Looking In The Dark Place

My adoptee father said to my adoptee mother when she wanted to find her original family that she shouldn’t go there because she might be opening up a can of worms. Now that I have gone there, I find it very sad. His own half-sister was living 90 miles away from him when he died. She could have told him so much about his original mother.

I read this morning in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird these passages –

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer’s job is to see what’s behind it.

You can’t if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. If the truth were known, they would be seen as good people. Truth seems to want expression.

I opened the closet door and let what was inside out – liberation and even joy rushed through. It’s wonderful to finally open that forbidden door. What gets exposed is people’s humanity. Turns out that the truth, or reality, is our home.

What I learned was that I was where I was supposed to be. As much as I have already revealed for my own self, I hope there is more yet to come. I will bravely go into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses because it has been utterly satisfying to have gone in and looked around – to finally know the truth of my family’s origins.

Naturally Reducing The Population

At the end of Real Time with Bill Maher for April 12, 2019, his rant is about population pressures in general and the over population compared to available resources which often drives migration. Maher noted that 18 to 35 year olds are having less sex than previous cohorts. That is a good thing. He advised masturbate don’t procreate.

He noted that more young people remain in their parental homes longer now. That is not a bad thing either. I have no expectation regarding my sons leaving our home. As I approached my senior year in high school, I simply knew my parents expected me to leave and had I not married a month before I graduated, I already had plans to share an apartment with a friend.

When I was in high school, my concern was not getting pregnant out of wedlock and I will admit that I simply got lucky. Having learned my adoptee parents’ origins stories and realizing my mother was pregnant with me out of wedlock and yet she was not sent off to a home to have and give me up, I got lucky then as well.

Another factor in young people having less physical sex may be the easy availability of pornography on the internet which I have read is more stimulating than the real thing and thus the real thing can prove disappointing.

Whatever the reasons, the current population uses 1.7 times more, almost twice the available resources that the planet has to sustain us long term. I don’t recommend wantonly killing off large segments of the population (though some elites and political types seem to favor such a solution) but if a lower birth rate could produce less stress upon the planet, I do believe that would be a good thing.

One final thought – many adoptees wish their original mothers had aborted them instead of giving them up. There is that much trauma associated with the practice. Considering that the planet is already overpopulated and some of those lives that the pro-life folks have preserved wish they had not been, maybe we all should drop arguments against the availability of safe and medically appropriate abortions. Just saying . . . one should think about it more deeply.

Denying Reality

Our family had a very personal experience this week related to DNA that I won’t really go into with specifics here.

My point being that because of inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites such as Ancestry or 23 and Me, pretending something that isn’t true is really a short sighted decision.

Because of my parents adoptions and this journey of discovery I have been upon, I have read more than one book about people who got unexpected and life-shattering discoveries when they had their DNA tested. Some of these persons had been adopted, one was believed to be the child who had been stolen from the hospital shortly after birth but was actually a child abandoned on a sidewalk. Another one had believed in a strong Jewish heritage from her father and discovered with feelings of betrayal that she was conceived by donor sperm.

Honesty is the best policy even when being honest is somewhat painful. That was something I learned from my own parents as a child.

I am also grateful for that inexpensive DNA testing. As I have uncovered genetic relatives who never knew about me or I them because both of my parents were adopted – our shared genetic heritage convinces them I am actually “who” I say I am.

It is a brave new world thanks to technology and families now can be created where they were impossible before. For that, I will always be grateful.

Finding Out About One’s Self

My mom’s search for her natural mother could be explained this way – it had something to do with finding out about herself, and it had something to do with trying to explain to herself what had happened to her. I’m certain at some deep level she just wanted to know why.

My mother believed she had been inappropriately adopted. She made a need for her medical history the excuse for her search and certainly she had some chronic health issues, including one very mysterious and unexplained issue. It is also possible another mysterious unexplained reason was why she had been separated from her mother. Only her mother could tell her the truth about that. It was not to be. Her mother had already died when the state of Tennessee denied her attempt to be given her adoption records.

Fast forward almost 30 years, my mom has died but now I am able to receive those records that had been denied her. Through reading between the lines of all the considerable amount of information the state of Tennessee released to me – my mother was not wrong.

She had been inappropriately adopted, just not in the manner she had tried to explain it all to her own self (that her supposed illiterate parents signed papers without knowing what they actually were – surrender papers – at the hospital in Virginia). The actual truth that became abundantly clear was that my grandmother had become trapped and then exploited by Georgia Tann – the notorious baby seller.

My grandmother never had another child. I believe she was devastated to have lost the child that might have kept her marriage to my mom’s father intact. I believe my grandmother died of a broken heart.

Why Anonymous Isn’t Anymore

There’s been a bit of controversy recently about assisted reproduction and the use of anonymous donors and previously created embryos. I’m quite familiar with the issues as it became a part of my own life.

I know of others who have gone down this path who I believe made foolish choices not to be truthful about what they did. There is a difference between not sharing private details publicly and not telling one’s own family members an important truth.

I have also been blessed by inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites – Ancestry and 23 and Me – for revealing the truth that my parents were prevented from knowing due to closed adoptions and sealed records. It is hard to imagine being forced to live a false identity so that strangers can claim you as their own (changing birth names and certificates to fit a manufactured reality).

I am grateful we followed a path of our own making and have been honest about the details with our sons. We’ve not lied to them – ever. We’ve also not made a big deal about how their conception was different than the more common method. We are pioneers in a brave new world.

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.

Secrets

I don’t know why they thought they could get away with it. Maybe because their true identities were a secret they couldn’t reveal to themselves.

My sister had a baby and my parents told me the baby died. I developed a story because deep in my heart I didn’t believe the story I had been told. I believed she had been stolen from the hospital. Not accurate but the fact that she was alive was not wrong.

My mom believed she was stolen and though not in the manner she imagined, she was not far from the truth of the situation. Her mom fell into a trap and was given a no-win solution – surrender her child who she could not support financially or be declared an un-fit mother by the Juvenile Court Judge who was in cahoots with the notorious Georgia Tann, known for stealing and selling babies.

Eventually, I confronted my mom with the secret of my sister’s baby and she came clean with me. Why did they tell a lie instead of the truth ? I was told it was to spare my adoptive paternal grandparents.

But how could that be true ? I believe they were the ones who kept me in the family when my own unwed mother conceived me.

Sadly, I’m left to consider the weird disconnect of my parents as parents. Was the truth actually that they didn’t want to end up financially and physically responsible for my sister’s daughter ?

Nevertheless, my mom’s life was “good” as most lives go and so was the life of my niece.

Secrets tend to out themselves eventually. My parents had to face the truth when my sister’s son married and invited his half-sister to the wedding. I know it was an uncomfortable moment for my parents. Lucky for them that most of the attention was focused on the bride and groom instead.

Fulfilling My Destiny

Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died,

even if his or her story lies submerged in years of silence,

fragments of life experience, memory and body sensation can live on,

reaching out from the past to resolution in

the minds and bodies of those living in the present.

~ It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn

My grandmothers . . . both lost their own mothers at a young age. Both lost their firstborn children.

When I was growing up with both of my parents known to me as having been adopted, I didn’t know they had another family except for their adoptive parents. I thought they were orphans. I don’t know when they knew they weren’t orphans but they never knew their original families either.

For my mom, it probably started when the baby stealing and selling scandal of Georgia Tann, who was at the head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, broke while my mom was a teenager. Her adoptive mother did her best to reassure my mom that she wasn’t one of those children who had been stolen.

Yet, she could not reconcile how she could have been born in Virginia but adopted from Memphis only a few months later.

My dad seems not to have wanted to know the truth of his origins. I believe he was afraid to find out. He would dissuade my mother’s yearning with “it might open up a can of worms”. Even so, she tried to find out. The state of Tennessee rejected all of her efforts in the early 1990s.

Finally, in 2017, I was able to receive her full adoption file, including her own letters and rejections from the 1990s. Her mother never intended to lose her and suffered the remainder of her life from having been exploited the way she was.

Motivated by success, I started trying to discover my dad’s origins. His mother was unwed, so I thought it unlikely I would ever know who his father was. But in less than a year, I discovered that as well – thanks to a newly discovered cousin on his mother’s side.

Now I know why I was born. Living in me were my grandmother’s desires to have the true stories known. What a fulfilling outcome to my life (not that I am ready to die yet).