So things are better, I guess, although I can't decide if this is actually my life or I woke up as someone else yesterday.

Que reste-t-il

I am sitting in my room, surrounded by papers and books and newspapers and magazines. Old tickets, pictures, letters. In some ways they say something about my life; in others, they only provide the slightest of clues. Detritus of a life. A collage of memories and emotions, good and painful.

The emotional impact of going through things that have sentimental meaning is powerful. Take, for example, a letter written to me by a long-ago lover, a charming Englishman who was working on his Ph.D. at Cambridge when we met and shared weekend trysts in London. Coming from different parts of the country, we would always find each in British Museum, in the gallery with the Neo-Assyrian wall reliefs, and usually in front of my dear, dying lioness.

In any case, Andrew's words can still conjure up feelings of great happiness in me:

Elskling-


It was so sad to leave you in such an unceremonious way today. There was something deeply inappropriate about your just having to step off a Tube and disappear after after such a beautiful happy (for my part, at least) two days. Thanks for everything, baby; for fixing up the den of trysting, for being  so beautiful and so much fun, for sharing in such a delicious adventure.


I'm really sorry for marring this by a couple of pillocky outbursts. What I want is what we've got--it fulfills all my dreams just now, and I've not reason to construct straw men. I do trust you and believe you, my love, and I want us to enjoy just being together in our friendship--nothing must spoil it. I start behaving like a rational man from NOW.


I smile when I think of the 22-year-old I was, making my way around England and Ireland, learning, reading, and writing poetry. Absorbing the landscape and searching for myself, although I didn't know it at the time. Thinking about his courageous knowledge of self and acceptance of criticism, and a love for me that meant a willingness to change. Haven't seen that in anyone for quite a while.

One of my favorite songs about nostalgia is Charles Trenet's "Que reste-t-il de nos amours" as he asks what is left at the end of a life: une photo, vieille photo, de ma jeunesse, Que reste-t-il des billets doux, des mois d'avril, des rendezvous, un souvenir qui me poursuit sans cesse.


I am trying to find the happy amidst the sad, but it's hard going. Talked to my brother today, which made it all the much harder. Apparently everything depends on C being willing to have a relationship with me, which will be a cold day in hell; I just cannot understand how a family lets her control so much. What a nightmare. More to follow on that when I am not beside myself in tears. Why does it all have to be so hard, so guarded, so awful?

Demons

I have a wonderful friend whom I had the great pleasure to meet through adoption activism. He is creative, supportive, and very intelligent, although he would blush if I said this to his face or mentioned his name here.

He has been working enthusiastically and tirelessly to put together my Newman family tree. I have ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, and in the Civil War. They have lived in the same area of Indiana for close to 200 years. Talk about stability! I've learned about relatives who have committed suicide in various ways. I have seen some of myself in the stories of various lives of my relatives.

Then last night, my friend sent me a picture he'd found of C, her Senior Picture in 1969 that was taken for her university's yearbook. There she was. Pregnant with me. It was the first time I'd seen a picture of her and thought, "Yes, I do look like her." We have the same face shape, eyes, and eyebrows. I still look a lot more like my grandfather, I think, but there was no denying this time that I come from C.

The pain shot through me like an arrow, leaving burning, poisonous residue in the wound. Yes, I look like her. I already know that I share some of her gestures. What others take for granted, I can't. It's not even just that I can't: she doesn't want me to come near her, or ever to know her.

The more that time goes by, I become convinced that she either didn't tell my brother that she doesn't mind our having a relationship, or that she put a different kind of pressure on him. His silence speaks volumes. I cannot even begin to understand how people can treat family this way. He claims that he's upholding the honor of his parents; I think he's taking the path of least resistance and losing out in the process.

To compound my pain, I read some first parent blogs this week, and I noticed that in more than a few of them, their placed kids are all but absent. It's immensely triggering. How can these parents say that they love their children, and then keep them at arm's length, waffle about setting dates to meet with them, or refuse to tell their families about their placed child at all? How can married people with two kids already think it's a great idea to place kids number three and four in order to do "God's will" and provide children to those who don't already have them? I imagine the placed kids feeling betrayed by their first parents, and the kept kids wondering anxiously if and when they might be placed, as well. None of this makes sense to me. It seems so much like adoption double-speak in which the adoptees, as ever, are damned.

I've also been thinking a great deal lately about the burdens that some adoptees bear (which isn't to say that adoptive parents and first parents don't also have burdens, but my concern here and now is for adoptees). How do we get to such a place that our very foundations begin to corrode? Why are we told again and again that our mothers loved us so much they gave us away? It doesn't make sense in any logical way, and then for those of us who find mothers who really don't love us at all, it's a very cruel joke.

I ask, too, how I have descended to a place where death is preferable to almost all other options. I was reading an essay by Howard Kushner about American attitudes vis a vis suicide in the nineteenth century, "Meriwether Lewis and Abraham Lincoln," and was struck by what he wrote about Freud's conception of melancholia and suicide as ineffective, incomplete mourning for traumatic events. For mourners, the world is empty, but for a transitory period--they learn to cope; for melacholics, the world becomes a painful cypher because they have no ego, and thus their defenses to trauma are limited. They are marginalized because they don't have a stable sense of who they are or a way to filter what happens in the world. The unresolved grief felt by melacholics results in chipping away at the will to live, and increased self-hatred and anger at the deserting love object.

Sounds familiar to me. Here I am, mourning what I've lost, being told that I should be grateful and have nothing to mourn, and having my own mother tell me that she wished I had never existed. I am trying to pick up the pieces of me and put them together in a meaningful way, but it's incredibly difficult to forge new coping mechanisms from the ruins of a self that was thoroughly burned to the ground. It is a wearying task, after a lifetime of being bullied, devalued, called ugly and many other things, to find the strength to stand up to C, and everyone else who has tormented me, and yell, "ENOUGH!"

I am angry that I lacked the strength to stop this travesty long ago, and I don't want to let it continue. But it is a struggle, every day, not to give in and find my own peace. Seriously. I have my medication, friends, support, a loving adoptive family, and one ncousin who sees all that is good in me--but it is a tiring uphill battle in a world that sucks.

I have to keep reminding myself not to ask "Why?" and instead ask "How can I get through this?" One minute at a time. One freaking minute.

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.                                                                                                                                                          

Je ne regrette rien

I was listening to Edith Piaf today in the car as my son, dog, and I were driving around and running errands. Many years ago Thomenon gave me CD of Piaf's greatest hits; he is a big fan of French music from the 30's and 40's, probably because his own parents loved it and listened to it during his childhood.

I have always felt drawn to Piaf, although my own parents didn't listen to her. When I would catch snatches of her voice on the radio, on television, or in French classes, she sounded both familiar and comfortable.

Today it hit me that the Little Sparrow is like a body memory within me. She is woven into my cells. I feel quite certain that C listened to Piaf while pregnant with me, and probably still does. I think C cried while listening to "La vie en rose." I think my East Coast educated father seduced her in French and hung her out to dry. I will add that to my list of questions to ask C, if and when I ever speak with her again.

Until then I remain une ombre de la rue.

Controversial

Adoptees sometimes talk about "coming out of the fog," which I take to mean that there's a sense of dissonance about what we're told and what we feel. Some feel no dissonance. Some of us deny this dissonance all together, some of us keep our mouths shut, and some of us have always decried what isn't true.

It is controversial for adoptees to say, and believe, that it would have been preferable for their nparents to choose abortion. I know there are plenty of people who oppose abortion, and that is their right. I feel, however, that what C said to me, "I wish I'd aborted you!" was her *truth*, and a truth I could live with. No, I wouldn't have existed or had this life or have known my friends or had my children. But I would have also been spared the pain of knowing that the person who brought me into this world regrets every minute of my being here. I truly think C was shocked that I *wasn't* distraught when she said she wished she'd aborted me. I wish I had found an nmom who welcomed me with open arms and was willing to get to know me as a person. And in the absence of that, I wonder why she bothered to carry me to term in the first place. I think she hides behind the shroud of religion: "That is against my religion." She would have had an abortion, I am sure, if she'd had the courage to face her situation sooner and function outside the law. She let the pregnancy ride, had me, and never looked back. Such a Slytherin.

I think it would have been easier on both C and me if she had aborted me. Well, she didn't abort me, so here I am. I don't have to be grateful to be here.

In another case a fellow blogger asked, hypothetically, if it would have been easier for me to search and find out that C was dead. I think it would have been less catastrophic for me on several levels. First, she couldn't have interfered with my relationship with my brother. Second, I would have missed out on speaking with her and knowing exactly how she felt about me--but in my particular case, ignorance would have been bliss. This isn't to say that I hate C or wish her dead. Just that the end of my journey left me with a stinging rejection, and continued rejection, that I wouldn't wish on most people.