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.

Auslaender

Being adopted for me has meant living on the outside. My relationship with my nfamily is fractured because of the trauma surrounding my birth and placement; there are dynamics way beyond my control, and it hurts. Yet in some ways, I can brush it off and say, "Well, they don't know me. It's about them, not me." I don't have history with them, which saddens me, but again, that was beyond my control.

Adoptees hear over and over and over that "All families have problems," and "We all have our crosses to bear." These are true statements, but it is highly annoying that people automatically assume that adoptees don't know this. When we talk about our problems, they're dismissed as being irritating and "less than" because we should shut up and be happy; any other narrative is disturbing, and why don't we know our place? My friend Joy wrote a brilliant rebuttal of this insanity in a blog post here.

To demonstrate that I am aware of other people's problems, I want to share something that my husband is going through. I hate seeing him suffer, and it sickens me that his family feels free to treat him as cavalierly as most of my nfamily treats me. Mark was born in 1970 to German parents who were then living in New York City; he is a dual citizen. His father worked for the Deutsche Bundesbahn [German railroad] and managed its ticket sales office in Manhattan for six years. When Mark was an infant, his family moved back to Hamburg. He comes from a very small, highly buergerlich [bourgeois is a close translation, but not quite spot on] Prussian family to whom appearances mean everything. Clothing, manners, language, social functions, house, garden, everything is tightly managed (if you've read anything by Thomas Mann, that's the culture). Mark says that there's a word for this properness, Spiessigkeit, that is difficult to translate into English, but combines elements of complacency, smugness, and arrogance. The only thing Mark's mom liked about me was that I had a Ph.D., because that is a title. Buergerlich people are way big on titles. But then my being foreign canceled it out, and I was back to zero. 

Although I am slagging off Germans here, there are regional differences that have everything to do with culture. The Northerners (Prussians) are cold, cold, cold. I have heard from many different people that they have hated Hamburg because of the demeanor of the people. Bavarians are different, and my friend Dirk is from Saxony, which has a great history and, I must say, friendlier people than I encountered in Hamburg. Mark says Saxony is Russian, but he's a Prussian and we're back to square one with the regional snootiness. When I say, "Deine Leute," or "YOUR people," to Mark, I generally mean Prussians.

Mark chafed under the strictures of his village's Aryan culture, wore torn jeans, asked his mother not to iron his underwear, tee shirts, and jeans, and had yearly arguments with her about how terrible it was that he wasn't working in a job that required a suit. He hates suits. Always has, always will. And yet the arguments ensued, without fail. I witnessed one of these arguments a couple of years into our marriage, and had to hide my face in a pillow to avoid her seeing that I was laughing when she called him schlampig, which translates both as messy/sloppy and slutty in English.

Anyway, at a point in his 20's, Mark decided to emigrate and move to the United States. In retrospect he feels this is because he wanted to escape the strictures of his family. Since he left, he has been nearly completely ostracized. He is as much an outsider from his family of origin as I am from my nfamily. It's terribly sad. I mentioned in an earlier post that his family boycotted our wedding in California, and other than a visit from his father after his mother died, we have seen nothing of them on this side of the Atlantic. Mark has to do all the work, make all the phone calls, do all the bridging and traveling. And when he's there, they treat him badly. It's wrong. It infuriates me to see someone I love demeaned this way. It's about *them* and not about him and his needs. Hmm, have I heard this before? Is it so hard to support someone in following their heart and dreams? I guess it is, for some people. He is basically alone, except for me, my parents, and our children.

His mother has two sisters, one of whom passed away in 2002, and one of whom is still living. His elder aunt was someone I adored. She was the only person in the family to welcome me with open arms, even though her English was minimal and my German is pretty rotten. She enjoyed that I was different, in as much as Mark's mother didn't. I loved her, and when she died, I lost my only ally. She would take Mark's mother on and call her out on all the garbage she said to me, which is, sadly, more than I can say for Mark. [An aside about that: when I was newly engaged to Mark, his mother made me a calendar with pictures of Mark. Some of those pictures involved him kissing an ex of his whom his mother *wished* he had married. I was horrified to open this object of torture gift and be slapped in the face by her disapproval. At the time, and for some 11 years later, Mark said that there was no malintent. Q.E.D. Germans are sadists. Seriously, I can laugh now, but it was terrible to have her do this and to have my husband say that she loved me. It's almost as bad as "Your mother loved you so much she gave you up for adoption." Really?] [Another aside--how I am on asides today--Thomenon hadn't heard about this rainbow-farting nonsense, and when I told him about it yesterday, he said, "No one actually believes that bullshit, do they?"]

So back to my story. Mark's younger aunt is a widow now, and Mark has always loved her very much. Since the death of his own mother in 2007, he has drawn closer to her and they speak far more. But twice recently she has been hospitalized and his family *completely* neglected to tell him. Twice. Once with a stroke and once with a hip replacement. He doesn't exist to them because he left the Heimat [homeland].

I would argue that the only difference between us is how we got to our place of exile: he chose to leave, and I was involuntarily sent away. Either way, it sucks. Yes, I know, other people have problems with their biological families. And I can love them and support them.

Only Connect

It was a Wednesday morning in early September. Callum, my elder son, was already back in school. Tobey, the younger, had another week off. We had stopped to visit a friend of his, and at 10 a.m., I found myself at a new dog park in Oakland supervising my dog and two children as they played in mud. I was getting my bearings when the phone rang. It was C's number.

I broke out into a cold sweat. I wasn't sure if it was C, her husband, a friend, or a pastor. I was certain that the message couldn't be good, though, and didn't have the strength to handle it without backup. I didn't want to break down in front of Tobey and his friend. I figured C had to be calling in response to the message I'd sent to M two days previously. I let the call go to voicemail and then immediately rang my beloved friend N, and texted my great adoptee friend Linda for advice. I knew I couldn't listen to the message. I saw it there on my phone, blinking and mocking me. Resourceful N came up with a plan, because I was paralyzed. She told me to come to her house at 2 p.m.; she would listen to the message, relay its contents to me, and then hold my hand as I listened to it.

The minutes ticked slowly by. I made my way to N's house. I gave her my phone and went to hide in the bathroom with my hands over my ears. I knew the message would cut me to the core and touch my deepest wounds. N listened thoughtfully and came to get me. She told me that in her estimation, it wasn't a bad message. She felt that C sounded frustrated, but not angry. I couldn't imagine that to be so. I returned to the bathroom so that N could play the message for Mark. It was brutal to know that my phone had captured the voice of the woman who gave birth to me, the same woman who cursed my very existence. It's quite a terrible thing to be hated by your own flesh and blood, for nothing you've done except be born.

N spoke calmly to me and eventually coaxed me to listen. She held my hand and pressed the button. A tired, and yes, frustrated--but also angry--voice articulated the following:

I hope this is Kara [pronounced incorrectly, of course]. I am calling from Mississippi to tell you to PLEASE STOP. I have answered all of your questions. My brother called me to tell me you sent him an e-mail; my mother is elderly and you will give her a heart attack. PLEASE stop. I'm asking you one more time, PLEASE STOP.


I felt for her. I understood how hard it must be to dredge up things long buried. Although most people assume I've never thought about her feelings, and urge me to do so, I've pretty much done nothing else for years. Weighing my needs against her pain, hating to hurt her. But at the same time, I was--and am--her child. Surrendering me did not sever the ties we share in blood. We had never spoken. She had never answered ANY of my questions except for the brief medical history the CI had taken by phone, and that had been incomplete. Willfully so. How had she convinced herself that she owed me nothing, that I mattered so little?

I winced at the disparity in our voices; I was raised north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and she below it. Had she kept me, my accent would have been the same as hers. It hurt to feel that this, the first time she addressed me by name, was in such a sharp, sad way. I wasn't welcomed, wasn't thought of with love. There was no homecoming, no sense of continuity. I was denied the reunion I had dreamed of; I had suffered the loss of C as an infant, and I suffered the loss of the relationship I had hoped for as I began to search.

And yet, for the first time, we had connected. She called me, spoke to me. I hadn't been ignored. She didn't acknowledge my feelings, but she put more of herself out there than she'd ever been willing to do previously. The question was, "What next?"

I paced the floors and spoke with friends. I wished I could have a friend call C for me, pretending to be me. I was frightened that I might be wounded even more harshly if she hung up on me or turned me away. I knew, however, that there was really no other choice than to call her myself, open myself up, and ask for the name of my father. I wanted to do so very soon, as well; I didn't want her to think that she'd succeeded in scaring me off or that I believed that I didn't belong. No way, not this woman. My time for sitting in the background was over. N offered to have me call from her house, while she held my hand, the following morning. There was no way I could sleep that night.