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.

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.

Better to know?

Many people have asked me over the past year and a half if I regret searching and finding my first family, especially because of the cold reception and the painful repeated rejections I have suffered.

No.

I cannot regret seeing myself in the faces of others for the first time. Learning about my family's history, where I came from, and getting additional medical history. Seeing that I have gestures just like my first mom's. Hearing her voice for the first time. Meeting my brother and his family. Feeling that the child inside me finally had found her long-lost place of refuge and recognition from the people she was connected to.

Yes.

I have sunk to some of the darkest depths emotionally that I've ever experienced. I opened myself up to pain and emotional distress in ways I'd never thought possible. I didn't think any living people could hurt me as badly as my first family did, and I've been through some really ugly breakups in my life. The rejections were visceral and bloody, and took me to places inside myself I hope never to see again.

I don't think that anyone should have to go through what I did. I think that people in reunions, even though said reunions might have taken a while to come about, cannot understand how horribly scarring it is to be treated as a personal belonging. There is a pain in being told that your mother wished she'd aborted you that I wish existed only in a Lifetime movie.

And yet I have hope. I am stubborn. I don't give up easily. I want so very much to believe that the goodness in me comes from somewhere in my first mom's family. I don't want always to be the afterthought, the exile, the rejected one.

I kept going, and have formed a new connection with someone else in my first family, who--beyond my wildest dreams--treats me with love and respect. I don't want to jinx anything, but I am impressed and filled with pride to be related to this person. I see the goodness of myself in him. I am cautious and not one to abandon my fear easily, but the past few weeks have shown me that there are people who do not choose to be blind or judgmental.

I am a loyal friend and family member, and I feel in my heart that I have met my match.

I read several blogs of adoptees who are issue free and happy, without reservation, about their life and situations. Sometimes I am envious. I ask myself if I would rather have their certainty and security than my darkness and turmoil. It's tempting sometimes, but I have decided I wouldn't. Part of my pain comes from my intelligence and willingness to probe deeply into myself; in my life, I would have to be pretty superficial to claim that all was well. I wouldn't trade my mental illness and emotional intensity for a life lived in Stepford pastels. Unless I had enough Valium, that is. And even then, probably not. I would always take the red pill of knowledge. I can't imagine being blind. I am not my first mother.

What Am I?

I can say who I am, and in a vague sense who I was born, but my interactions with my first family have left me asking, "What am I?" My aparents did not raise me to treat people as less than human, or as something disposable. I have done things in my life that I'm not proud of, and I've treated people in ways that I wish I hadn't. I have been selfish and rude. I own that. And yet I have never, to my knowledge, treated anyone as an object, an annoyance, an old shoe.

Through all my searching, I hadn't had any direct contact with C until last November. One Saturday evening I arrived home from a relaxing dinner out with my family and went to the mailbox to collect the post. On the top of the stack was a letter, with no return address and the postmark of Memphis. I knew it was from C. I began to tremble. It didn't seem a good thing that the envelope was thin, and when I opened the letter and saw the size of her script, I knew the message was not going to be pleasant.

She wrote:

Nov. 18, 2009


[No salutation]


I am telling you for the last time. I DO Not Want Any Communication Nor do I Want You Contacting my family.


When I left the hospital 40 years ago, I left you and what happened behind. My life has continued very well and happy. There is nothing to gain. I did what I thought was right.


Accept what you cannot change.


C

[All emphasis and capitalization hers.]

I was struck immediately by the lack of salutation, by the erratic capitalization, and her assertion that I was a personal belonging left behind and no longer wanted, missed, or thought of. How presumptuous of me to think that my own MOTHER would care a fig about how I was doing.

I was stunned. I knew this had to do with her own steel-clad coping mechanisms, which were in direct conflict with mine. It felt enormously, wearingly sad and dark. I was inhuman to her. How could a person treat another person with so much contempt and disrespect? Oh yeah, humans aren't very nice a lot of the time, but still.

The letter arrived shortly after she realized that I was going to visit A, last fall. She was attempting to guilt me into backing off and going back into the closet with whatever other skeletons she has. Needless to say, it didn't work.

A knew, and there was no stuffing the truth down again.

My husband and friends advised me to take the letter with me when I went to visit A, for full disclosure. I showed it to him, and he confirmed it was her handwriting and that it sounded like her.

When I visited T in April, she brought up the letter again and said that when C sent it to me, she was also sending lengthy epistles to A, day after day, begging for his forgiveness and compassion. A was angry that she had lied to him, and she was a busy supplicant, all the while bashing me on the head with venom and guilt. Hypocrisy. Lies. Secrets. They do so much damage, and I seem to come up the loser in all scenarios involving A and C.

I understand that my birth was not a good time for C. I understand that she has her own trauma related to what happened so long ago. I understand that none of this is easy, for her or for any first mother. I respect that she has no desire to know me. And yet it hurts, excruciatingly so, to be a chapter in a book so readily torn out and burned, a narrative denied. To count for nothing. To be a nonentity. To have C insert herself between A and me and destroy that, as well.

I still have the letter. I will always keep it. It's the only thing I've ever touched that she wrote for ME. Sad, isn't it, keeping a poison-pen letter for sentimental reasons?

Searching, Part I

Searching for me was a process. Getting to the point of deciding to do something took a long time. Having courage and money and support was part of it. I had to be in a place where I knew I wouldn't be shattered if the response was negative. That said, I really wanted to know who I was before I was the me that all my friends and family know. It sounds very complicated, and in some ways it is. I was worried also about hurting my aparents, whom I love with all my heart. I felt disloyal to them by opening up this can of worms. But it was my can of worms, and there was no escaping its presence in the front of my mind. 

I remember finding my Pre-Adoptive Agreement in my aparents' file cabinet, in a manila folder labeled "Adoption," when I was 12. The agreement named me as "Baby Girl Neuman." I had a last name! At least I assumed it was my last name; who would make up "Neuman"? More on that later.  I rolled the name around my brain and imagined being a "Neuman." It gave me something concrete, although it was only a fragment of what I wanted to know. 

Although I always wanted to search, I had neither the time, inclination, or outward push to make it happen until I was in my mid-twenties. For a number of years in the 1990's, I lived in Berkeley, where I was working on a Ph.D. in art history at Cal. One of my housemates was a woman my age who had also been adopted. She was interested in what it meant to be adopted and invited me to go to an adoptee support group with her. We talked about what it meant to be adopted, and I read some foundational books in adoption psychology that began to help me normalize my emotional experiences. I was envious of those who had found their families and seemed to be more at peace with themselves. 

The members of PACER, the support group, encouraged me to write off for my non-identifying information, which I did in 1997 after having to ask my adoptive parents notarize a permission slip to verify that they approved of my desire to search. It was infantilizing to have my wishes and opinions count for nothing. A "no" from my parents would have barred the path forward, but I was relieved when they readily agreed. I paid $75, and two weeks later received six sheets of paper that summarized who I was before my parents brought me home, before I became the person attached to my aparents and my family. When I began my first reinvention of self at the ripe old age of 10 weeks. I read the physical descriptions of my first mother, first father, my first mother's parents, and the circumstances of my birth, over and over. I began to give myself permission to imagine who these ghostly people were. I wondered if they ever thought about me. 

I was adopted in a state that in extremely restrictive in terms of adoption laws. Missouri mandates the use of confidential intermediaries (CIs) to make contact. I didn't have the money to pay for this service until several years later, when I was married and more financially stable. I called the court, filled out forms, and waited for the agency to contact me. I wrote a $350 check to the CI, and gave her a letter I wanted her to read to my first parents. Then I waited for what seemed like five interminable months. At last she called me. 

"I don't have good news, I am afraid," the CI said. "Your birthmother would barely speak to me, and just kept repeating, 'I knew this day would come,' and 'I don't want to know.'" I felt all the blood drain from my face. I cried. The CI encouraged me to let move on. "I could try calling her again, but I doubt she'd change her answer. You can try again in three years." "Okay," I answered. I am ever the compliant adoptee. 

Three years went by. Then another five. I had two children. I was sick. Part of my being sick had to do with a hereditary blood disorder that I knew I'd inherited from my first mom, so I screwed up the courage to get back on the searching carousel. I called the court again, filled out the papers, sent off my check for $450. I wrote a new letter for the CI to read to my first parents, and enclosed a detailed medical history questionnaire. Then the painful wait began anew. I called the CI after two months. After four months. 

Five months later, I received an unbelievably cruel letter from the CI, which ended on this lovely note: "It seems like your birth mother has gone to great lengths to make sure she wouldn't be found or contacted again, and I feel it's time to give up all attempts at finding her. I have $81 in out-of-pocket expenses. Please send a check to…" This was unacceptable. I flew into a rage. She had found her eight years ago! What could have happened? And blaming me? Unconscionable! I called the CI, was uncharacteristically irate and let her have it with both barrels, and then asked her to read through my file again and tell me everything she could, IMMEDIATELY. She did, and then sent me a new summary of non-identifying information. And you know what? She called back to tell me that she'd misspelled my first mother's last name and had found her, after all. I swear up and down, without any proof, that the CI is a first mother herself. She was far too protective of my fmom and rude about what I was doing legally. I am sure there's a conflict of interest in there somewhere. Either that, or she is the most pathetically unprofessional woman EVER. Maybe both.

The overall result of the second phone call was the same; my first mother desired no contact, although I got a little bit more medical history and found out that I had possible siblings and my grandfather had died. I sighed. I felt so alone and so unwanted by people whom I desperately wanted to love me back--or at least acknowledge that I exist. I felt powerless and isolated. Civilians (the nonadopted) didn't know what to say or how to help me. I folded in on myself and tried to put one foot in front of the other. To convince myself I was okay not knowing, which wasn't true. I couldn't lie to myself anymore.