A Mother’s Love

This is my paternal grandmother later in life looking happy and sweet and loving as a person can be. Yesterday, it hit me quite deeply how much she actually cared.

My elbows were supported at the table where I sat working on my writing. I closed my eyes and put my hands together as if in prayer. My fingertips touching my nose, my thumbs touching my lips. With my face turned upward, I poured my feelings out to her. Thinking that somehow she would receive my feelings wherever it is that one goes when they leave their physical body.

“I love you, Dolores, for what you did for me. You may have hoped it would help your son someday but I am as close to that hope as it was possible to come. I am so deeply grateful that you cared about recording it in photos, with names. Without that effort on your part, I would not be whole today.”

To me, what she did was nothing short of a miracle and I recognized the importance of that act by a mother who lost her child for the rest of her life.

Thanks to how she named my dad, to a photo of her holding him in her lap on the front porch of a Salvation Army home in El Paso Texas, and the proximity with which she placed the head shot of my dad’s original father to that photo, along with the man’s name and the word “boyfriend”, I was able to do something I had thought impossible.

I am able to identify the man who impregnated my grandmother. He was married. He may have never known about my dad but she knew who the culprit was and recorded it for some future unveiling that she could never have imagined.

Ancestry had identified a cousin for me 8 months before I knew who this man was. That cousin did not respond to my inquiry for that long and when he did, based upon the “other” surnames I knew at the time I contacted him, he could not imagine how we might be related, though he accepted we must be. When I gave him the “new” name, he came back immediately – your grandfather was my grandmother’s brother. A perfect confirmation of the truth.

Overburdened By A Need To Be Grateful

The adopted child has many challenges but one of the most unique may be this sense that they should be grateful to the adoptive parents for having taken them into the family.

Often unacknowledged is the loss that precedes all adoptions.

That loss is profound regardless of the reason the child was separated from its original parents to begin with. In that separation the child experiences many complicated emotions. There can be differences between the child and the adoptive family that become ever more obvious with the passage of time and that no one is at fault for – other than the fact of the adoption.

Such differences can include – ethnicity, physical features, preferences, and intellectual abilities, or being told they are somehow “special” or the “chosen one” by the family. Simply being adopted sets the child apart from most of their peers.

A syndrome referred to as being caused by the adoption itself leads to a strong desire to understand the mystery of having been adopted in the first place. A desire to know the people one has been born of and the conflicted feelings about wanting to know people who it seems to the child they have been rejected or abandoned by.

Even when the adoption is “open” (both sets of parents are at the least in contact with one another) or a “reunion” with the biological family occurs, differences in nurturing and life experiences may make even one’s genetic relations seem alien.

Simply Grateful

With a deep compassion, sympathy and understanding the best I can for all adoptees and all original parents who lost their children, I have no other choice – unless I would deny my very existence – but to be grateful for all that happened.

But for Georgia Tann exploiting my grandmother – for who knows NOW why her husband abandoned her 4 mos pregnant and did not reply to the Juvenile Court regarding his obligations to her and my mom ? – and due to her falling into a trap laid by her own survival desperation (not intending to lose custody of her one and only ever child). And but for, my dad’s mother ultimately giving in to what was most likely pressure from the Salvation Army to release him to adoption.

But for all of these sorrows and then for the wounds inflicted upon my parents by their separation from mothers who clearly did love them as much as I have loved every child I have born within me, but for – I would not exist.

And because I love life – I am simply grateful – and humbled by the losses that facilitated my birth.

Losing My Mom

I was thinking about my mom this morning. No particular reason. I was reading something and the mother had died, yet she lived on as this significant presence that was influential in her family’s life.

My mom was like that.

I expected to see her at least one more time. Was in communication with her by email just before she died. Her death was a shock to my world, unexpected, and life changing.

It really doesn’t matter when our mother dies. It is the end of an era for us and we miss her terribly. No more long phone calls or in person visits. It’s all gone and done and no getting it back.

Many of my friends, in the same age cohort as I am, have lost their moms and it is clear they grieve them terribly, even many years later.

I am grateful I had my mom and that she was the one I grew inside of because she didn’t have that and she yearned eternally to know that one. I believe they reunited in death. No proof. I just like believing that all that was not known, now is.

Maybe someday, I will have that pleasure to meet my grandmothers. My original grandmothers. The ones I never got to know in physical life.