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.

Cutting Ties

Ours is not a happy story. I didn’t fully realize that until I began to finally learn about who my original grandparents were.

I had described the situation though and I had intuitive senses about it before I began to read what others had written about it as well.

I put together everything I knew into book form – a limited edition only meant for direct family and not even all of it.

Knowing it wasn’t a happy story before I sent it off to its recipients, even so I was willing to risk the fallout that might blow back at me. And it has. Sadly.

What I regret most was that it appears it will impact several others who had nothing to do with my decision to come fully to face all of the less than happy truths about our family circumstances.

Yet with a heavy heart and deep sadness, I also know it isn’t something that only happened last night. It has been always at the edge and always unhappy. The wounds are deep, complicated and hurting.

I wish it wasn’t that way. I suppose that many families do have less than happy stories. I have cut off my youngest sister for the time being because she has traumatized me. My husband and his brother who were once very close are not now. It happens. That doesn’t mean I rejoice in it.

Family Dysfunction

I remember a long private Facebook chat with my nephew as I became aware of wounds that he was suffering from and trying to help him with the truth I knew at the time. I had not yet learned so much that I have learned in only the last year but I understood that somehow the family I was born into was broken.

This didn’t mean I had a bad childhood or that my parents didn’t love us or that they divorced. None of that is true of my own circumstances.

I believed stories about my parents’ origins that weren’t true. And now, armed with the true stories, I have yet learned about the wounds that happen when any child is separated from its mother – as both of my parents were – then adopted by strangers and forced to live false identities.

There were other elements too – my grandmothers grew up without their mothers who had died. All three of us – me and my two sisters – in one way or another lost custody of our own children – the same as our grandmothers (and by inference the fathers had lost their children too).

I am still trying to write this sad, romantic and true story in the best possible way. It is also a growth and healing process for me. I understand so much, so much better now. Eventually, it may come to pass that you are able to read my story too.

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.

Cutting Ties

There is one simple and critical fact – the adoptee was there, experienced being “left” by the biological mother and handed over to strangers. It makes no difference if the child was a few minutes or a few days old.

For 40 weeks he shared an experience with a person with whom he likely bonded in utero, a person to whom he is biologically, genetically, historically and psychologically, emotionally and spiritually connected.

~ from The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

If the above is true, and my heart tells me that it is so, then how much more intense was the separation for both of my parents who had been with their natural mothers for months.

In the picture of my maternal grandmother holding my mom for the last time, after she had already been left in the Porter-Leath Orphanage – only for temporary care while my grandmother tried to find some way to provide for them both – I see the joy on her face. I see her head craning in the direction of her mother as the nurse holds her so they can make some photos of her for my adoptive grandmother to approve as the little sister she was seeking for her previously adopted son.

I am told my dad’s mother was still breastfeeding him when my Granny took him home with her. What must he have thought the next time he was hungry?

I can understand the need for children to be adopted when they are true orphans without family or being honestly abused. However, poverty should not be the reason women lose their children. In my family, that was always the reason a child ended up adopted.

One reform that has been suggested (and based on comments by adult adoptees in a Facebook group I belong to, seems relevant to their own feelings in maturity) is that there be only a form of guardianship where the child keeps their own name and heritage but has the security of a permanent home.

My parents were forced into false identities with made up names and altered birth certificates and not allowed to discover the truth even after well into their adulthoods, and truly, they died not knowing anything about the families they were born into.

The flaw in that “reform” idea is that it would be too much like foster care, robbing the child of a sense of family. In reality, the only real solution is finding methods of keeping mothers and their children together whenever possible.