Barnmaven

Lowering the bar

Its been about three and a half years since I wrote this post, which included some of my birthfamily history and my thoughts about finally putting the past behind me and reaching out to speak to my birthmother.

I never got as far as picking up the phone.  I did make contact via Facebook, and we exchanged a few PM's.  It never got beyond that. I decided that I didn't want it to.

I thought about going to visit her.  I thought about introducing her to my kids.  I thought long and hard, considered my feelings, motivations, intuition and, mostly I just asked myself the question "Why?  Why would I do this?"  I felt that if I was considering introducing my children to someone I had previously considered so emotionally toxic that I wanted nothing to do with her, I would have to come up with some sort of logical reason that it made sense to do so.  Know what?  It didn't. Not whatsoever.  Even if I wasn't going to involve my children, I still couldn't manage to fan the flames of any desire to spend the time and money to make the trip. I never went.  I don't regret it.

Thinking about my birthmother and her relatively recent admission regarding her part in the systematic abuse of her children in the context of my very normal human pondering about my existence and purpose, I realized that forgiving was not the same thing as wanting to have a relationship.  There were so very few potential good things that could come from opening that door, and quite a lot of potentially not-good things. 

I started to write "It's not her fault," but then I had to take that back.  It is not entirely her fault. She wasn't the only abuser of the children she kept, but she did abuse them and she sat back and let others abuse them in especially horrific ways while she spent her time getting drunk and high. When my older sister left home at the age of fourteen, she was a child who had experienced things most adults have never experienced. She left to save herself, but in doing so she had to leave behind her four other siblings.  We've had so many long, tortuous conversations about the knife's edge she walked.  She was homeless, she was just a kid, and she could barely take care of herself much less four children between the ages of five and twelve.  But she was, in many respects, the only mother they'd really had.  When their mom was absent or too busy drinking and drugging, my sister fed them and changed their diapers, tried as best she could to protect them, though she couldn't, not really, nor could she protect herself. She left.  She had to.

She ended up as far away as she could have gotten geographically and still be on the same continent.  She spent 24 years on the opposite coastline, trying to heal, trying to both distance herself from the situation and at the same time trying to figure out how to get her family to be normal.

Normal they have never been, and the resulting fractures from so much dysfunction have created a situation so toxic, so filled with narcissistic, passive-agressive, unrealistic drama that I've made the conscious decision to just not be a part of it.  Periodic exposure has done nothing but solidify that resolve.

I think it is normal for most families to experience a fair bit of sturm und drang when a family member passes, even when they have functional, healthy relationships.  Our ties with those we love get interwoven with material things, and unless someone has made a very complete and detailed will (and sometimes even when they have), relationships are strained when two or more people have a strong emotional attachment to a particular item, or when children feel they are competing for their fair share of what is left behind.  When the family is deeply dysfunctional to begin with, these situations quickly begin to make even characters in shows like Dallas look benign. 

I saw a bit of this when my grandmother passed.  I had no attachment nor sense of entitlement to anything; I was beyond grateful when I found out that she had left a little bit of something for me and also for my children in her will.  My birthmother and the rest of her grandchildren most certainly did feel they had a stake in who got what, and there are those who still speak to certain others with barely repressed rage over certain prized items that ended up in one or the other's possession.

Now, sadly, my birthmother is dying.  She has been given a very short window of time and will be entering hospice care.  I feel bad for her, of course.  No matter how awful a person has been, no matter what they've done, I would never want them to have to suffer through what will most likely be a pretty horrific end-of-life experience.  I even thought, for a brief moment, that it would probably be a good thing to make a short visit to make peace with her.  It felt like it might be the right thing to do, for her, for me.  Almost before that impulse could begin to take shape, however, the infighting and absolute dumbfuckery of this extraordinarily damaged family made it completely out of the question.

I'm not angry, I'm not hurt.  But my sister surely is, and although I'm here for her and she has my shoulder and my ears and my heart, nothing can take away the sting of being unable to go say her last goodbyes to the woman who, while not a mother, was certainly the crucible that shaped the woman she eventually became.  If I didn't love my sister I'd be content to just wish them all well from a distance and let them tear one another apart, piece by piece.  You'd think a dying parent wouldn't be the source of so much angst, but somehow they manage to make this an opportunity to draw lines in the sand, to knock each others' chess pieces off the board, to try and get something, though I'm not sure they even know what it is they want.  I believe, watching them, that  the prospect of watching a pit full of hyenas tearing apart a screaming antelope would be more peaceful.

Distance is a thing of beauty, no doubt about it.

If you need me, I'll be with my mom, hugging her so tightly she can't breathe, thanking her repeatedly for just being my mom.  I'm only sorry Dad's not here so I can thank him too.  There's no substitute for them.  As mildly dysfunctional as we might have been, they were in all the ways that count exactly the kind of parents a person should have. 

Without them? I'd just be another hyena picking antelope carcass out of my teeth.

 

 

 

Being real

I always thought that Gepetto loved Pinocchio just as he was.  I believe that the ending of the story, where Pinocchio becomes real, is more of a metaphor than anything else.   I think Pinocchio became a real boy not because of the fairy but because he finally believed that he really was Gepetto's son.  I stick to this version because if the ending really means that belief isn't what creates reality then the story invalidates my self-perception.

Bastard Moments have been very few in my life.  My family never shied away from the topic, but even though being an adoptee had enormous impact on me emotionally, but it wasn't something we needed to constantly discuss.  As my Dad often remarks, our family has a wrong kind of humor.  We have been known to mess around with people who didn't realize my brother and I weren't our parents' biological spawn.  We'd go to some event or family thing, some new person would remark on how much I looked like my parents and we'd start laughing like wild hyenas.  Fun times.

Never have I felt like I was anything less than my parents' child.  My brother and I were - are - loved just as deeply as any child has ever been.  

I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the sense of indignation and burning shame I felt when I realized that even though we weren't somehow less real in the eyes of our parents, we were decidedly so in the eyes of others.  Mom had a copy of the Bardwell family genealogy book - a big hardbound monster of a thing - that listed all the Bardwell descendants, living or deceased.  Right there in print next to my name and my brother's name:  ADOPTED.  I couldn't understand - then or now - why such a distinction even needed to be made.   Whenever I read an obituary that pointedly refers to the deceased's surviving child as adopted I immediately assume the obituary's author is an asshole.

Not once did I ever think that any of my close relatives thought of us as less real than biological progeny, even if some  nameless, faceless genealogy junkie did.

 

It wasn't until my uncle passed away that we learned otherwise.  

 

Of all of the relatives I knew growing up, this aunt and uncle were the closest to us both in proximity and in heart.  They were my godparents, and I was my aunt's namesake.  When my uncle passed away I had not seen them in almost ten years, having just moved back from the other side of the country.  I had just started my new job that week and the dinner would be a midweek affair over on the other side of the mountains.  I could not go, but my brother and parents could.  When my mother requested that the gathering be held on a night my brother wasn't working, my oldest cousin's wife balked.  "Why should it matter if Ken or Mary can come? Its not like they're actually related or anything."

 

I think I could smell my mother's hair burning from half a state away.  

 

That was - oh, gosh - more than seven years ago.  In the time that has since passed, I assumed maybe things had softened, settled.  Maybe it had just been a careless remark - the kind you say but don't really mean.  We've all done that a time or two, right?  I have.  And we've had at least one family reunion and had a wonderful time.

 

And then  - the wedding.  My cousin's youngest daughter.  We'd been hearing and talking about it for months and since my Dad's health precluded my parents' attendance, I planned to attend.  It would be wonderful to see all of my cousins and my aunts.  

 

And of all of the relatives on this coast and elsewhere, guess which cousin was the only one not invited?

 

My parents got an invitation.  Since I'm nearly 50 I think I can safely assume that the invitation addressed only to them did not include their children.  I waited for my invitation to arrive.  And waited.  After more than a week I had to admit that it wasn't ever going to be in my mailbox.  It had never been sent and never would.

 

I will be the first to admit that my hurt and dismay are likely exacerbated by my current health issues.  I know I'm a miserable person these days.  But that ... being left out like that ... was more than a slight.  It was more than an insult.  

 

When other relatives started posting pictures last weekend of the fabulous reception and talking about how much fun they were having hanging out with their family I felt almost sick to my stomach.  

 

In one of those typically dramatic reactions I tend to have I deactivated my Facebook account.  I'm sure that showed them!  Almost as much as being taken off my Christmas card list will SHOW THEM!

 

I reactivated Facebook yesterday, but I really mean what I said about the Christmas cards.

 

I know that "feeling" like I'm the real daughter of my parents doesn't change the reality of our biological disconnect.  But I will go toe to toe - and I'd probably have to get in line behind Mom and Dad -  with anyone who thinks that my parents and I are anything other than family.  

 

My Dad loves his family and he loves me.  I always thought they were my family too.  Does it require their belief that I am also theirs to make me real?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picking up the phone, I said...nothing

I was the fourth child of an alcoholic and (so I am told) abusive mother, whose husband (not, incidentally, the man who fathered me) was in prison and who was likely not going to receive any more welfare money from the state for baby number four.

That’s my side of things, anyway, after listening to her story, and the varying, often conflicting stories told by other biological relatives.  The “facts” vary: I was the result of a rape and she couldn’t bear to keep me; the state told her that if she didn’t relinquish me for adoption they would take all of her children; her mother recalls her saying that “if it [me] is born handicapped I’m going to keep it.”  My sister remembers the Christmas that her mom wasn’t there and she and her brothers stayed at Grandpa and Grandma’s house.

There are likely millions of adoptees whose beginnings are similar to mine and there are millions more who had both better and worse opening paragraphs to their life stories.  It is important to me that my story be valid and clear, that I own what is mine to own and be willing to acknowledge that there is a lot to my own story that I do not and likely never will know.

I don’t know who fathered me.  There was a time when I was younger that I thought that was important.  I’m no longer so certain of this; there are days, though, when I remember the blank half of my heritage and I feel a sense of loss.  Was he a rapist?  I don’t know for sure.  My birthmother, told me once that his name was Marty, and that she didn’t know his last name.  She had been “dating” him for a month or so, and then he raped her and she never saw him again.  The agency information I got when I applied for my non-identifying information from Children’s Home Society stated that my birthfather’s first name was “Pete.”  Surely this was more than a simple spelling error, it seems rather difficult to turn “Marty” into “Pete” for even the worst transcriptionist ever.  Sylvia insisted that Pete was just a friend who agreed to be named on the paperwork in order to keep the agency from attempting to contact the other man to obtain his waiver of parental rights.

What’s true?  What’s false? Over the years it’s become such a confusing jumble of what others have told me that I at some point decided that pretty much none of it bears any relationship to the truth and that I might as well just let it go.  I’m never going to know and I have to be OK with that.  And I have a father, a father who loves me and who I am like in so many ways that people who didn't know better would be surprised to know I wasn't his biological offspring. 

I’m grateful that I didn’t live the life that my older siblings and the two younger sibilings she had after I was separated from the family suffered through.  But depending on which story surrounding my conception and birth you believe, its not really clear on whether I owe my birthmother any gratitude for that fact.  Not knowing who to thank leaves me simply grateful to God for benevolently allowing me to grow up free of violence and pedophilia.  Not so my siblings, who were unfortunate enough to suffer for a long period of time under the heavy hand of their mother and rape and sodomy from her second husband

I met my birth family when I was in my early thirties.  Seeing her for the first time, I was surprised.

In certain physical ways, my birthmother and I resemble one another not at all.  I am tall, she is short.  When I first met her she was quite heavy and so far as I know still is.  But when I look at myself in the mirror, I see her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth, her hair.  I’m even starting to get silver hairs at the temples, the same place she has what I remember her calling her “devil horns.”  Consdering the difficult nature of our relationship (if that is what you can call something that doesn’t really exist), the resemblance is both ironic and disturbing, at least to me. 

We haven’t spoken in years, she and I.  There was a family issue over something that happened with my younger sister during her teenage years, everyone took sides.  My birthmother sent an identical letter to all three of her daughters.  I grant that she didn’t have the ability to solve this problem for anyone and that the division and the drama surrounding the issue were terribly painful.  I acknowledge her desire to distance herself from the drama and focus instead on the things she could control.  Other parts of the letter were not as easily acceptable – her attempts to evoke sympathy by mentioning an abnormal medical test result, her tendency to allow blame to be placed everywhere else but on her.  We talked a few times after that, but eventually I decided the relationship was not healthy for me and I just...withdrew.

Recently she reached out to my older sister, and for the first time that my sister can recall, her denial of past events and her refusal to accept her part in what happened to my siblings finally ended.  She acknowledged that the things my sister remembered did indeed happen.  She apologized for her part in it.  She listened. 

I was happy for my sister, but at the same time I was resentful. Even though I am the one who eventually ended contact with her, that small part of me that will always be searching for my missing roots cried out in jealous anger.   I know this is not even a reasonable thought, particularly when the proportion of the wrongs committed against my sister and other siblings so enormously outweigh any grievance I may have.  But still. 

I tried months ago to let her know through my sister that I would be receptive to contact if she were willing to make it, but no contact ever came.  I reasoned with myself that for her to take the step of reaching out to me would mean that she must acknowledge that I am right and she is wrong so this must be why she had not made the effort.  I didn’t stop to consider that thought might apply equally to both of us.  I didn’t for a moment give thought to the fact that I can be a little intimidating sometimes and perhaps she had plenty of reason beyond my snap assumptions not to reach out.    Eventually some recent birth family drama (it is always the drama with these people!) our impasse came to mind again, and I began to wonder if maybe I wasn't that one being unreasonable.

So then I had to examine myself and my feelings about her, about my birth, about all that has transpired in the years since, and I had to decide whether I was ready to let go of the past and be more concerned with how the future might shape the present.  And in truthfulness to myself, I had to acknowledge that the pain I might feel at times over my lost roots and the cold hard reality of my adoption is not really quite as large as I sometimes perceive it to be.  Once upon a time it was a central issue for me, but that time is long gone.  And so I resolve myself, I surrender to the idea that the mystery of the past is simply that:  a mystery.  Unknowable and ultimately unimportant to my future.  And so I ask my sister for her mother’s phone number.  I resolve to be responsible for reaching out, to forgive, forget and move on.

I have yet to pick up the phone.  It feels the time is never right, that I haven’t yet found the right words to say.  I’m sure its simpler than I’m making it out to be, but the willpower to do it eludes me. 

I'll let you know what happens.

Two of me hold hands and try to reach the rest of me

There are three of me.

There is the before, the in utero, the swimmer trying to escape a reality that is untenable.

There is the in-between, the foster child, the little girl named Bobbi whose foster mother wrote down feeding schedules and diaper details and who didn't dare attach to a baby who would move on.

There is the after, the child who came from nowhere, from nothing, without lineage.  Outside of time and space, I emerged from a black hole, a rip in the fabric of yesterday, without a name or a past.  Loved selflessly and nurtured into adulthood by a family though not of flesh and blood, but intertwined by the heartstrings of love and need.

Today I claim the in-between.  I pull her into myself and gaze on her infant face.  She is me.  I am her.  She has languished, apart from me, and I need only own her, accept her, take her in to myself, to nurture her back to the whole. 

The other, I am not yet ready to embrace.  The one who was an unhappy surprise.  The one who swam nine months, nearly ten, in a toxic soup, a place where she was not welcome.  Who drank what she drank, ate what she ate, heard what she said.  Who emerged, finally, not into the loving embrace of a mother but into the competent and dispassionate arms of a nurse.  Who disappeared, climbed into a cocoon and emerged as someone completely different - a child bereft of family, of lineage, of kith and kin.  A child rescued, to be sure, but yet an orphan.  Abandoned, then saved.  Lost, then found.  Loved, finally, but only after being cut loose from blood ties and family lines.

I'm not ready to reach her yet.

Maybe soon.

Maybe not ever.

Relatively speaking

About once every two weeks I browse through the "people you may know" feature on LinkedIn.  If you're a social media junkie, you know that LinkedIn is the business and career (i.e. clean and sanitized) version of Facebook.  People post their resumes and job experience, connect with colleagues and business contacts.  No friday-night drunken party pictures or gratuitous photos of children and pets, just all work, all the time.  Well, mostly, anyway.  Every once in a while I link my blog in a very discreet place on my LinkedIn page, followed shortly by a wave of fear that causes me to un-link saidsame blog.  I have nothing to hide.  I have everything to hide.  I'm not sure if I ever decide to go job-seeking that a prospective employer would be truly impressed by reading about my bleeding hoo-haw or my dogs or my very special and very challenging children.  (One of these days I'll post more about how I'm going to make a bajillion dollars when I create MyFaceLinkTwit+ and everyone migrates their social media addition to it.)

One time, before they added the feature where you can scroll through profiles of people who are connected to people who are connected to you they used to just make a few suggestions by name.  Once LinkedIn suggested that I connect to my Mother's cousin's daughter's husband, who I have not seen since 1996 and who lives in South Carolina.  How did you know, LinkedIn, HOW DID YOU KNOW???? 

So last week I'm scrolling through the list of people LinkedIn thinks I want to connect with, and I see a name that I recognize. Its the daughter of the alcoholic I lived with some twenty or more years ago, the daughter of the man who glued me to the path of the codependent, the daughter whose father owes the state of New Jersey some $54,000 in back child support.  Wow, LinkedIn, REALLY?  How did you know?

As it turns out, the suggestion wasn't that mysterious, she is the connection of a connection.  And then I look at my list of connections and I start to have that strange sensation of sinking into a swimming pool filled with marshmallows.  Goosebumps rise on my forearms as I consider the breadth of people represented in those several hundred names on my contacts list.  High school friends.  College friends, sorority sisters.  Ex lovers.  Coworkers current and past.  Business associates, fellow Bastards, fellow bloggers. 

All across the web, we are connected.  We are connected on Facebook, we follow each other on Twitter, we know someone who knows someone who knows someone who...fill in the blank. 

Connected.

Interrelated.

I think now, more than ever, the average non-adopted person can understand what its like to be an adoptee "in reunion" and living with relatives from two (or sometimes even more) families.  Adoption, divorce, remarriage, step-familying - my children have a brother from another mother, I will likely soon be acquiring another step-offspring, I have a brother and cousins by adoption and brothers and sisters and cousins by birth, because their father and I are both adopted, my children have at least eight sets of grandparents, and that's not counting potential future stepgrandparents.  But when viewed in the context of the world of social networking so many of us inhabit, it no longer seems strange, does it?

We may not be one people, but we are all on one planet.  Social Media has provided the material framework to prove what I've known all along - we are connected, each and every one of us, if not by blood and birth then by common acquaintance and if not by that then by common interest or common point of contention. 

And yet, more so than I can remember in my very brief lifetime, the dividing lines between people in my country are wider and more stark.  We live in a world where we can connect to one another at will, with an ease and speed never before known in the history of humankind, and the beliefs and the politics that we cling to drive us even farther apart.   The juxtaposition of these two concepts, our connectedness and our difference, flattens me with the irony it engenders.

Together.  One.

Apart.  Many.

Friends.

Enemies.

To quote Burns, I dinna ken how that may be.

Family drama

I've seen two kinds of "dear birthmother" letters -- those written by hopeful couples wanting to adopt, and those written by hopeful adoptees to a possible found birthparent. 

I wanted to write a completely different "dear birthmother" letter today.  I actually did write it, but then I deleted it. 

Instead, I have chosen to write about forgiveness.  Or at the very least, a "dear birthmother" letter masked as an essay on forgiveness.

I've posted my sister Vicki's story in bits and pieces here on this blog and elsewhere.  I'm not sure the parts of it that she and I have written together even begin to cover the depth of what happened to her as a child. 

I've seen different responses in families to abuse.  Sometimes the victims draw closer to their victimizers, in some attempt to finally receive approval and love from the people who have hurt them so badly.  I've seen victims lapse into hatred, drug and alcohol problems, and sometimes perpetuate the abuse cycle. 

There's another thing that happens, rarely:  The abuser admitted their wrongs, made amends, and their victim forgave them and they were able to reconcile their relationship.

Its possible to forgive someone, even if they never acknowledge the nature of their wrongs.  That kind of forgiveness doesn't actually require you to let the person know you've forgiven them.  You make a choice to let go of the past in order to save your own soul, and you move on.  It doesn't make things right and it doesn't absolve the person of guilt, it is simply a way to stop being poisoned by what was done to you.  Very often, especially when the person who has hurt us is in denial over what they have done, this is the only way for the person who was harmed to remove the toxic bitterness from their lives and find healing.

But in order to offer the kind of forgiveness that leads to reconciliation, the offender needs to accept responsibility and makes amends for what it is they did to cause harm to the other. 

I have held my sister while she sobbed uncontrollably, wracked with the  remembrance of yet another incidence of abuse from her mother or her stepfather or from one of the friends my birthmother traded her to for a weekend for a rack of BEER.

I'm not sure how one begins to forgive that kind of thing, or how one might make amends for such horrible abuse, but I do know this:  Forgiveness itself may not require amends, but I'm pretty sure that reconciliation does.

And that's all I have to say about that.

 

 

 

A family is created, a family is lost

Yesterday a friend of mine and his wife became parents for the second time.  They are really wonderful people, and because of some pretty significant health issues, having another baby the "usual" way wasn't an option.  They are already terrific parents to their daughter and I have no doubt they are going to be equally terrific parents to their new son.  He will be loved deeply, listened to, nurtured, nourished and cherished.  I am deeply happy for my friend.

Yesterday a woman I don't know relinquished her newborn son to my friend and his wife.  She chose them as the parents for the baby she and her boyfriend did not feel they had adequate resources to parent.  She was not under duress or pressure from her family to make this decision, it was a decision she and her boyfriend made together.  They were in contact with my friend and his wife throughout the last months of the pregnancy, and invited them to be present at the birth. 

Even so, I grieve for her loss.

Even though I am estranged from my birthmother, by my own choice, I feel that sense of grief and loss every year on my own birthday.  Right along with the joy and gratitude for the life I've been privileged to have, for the love of my parents and my children and the important people in my life, right along with all of that, there is also a part of me that feels pain.  Whenever adoption creates a family, it also severs the relationship between a mother and her baby.

I'm a mother, twice now.  I know the firece joy of being pregnant, the miraculous sensations of life moving inside me.  The unparalleled opportunity to experience what it means to grow and nurture a life with my own body.   From the moment that pink line appeared on the stick I'd just peed on, I was in LOVE with my baby.  With the thought of my baby.  Overwhelmed by the sudden need to protect that new life at any cost.  I knew without a doubt that nothing would separate me from my baby. 

Its easy to feel all of those things when you are financially able, in a supportive relationship, and fully physically and emotionally prepared to become a parent.  Unfortunately, that's not the case for everyone, and I cannot imagine how it must feel to carry a life inside you, feel that life move and grow and have hiccups and kick your bladder and poke toes in your ribs, and then know that you will not be able to mother that baby after he or she is born.

I can't imagine how it must feel to watch another mother hold the baby that grew in your body and know that from this day forward, that person is going to be his mommy and not you.

I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that mother who is being given the incredible privlege of being this baby's parent is grateful to you beyond words.   Your sacrifice has filled a hole in her heart. 

But I wonder, who will fill the hole in yours?

 

 
 

 

 

Survivor

 

 

A few years back, my sister Vicki sent me a draft copy of what was meant to be the beginnings of a book.  She's spent a good number of years exorcising her demons, and she knew that the act of telling her story would be a valuable tool in the healing process.

In all honesty, the first time I read through her account of what happened to her as a child, I threw up.  I cried.  I raged.  I HATED.  Vicki and I have talked so much over the years, usually into the wee hours of the morning and well into several bottles of wine (mine) and whiskey (hers) about what she and my other birth siblings endured, the impact it has had on her life, her relationships, how to deal with it in ways that were useful.  I've expressed to her the survivor's guilt that gnaws at the core of me, the guilt of having escaped what happened to the rest of my siblings.  We've talked about these stories, about how to tell them.  i know that one day she and I are going to sit down together and the entire story will be told.  We'll write the book and we'll get it to a publisher.  For now, its mostly in her head and partially on paper.  Several months ago I reread some of what I had edited for her and decided to at least get the beginnings of it out there.

My sister has survived things the weight of which would crumple most people.  Much of what she has endured is practically unspeakable.  It is the kind of abuse you never want to imagine happens to children, the stuff of nightmare and denial.  It is the kind of abuse that once exposed to the light causes you to never look at another human being in the same way again, because you realize that people who walk around looking like normal men and women very well could be, in the privacy of their own homes, horrible monsters.

The first step to publicising Vicki's story was published today at Violence Unsilenced. 

It is graphic.  It is true.  It is one reason among many that I choose to have no relationship with my birthmother.

Please honor my sister.  Read her story, leave a comment over at VU.  Thank her for being a voice for other survivors, for being courageous enough to let her personal truth be public in hopes that it will encourage other victims of violence to speak up.  To know that they do not suffer alone, that there are people out there who understand, who have been there or are there right now, people who want to help.

If you or anyone you know is a victim of domestic violence or abuse, I encourage you to call your local domestic violence hotline or call the national hotline at 1−800−799−SAFE(7233) or TTY 1−800−787−3224.

 

Soapbox: Preserving Adoptee Rights in Oregon

 

 

 

A brief history:

In 1864, the state of Oregon enacted its first adoption law.  This law severed the ties of birth parents to a child,  declaring selfsame child to belong to the adoptive parents.  Until 1921, though, all name changes - for adoption or otherwise - were published annually and made available to the general public.  In essence, an adopted person - or anyone else, for that matter, had access to adoption records.

In 1921 the practice of publishing name changes ended in Oregon, but it wasn't until 1939 when Oregon followed many other states in actually sealing some of paperwork involved in the adoption process, though those records could be accessed by court order.  In 1941, the Oregon legislature provided for an altered birth certificate to be issued upon the adoption.  The 1941 laws did not, however, provide for secrecy or identity protection for birthparents.

In 1957, the original birth certificate became a sealed record in Oregon, available only by court order. It was in 1979 that all adoption - related records, including agency files, were sealed as well.

Until 1957, the state of Oregon provided an original birth certificate to every citizen who requested one.   There was nothing in any Oregon law which prevented an adult adoptee from asking for and obtaining her birth certificate.  After 1957, however, adoptees in Oregon had a most basic right taken away, the right to view official documents recording their birth.

In 1998 I had the immense privilege to support Helen Hill, Oregon adoptees and birthparents, and Bastard Nation in the campaign to gather enough signatures to place Measure 58 on the Oregon ballot that year.

We wrote letters to the editor.  We collected signatures.  We did interviews and outreach.  We spoke out and acted out and marched ourselves bloody. 

On November 3, 1998, Oregon voters agreed that adult adoptees in Oregon should be able to access their own birth certificate.  It took two more years of wrangling in court, however, for the Measure to finally take effect.  On May 30, 2000, the stalling and the appeals (remember the Jane Doe's?) and the drama were finally put to rest,and Oregon adoptees were finally able to go to their Department of Records and request a copy of their original birth certificate, just like any other non-adopted citizen in Oregon.

This brief narrative does NO JUSTICE to the amount of money, time, effort, sweat-equity and dedication that went in to making Measure 58 a reality. 

Now someone wants to change that.

Representative Dave Hunt (D) has introduced 2843, a law that would repeal Measure 58.  Under HB 2843, adoptees would only be able to access their birth certificate if a birth mother provided written consent.

I don't want to rehash hours and pages of birthmother testimony here, but its out there and its compelling.  Over 500 birthmothers paid for a full page ad in the Oregonian in support of Measure 58. 

No other citizen requires the permission of another adult to access the original record of their birth.  A birth certificate records the birth of a person and unless all birth certificates become accessible only under parental permission, the birth certificate of an adopted person should by the same token be available to the person whose birth it records.  Period.

I pay the same taxes as you do.  I vote.  I drive.  I am old enough to drink.  I have two children and a full time job.  Why on earth should my birthmother dictate whether or not I have the right to the document that records MY OWN BIRTH?

Ron Morgan will be chronicling the fight against HB2843 here.

Join us.

Don't let this happen.

 

 

 

At the same time

For some reason, its a concept that doesn't seem to permeate my steady state of consciousness.  I forget all about it, and then suddenly, WHAM! - it smacks me on the forehead and I remember.

I remember that it doesn't have to be one or the other.  It really can be both, you know.  My marriage taught me that.  Parenting taught me that.  Winter reminds me.  Christmas reminds me.  My grandmother's birthday reminds me.  My dogs, those present and those no longer with us, remind me.  A lifetime of love and happiness and grief and loss.

Life can be simultaneously painful and joyful, both things can take your breath away and sometimes you won't know exactly what it is that makes your voice catch and your eyes swim with tears, but there you are in the middle of it all, feeling both.  The emotional component of each is different, but the physical reaction can be the same. 

Sometimes, during those years where the marriage cracked and crumbled and eventually dissolved, the feelings were so overwhelming that I wasn't sure what I was experiencing.   Anger turned to sadness turned to grief;  intermingled with these were the joy and the delight over those moments with my kids or with my friends or even with my husband on those days when we could connect in a meaningful way. 

There were times when I though that all I was feeling was sadness.  Or anger.  Whatever the emotion du jour happened to be.  And yet when I let myself just be, in the moment, I realize that emotions are not simple, primary-colored boxes of paint.  They are complex, perhaps shaded darker by the strongest and deeper reaction to what's happening in my life, but many-colored, shot through with strands of the blackest black and silver shining light. 

Maybe that's what my friend Charles was trying to tell me a few weeks ago.  He gave me the analogy of a stack of paint cans - or the dead folks he talks to regularly gave me this analogy, whichever you prefer.  He said that he could see the cans all toppling together and that it might seem like it was going to be a horrid big mess, but that in the end the colors would all turn out right.

Christmas and birthday, I've written about them before.  My favorite and least favorite time of year, simultaneously. 

Birthdays are, for most people, a time of celebration.  At least until you reach the age which you never thought you'd actually reach, the age you consider to be "old," and then they lose their luster...but that's not the crux of the matter for me.  Its the dichotomy presented by birth, a joyous occasion for most people, but not for everyone.  My birth wasn't something that was celebrated, my birthday was a day that brings back painful memories for at least one person that I know of, and for me it was the day that I lost a mother and a family, but unknowingly got a chance at a life much brighter than would have otherwise been possible.  Still, I cannot ignore the feeling of loss.  The loss of what never was, what never could have been.   I mourn the shadow birthmother, the one of my dreams who was perfect and loving in every way.  She didn't exist, really, but in the fertile imagination of my growing-up years, she was a real as I am.  So.  Joy and sadness.  Because I got that loving mother, I just had to wait a little bit for her, and then thirty or more years for events to unfold that allowed me to truly appreciate what an enormous break I managed to get.

Celebration and grief.  Joy and sorrow.  Forever entwined in every life.  The joy of talking to a dear friend on the phone and catching up on life; the sorrow of her terminal illness makes every conversatio more precious.  Finally really enjoying a relationship with a relative and realizing that the years left to have that bond with them are few.  The satisfaction of watching your child teach himself to read, early, comingled with the frustration and sometime hopelessness of knowing the struggles that lay ahead because of his particular issues.  The sweet piercing sensation you get when you look at your breathtakingly beautiful daughter; the tears you shed for her when someone at school whose opinion matters to her doesn't like her or treats her badly. 

Watching them grow and succeed and stumble and fall, all at the same time.  The utter beauty of this wrecking ball of emotions grabs me by the throat and will not let me go.  I am shattered to the core by the depth of feeling we are capable of; no surprise, then, that I spend much of my life doing 'busy things' to avoid that bottomless well of emotion.  Sometimes, though, I must remember to just sit and let the feelings come.  Embrace them in all their beauty and their ugliness.  Its what life is about.  Sometimes the feelings are all we have.