Lifelong Sorrow

It is clear in my mom’s adoption file that my maternal grandmother, shown above holding my mom for the very last time, never intended to surrender her. She was pressured and exploited by circumstances and the expert manipulation of that baby thief, Georgia Tann, in Memphis.

I read a statistic that said that more than 30% of women who have relinquished children never have another – either because they chose not to, or could not. There is an increased incidence of secondary infertility among natural mothers.

I know that my grandmother never had another child. I know that while her birth name was Elizabeth, my mom’s birth certificate had her name as Lizzie. I saw her sign Elizabeth to a note and a postcard she sent to Georgia Tann after losing my mom. Yet, when she died in her 60s after marrying a second husband, Lizzie is what is on her gravestone. I can’t help but believe she hoped my mom would find it someday. My mom died without fulfilling her desire to know about her original mother. I was the one to find the gravestone and sit beside it and talk with her soul.

There is no way to know why my maternal grandfather left my maternal grandmother in Memphis four months pregnant. It seems her widowed father sent her away to Virginia to have my mom and I doubt she was supposed to bring my mom back to Tennessee. It is clear my great-grandfather was unwilling to take the two of them into his home.

It appears that the only time my maternal grandmother had any communication directly with my maternal grandfather (after he left her alone and pregnant) was when he decided to go ahead and divorce her 3 years after they married and two years after my mom was born. The divorce papers also show her name formally as Elizabeth. I believe that having lost their child, my grandmother was so filled with shame, she could not face him. The divorce freed her up to remarry and not long after that he remarried. My heart is glad they didn’t die alone.

My mom’s adoption file is a constant reminder to me of what they had not done, of the courage they somehow lacked to fight back and of the child in the middle (my mom) they both lost. I come close to tears every time I revisit this story in my heart’s mind.

Out From The Shadows

Later this week, I’ll be pitching my work in progress to literary agents at Gateway Con – a conference for writers and readers in St Louis Missouri taking place over this coming weekend.

It is a nonfiction, memoir style story of loss, conflict and the redemption of my roots.

How I had to quickly mature after both of my parents died only 4 months apart, in order to close their estate and cope with the legal challenges of a brilliant but delusional sister.

It is also a mystery. I share what I had to do in order to discover who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adoptees).

There is a surprising realization for my own self at the end. Maybe it should have been obvious but it took learning the story of my parents adoptions to understand my own humble but fortunate reality.

I think I’m probably 3 to 6 months away from completing this story satisfactorily. Probably a couple of years away from publishing if I am so fortunate.

Losing A Mom

Many of us have lost our mothers. Whether we had her for a short time, almost no time at all, like my paternal grandmother who lost her own mother at age 3 mos. Or whether we had her for a bit longer, like my maternal grandmother who lost her own mother at age 11. Or whether we had her for much longer. I lost my mother in 2015 at the age of 61.

My mom carried a deep unhealed wound that was caused by the unintended (unintended by her own mother) separation from her mother when she was exploited due to financial desperation. When my mom tried in the early 1990s to get her origins information and reach out for contact with her original parents, she was told her mother had already died and that devastated her.

There was an emptiness that my mom carried her whole life and it was real and not imagined. She was alone in a real sense with the issues that her life presented her with and we all are in reality.

Death is inevitable. I accepted that almost 20 years ago when I learned I was positive for hep C but would never be treated for that. Even though I knew nothing about my original grandparents and my own parents were still alive, my OB said he was more worried about my heart than my liver. It seems he was intuitive.

Having now located who all 4 of my original grandparents were, I also know they all died of heart related causes. Both of my own parents also died of heart related causes. So I have to take my own health seriously in the aspects related to that.

Even so, no one can save my life. We are all born to die and the timing of our death is never known until it is upon us. What matters to me is the quality of the lifetime that I have available to me. I do my best to honor that gift.

Fathers and Daughters

My great-grandfather, Raphael,
holds his infant daughter, my grandmother Dolores,
with her sister, Eleanor, seated nearby

My grandmother’s mother died when she was only 3 months old. It is said that when the mother dies, a good indicator of where the father-daughter relationship will ultimately end up is what kind of relationship they had developed, when the death occurs.

The mother’s absence can change the way a father relates to his daughter. This period can affect a daughter’s feelings of security and self-worth as well as her ability to form satisfying relationships as an adult.

There is a lot I cannot know about such things. These circumstances happened so many years ago and we were cut-off by adoption from our original families. I know that he remarried and the step-mother was not kind. I know that they moved to Asheville, North Carolina, when she was a young girl and they put her to work in the rayon mills.

I know they went out to California to visit Raphael’s elderly father Austin who lived nearby his daughter, Laura. My great-grandfather would have been, at least in part, influenced by his own identifications with his parents. Certainly, Austin seemed important to Raphael in adulthood. I’ve no indication what his relationship with his mother was like. Did he have any memories about how his father treated his mother ?

Austin seems to have been closer to his daughter, Laura, than to Raphael. If my great-grandfather didn’t have any comfortable memories to draw on, then he may have lacked a firm bedrock for relating to his daughter. I have discovered through Ancestry that he was of an advance age when he still living with his parents.

What I do know at this point is that my grandmother Dolores’ home life was so unhappy, that she refused to go back to North Carolina with her family and they dis-owned her over it. It seems that her Aunt Laura and her girl cousins were important to her going forward in California.

Renewal

Today is Easter Sunday and Spring is everywhere evident in Missouri. In pondering the idea of Resurrection, the concept of coming back to life after death, I realize that for my own family, I have brought our original grandparents “back to our lives” though all of them have died and we will never be able to know them one-on-one.

These days, families are often geographically distant from one another and may not know each other well. I have to content myself that what I do know may be almost as much as many other people may know (without the complications of adoption within their own families).

For myself, it has to be enough to know that I have allowed these dead relatives to speak to my heart about their sorrows and sacrifices, that make the life that I live possible. It is a kind of reward and vindication – not of what they lost or what was done to them – but for their choosing life. It is true, that other options didn’t really exist at the time my parents were born or when I was actually conceived out of wedlock myself.

While holding precious every life that exists in my own family, I am also grateful that women have had the right to make safe decisions about their own lives and I sorrow that those rights are being eroded. The planet actually has more people than it can sustain. Part of life’s ongoing nature is that some die and some are born. A renewal of life is ongoing. All we have to do is look honestly around us without politically advantageous sentimentality.

Arrested Development

The loss of a mother creates a significant
developmental challenge for a child.

My maternal grandmother was 11 years old when her mother died and the oldest of 5 children. I suspect that Lizzie Lou was forced to take on responsibilities not only for herself but for the whole family very quickly.

It is known that in such cases the daughter advances some areas of development quite quickly.

At the same time, it is also known that she may identify with her earlier stage of maturity, the age when her mother was still the guiding light of the family’s life,
as a way of maintaining a relationship with her mother in an effort to deny
the finality of the death.

The result can be an adult who is stuck at an earlier developmental stage. I don’t know if this happened to my grandmother but my grandfather, I am told, described her as very young – indeed she was 20 years younger. She was, however, already 20 years old when they married and 21 years old when my mother was born. Hardly a child, though I understand that maturity is more of an issue than a young person of that age may believe.

Ever since I heard this assessment, that this is what my grandfather said about my grandmother, that she was very young, I have wondered, exactly what did he mean by that ? I have to consider that maybe she was a “little girl” in emotionally significant ways. Did she expect too much of him ? Did she throw temper tantrums ?

I’ll never know why he left her 4 months pregnant after only 4 months of marriage. I am left simply to consider the possible reasons and I come down on the side of believing there is a “positive” perspective I could apply.

Mother Loss

I don’t know why but my mother is on my mind this morning.

No matter who you have in your life (father, siblings, husband, children) when your mother dies, bottom line is you don’t have her any more.

I understand – my mom was like “If I have to live like this, I just want to die.” And I really don’t want to die, I just don’t want to live like this. In my own decline, I have felt similarly. My mom said to my husband before she died “don’t get old, it’s horrible”.

It was a Sunday morning when my mom died. I got a phone call from my youngest sister – “Your mother has died. We need you to come and do your work.”

Later as I transferred from one flight to another around dinner time in Chicago the details were served to me which left me unsettled all the way to New Mexico.

She died in her bathtub. She was found, face down in the water, by my dad the next morning. He tried but couldn’t lift her out. My youngest sister had to clean up the mess left behind.

From the official responders – neither my sister nor my dad handled it well.

I remember thinking, why the bathtub, why not her bed ? Then I thought actually it was my mother’s last thoughtful act – to die in a place easily clean-able.

The cause of death influences how the family reacts, what type of support system is available and what kind of stressors the children have experienced before the actual loss. My dad was like woulda – coulda – shoulda, until the autopsy came back that it was sudden and complete and he couldn’t have saved her. She had a massive heart attack.

It is interesting and a commentary on modern life – of 149 motherless
women surveyed – 44% died of cancer, 10% of heart failure, 10% in accidents and 7 percent by suicide. A small percentage, 3% by pneumonia, infectious diseases, complications of childbirth, abortion or miscarriage, kidney failure and cerebral hemorrhage – and the remainder due to alcoholism, overdose, aneurysm, stroke or complications of surgery.

It really matters not how it comes. Every cause of death is a different kind of hell. Every cause is painful, every loss leaves us wondering how we might have prevented it.

I miss my mom.

Bottled Up Grief

Ever since I learned about my maternal grandmother, my heart has broken for the grief her life gave her. She died at an age decades younger than her 2 sisters and 2 brothers. They did not have her heartbreak. They were all much younger than my grandmother when their mother died. My grandmother was 11 years old.

Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer, yet I am relatively certain that is how my grandmother coped. She didn’t talk about the pain but 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 – both of which happened to both of my grandmothers actually. 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 Daughter Mini Me

What happens when a young daughter doesn’t have a mother for a role model ? Here I am not speaking of an alternative mother but the natural mother. I think about this because both of my original grandmothers lost their own mothers at a young age, during their childhood.

There is a wide range of mother-daughter relationships. Some are not happy ones but I doubt any daughter would say her mother was not at all influential, even if the influence was a contrast telling her own self how she did not want to be.

If a daughter is fortunate, she will have a mother who is a blessing and who will be forever missed once she is no longer physically incarnated. Some of my friends had those kinds of mothers.

It may be that my relationship with my own mother was not all that unusual. We had a complex relationship. I did love her dearly. I remember sitting in the kitchen on the deep freeze while she cooked dinner, chattering away. I don’t know if she really listened or not but I appreciated having her captive. I get a similar treatment sometimes these days from my sons. Sometimes I was frustrated with my own mother. Sometimes I didn’t like her perspectives. Sometimes I was unkind or unreasonable in my expectations of her.

Girls learn a lot about being a woman from their “mother” and that is true even if their “mother” is an alternative one to the original mother.

The Unknown

From an adoptee – “It’s not as easy as everyone thinks, growing up and never knowing the truth about yourself.”

And it isn’t easy for the child of two adoptees because the feeling is the same – there is an emptiness, a void, a gap in the family history story and it hurts somehow in some deep place that is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t felt this.

Having gotten my mother’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee, due to her having been adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society – Memphis branch – under the direction of Georgia Tann (who would have been indicted on criminal charges had she not died first), it was clear that my maternal grandmother never intended to lose my mom.

When my mom tried to get that adoption file herself in 1990 (and was rejected by the state of Tennessee), she said – as a mom, I would have wanted to know what happened to my child. My mom yearned for a reunion she would never have, since her mom died in 1984. My mom was devastated.

I also believe her mom always hoped my mom would find her. Though her given name was Elizabeth and it shows up in the adoption file and later in the divorce papers from my maternal grandfather 3 years later, she reverted to the name on my mom’s birth registration in Virginia – “Lizzie Lou” – and even her gravestone bears that name.