What Makes You Crazy

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died,

or that you lost custody of your child,

it is that you can’t talk about it.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

It is incomprehensible that BOTH of my grandmothers lived such similar circumstances – both lost their own mothers at a young age and both lost custody of their firstborn child to adoption.

There probably was no time to really grieve for her mother in my mom’s mother’s life – there were 4 younger siblings to be cared for and the enormous labor required of any woman without servants living in the early 1900s. There were likely no words for my dad’s mother since she was an infant of only 3 months old and pre-verbal.

But what of the deeper wound ? The loss of their firstborn children ?

Who could they talk to about it ? Who wanted to hear anything about what happened at the end of their pregnancies ? Most simply wanted to pretend that none of that had happened and just move on with Life.

Yet, it is unlikely that the wound ever healed or that my grandmothers didn’t think about their lost child every single day of whatever life remained for each of them.

The Wound Never Heals

In her book – A Hole in My Heart – Lorraine Dusky notes “You would be surprised how many little blond girls there are in the world when you are not looking for them. They are everywhere, filling your sightline like a chorus line of charming little dolls, reminding, mocking, making you aware of what you are missing, what you have done.

You stare at them, check out their clothes, absorb their little-girl movements and words.

The girl in the coffee shop with her mother. Another at the supermarket. Creating a scene at the mall. The daughter of a friend of someone you are dating, you can’t take your eyes off her, blonde, fine-bones and only a few months older than yours.”

Questions haunt a mother who has given up her child to adoption – Are my daughter’s parents good to her ? How is she ? Who does she look like ? Is she blonde like me ? Does she have my flat feet and his blue eyes ?

It is more than the girls themselves – an invitation to a baby shower. A picture of a baby in a magazine. Forsythia in a flower shop window. A family reunion.

I have this secret that makes me – different. Alien. Deep inside me there is a gnawing sense that I must find my daughter one day. Surely I am not the only one in this private hell.

It is good that the trend now is for – at the least – open adoptions. And there are activists among those who were adopted themselves trying to reform the system to make adoption rare, if at all.

It is good. It will stop some of the pain . . . as a society, we should care about our mothers and children more than we do.

Unconscious Grief

I have felt guilty about the unhealed wound I carry,
but the emptiness is real.
The sense that I am alone,
that death is inevitable,
that I feel insecure in my mothering,
that I still search for her
in so many ways and faces –
these tell me the loss is real.

I have reflected on the loss of my mother
and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief
by trying to gauge its effect on my life
as objectively as possible.
This is effective when I am in my conscious self,
but like most of us, I spend a good deal of my time
in unconscious thought and choice,
and there the grieving child reigns.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

I think my mom knew she had a good life. Yet, deep inside her there was this grief. This feeling that she wasn’t where she should be, that she really wasn’t like these people who she inhabited a house with.

And she tried to reach her mom but by that time, her mother had already died. This was devastating for her.

I don’t know how conscious her grieving actually was but it came up between us more than once, as her oldest daughter I guess she felt I was the best one to share such unacceptable feelings with.

She tried to justify them to me more than once –

“As a mother, I would just want to know what happened to my child” or “I needed an explanation for this mystifying problem I was having with my health” (that later one is often what adoptees indicate as a reason for their search).

It is interesting that she was less moved to search for the aunts and uncles on her mother’s side, or half-siblings on her father’s side.

I guess having been shut down and shut out in her initial attempt, she just gave up and accepted that the grief could not be relieved in her lifetime.

I do believe she did reunite with her mother after death and that everything was known between them at that point.

After Losing Frances Irene

Frances Irene Moore at 6 months

I don’t really know what happened to my grandmother after she lost custody of my mom. I do know she was forced into the situation by economic conditions, by the general chaos that accompanied the end of a super flood at Memphis and by a conniving and exploitative Georgia Tann who needed the perfect baby sister for my adoptive grandmother’s little boy.

So I imagine how my grandmother coped –

Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer,
yet that is how I coped, I didn’t talk about the pain, it didn’t go away.

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died, or that you
lost custody of your child, it is that you can’t talk about it.

You just want to run away, but you don’t know where you can run to.
There isn’t any where to go.

My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air.
It leaves no room for anyone else.

After 3 years, Lizzie’s husband, JC Moore divorced her with no contest from her. My guess is that she couldn’t face him again after losing their child. She did remarry but she didn’t ever have another child. He remarried too but he was past fathering more children by then.

At least neither of them died alone. Such a sad and romantic and tragic story.

Unacknowledged Ghosts

Deborah Hempstead

In the book, It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn, he asks – Is there a person no one talks about ?

Deborah was run over and killed by a teenager driver, a member of the Doubleday publishing family, while crossing the road with her younger sister, Eleanor. Her story does survive or else I wouldn’t know this but did the family talk about her ?

The death of my paternal grandmother Dolores’ oldest sister would have certainly left behind grieving parents.

My grandmother is born only about a year after that tragic event. Then Dolores’ mother dies 3 mos after giving birth to her. There is just the heavy sorrow in that family including in Eleanor, the middle child. She would have been very young when this happened, perhaps pre-verbal and maybe didn’t receive very much comfort or attention due to the intensity of all that happened. I don’t really know. She is a sad person, never married, died alone of tuberculosis in a state hospital and cremated.

So, this “ghost” is a painful thing for everyone in the family but more conscious in Eleanor, more unconscious in Delores.

I wonder how Dolores dealt with all that grief, that sorrow ?

Did she reject her father ? I don’t know. He remarried. Men of that era were not heavily involved in child care but it seems rather certain from stories and from her stepmother’s will that Josephine was not very fond of her step-daughters. It is likely that, Raphael, Dolores’ father would have been in a terrible grief and depression for some time, if he ever truly got over those losses.

It is no surprise that I am fascinated by Deborah. I was given the same name as the oldest daughter of my father, even though he never knew of his aunt’s existence.

The author as a young child.

Grief

Mourning does not have a straightforward –
beginning, middle and end
Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons,
like the moon.

In the midst of the initial shock and numbness,
we grieve the best we can at the time.

~ Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman

There are many kinds of grief. The grief my adoptee mom felt when she learned there would be no reunion because her natural mother had died years before my mom knew she had gone. The grief I felt when I realized my mom believed a story about her adoption that simply wasn’t true. The grief my newly discovered cousin felt as first her mother, then her husband died.

Today, an online community friend openly expressed her grief about a debilitating illness with no hope of treatment and though she acknowledges that some acquaintances pity and some empathize, in reality grief is a path we each can only walk alone.

When my mom died, I was thrust into an intensity of huge responsibilities. When my maternal grandmother lost her mom at age 11, with four younger siblings that needed her care and attention, and who knows how her father responded but he never married again, I doubt she had much time to grieve at all.

Life doesn’t come with a guaranteed length for any of us. Some people never make it out of childhood. Others hold on until they are so old, their imminent death is clearly obvious, but the time of their leaving is not. What is certain is that I would suspect all of us will grieve at least once in our lifetime.

Be gentle with those who grieve. Their pain is real and time may or may not heal those wounds.