I Am Not An Accident

I had a very deep realization yesterday. My earliest conception may have been viewed as an “accident”, an unintended consequence of my parents going too far in youthful hormonal impulse.

And on a very deep level, I felt what many adoptees probably feel as well – as though we weren’t mean to be and it is hard and deep and an important healing I believe.

When I counted the months back from my birth to the date of my parents’ wedding anniversary, I knew the truth and it troubled me. I have always thought what troubled me was my mom’s “good girl” lectures but I understand in maturity, she wanted to spare me her young experience while yet a student in high school.

I was angry with her at first and didn’t want her to touch me. Eventually, I forgave her because I loved her, not because the reality didn’t remain a troubling paradox for me.

I know I’m not a mistake and I do know my life has purpose – my life has many purposes actually. I’ve become a mother 3 times. I’ve been there to handle my parents’ estate after they died. I’ve been the one to uncover our original grandparents after my adopted parents died knowing next to nothing themselves.

And I have a “voice” and courageously (or foolishly, depending on whatever external judgement of my own voluntary behaviors) and I use it to promote and defend issues that are important to me because if not me, then who ? Yes, someone else might come along . . . but if everyone were to hide their own truths, what would that accomplish ?

We are all important to wholeness and I know that my ancestors suffered emotional and mental anguish, in order for my parents to be raised by the people who adopted them and in the place where they grew up, which enabled them to meet and my own self to be born.

Teen Mom

Many natural mothers who give up their babies had very inadequate counseling, they are pressured and coerced. They never feel any worth related to motherhood. They have difficulty experiencing that their child is “real”. She has no opportunity or encouragement to mourn her loss.

Most of these mothers are in some stage of unresolved grief their entire life. A mother who has surrendered her child cannot undo what has happened.

If a reunion occurs, it brings with it the realization that the mother can never recover those lost years.

Breaking the silence of a secret pregnancy or surrender, means that the wounds have to be opened for everyone. This is healthy in the long run – secrets are one of the most debilitating aspects of any person’s life.

It is a DOUBLE LOSS when the pregnancy also brings an end to the relationship between the original couple – mother and father.

The source for these perspectives come from the book – The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier and resonated with me from personal observation in my own family.

I Go Back To May 1937

In Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird near the end she shares this poem that makes me think so much about my grandparents. My mom was born in 1937. My grandfather certainly was not the young man portrayed in the poem, though Georgia Tann made both of them young college students. My grandmother, though never a college student, was that naive. I can’t regret what happened because my very existence depended upon it but I am left still with way too many questions that I’ll never be able to answer.

Here is Sharon Olds poem –

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books on her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it – she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot image you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Children Playing

As with your shadow I with these did play

~ Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

I was thinking about what to write today as I read the words above. And it came to my mind, my childhood.

I thought about how my grandparents were 100% my grandparents when I was a child. In reality they were not my original grandparents. But as a child I didn’t know any difference.

To their credit, they did treat us as though we were, even though they knew the secret that we were not. I do not know in what ways they didn’t wholeheartedly feel that we were theirs. They were my grandparents because of adoption – both of my parents having been adopted in the first year of their life.

I think about how we simply accepted them as what they were called – Granny and Granddaddy and Grandmother. We played as children at their feet and minded them with all the same authority. We could not know how it might have been different because it was not.

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.