Where Does It Begin ?

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

At some point, as I delved into my own origins story, I began to wonder if many of the random things that seemed to happen to my family members were the result of something that happened to our ancestors.

I discovered this book that seemed to indicate that it was a real possibility.

Wolynn asks early in his book – Did something traumatic happen while your mother was pregnant with you ?

I would say that any unplanned pregnancy would be – to some extent – “traumatic”, wouldn’t you ? Most adoptions are the result of an unplanned pregnancy. My mom was only a teenager in high school when she discovered that I was on my way. At 2 months pregnant, she married my father. He had only just started his university education but had to quit school and go to work to support us.

But what about in the days and weeks before the decision to marry took place ? I did find the love letters my parents were writing to one another as I cleaned out their belongings after they had both died. I only read one. It was a note from my mother to a friend (I don’t know whether she ever delivered it) that was stressing about how my father would react to the news. I suppose if I had known I was going to embark on this origins journey less than 2 years later, I might have saved them for the insights they would have given me.

I do regret not saving the love letters. Shortly before I started cleaning out their home, I had read an article. It was written by a woman who lamented her mother destroying similar letters after her father had died. She told her daughter that they were not for anyone else to read beyond the two of them – not even their own child. That the letters were private. That perspective is what guided my thoughts at the time.

Previously, I had received a bunch of letters that my dad’s adoptive father had written, I believe mostly during World War II, from my mom. I actually read one of those letters at my grandfather’s funeral service as an indication of his love of family and country. However, most of those letters simply sat here – unread – for a couple of years and eventually, I delivered them to my grandfather’s biological daughter, my Aunt Karen.

I suppose the lack of time I had to hopefully read those love letters, influenced my decision not to keep my parent’s love letters when I had them in hand. Too bad I can’t go back and retrieve them now.

Abandonment and Loss

Bonding doesn’t begin at birth,
it is a continuum of physiological,
psychological, and spiritual events
which begin in utero and continue
throughout the postnatal bonding period.

When this natural evolution is interrupted
by a postnatal separation from the
biological mother, the resultant experience
of abandonment and loss is indelibly
imprinted upon the unconscious minds
of these children, causing a primal wound.

~ The Primal Wound – Understanding the Adopted Child

by Nancy Newton Verrier

This was not well understood until quite recently. It’s effect on adoptees is profound, even when the adoptive family is a good one and does everything in the best possible way for the well-being of the child. Some adoptees don’t even realize it’s effects on their own lives until well into adulthood.

In learning to understand this, I was also able to recognize the unconscious wound in a person who wasn’t adopted but had experienced a betrayal of his earliest romantic love. Decades later, an unrelated event sent this person into an emotionally breakdown, when circumstances triggered a fear of another abandonment looming. Though it wasn’t the truth of the situation or the relationship.

Breaking the Cycle

Even before I learned about the book “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn, I was beginning to suspect that what happened to my grandmothers had somehow passed down through my parents to me and my sisters.

Wolynn makes a pretty good argument in his book that it is possible. Consider that the three of us, sisters, were unable to keep custody of nor raise our own children. Well to be honest, I have now broken that pattern. I sometimes joke that I decided rather than die and be reborn, I would just live several lives without having to go through infancy and childhood all over again.

Even so, what are the odds ? – both of my parents were adopted, then both of my sisters give up babies to adoption. I suppose part of the explanation is that adoption was such a normal occurrence in my birth family. Otherwise, our own parents would not have been “normal”.

Yet, even when it wasn’t an official “adoption”, two of the children were raised by someone other than their mother. My daughter was left temporarily with her paternal grandmother, only to end up being raised by a stepmother when her father remarried. My sister’s son was taken from her by a lawsuit initiated by her ex-husband’s parents, who then attempted to turn her own son against her. Too sad.

Thankfully, I do believe our children are breaking this awful pattern that results in mothers and their children becoming separated. The cause, I believe, has been economic and perhaps poor choices in romantic relationships. Our children are managing to keep and raise their children, which is a happy thing.

I also managed to get my own self in better circumstances and have now just about accomplished raising my sons to adulthood with lots of presence from my own self in their everyday lives.

I realize how much of my daughter’s life I missed. Thankfully, we have a good relationship today. Thankfully, she didn’t abandon or reject me.

Motherless Daughters

These two little girls, my mother’s half sisters Mildred and Javene, lost their mama when they were only 7 and 4 years old. I was startled to realize that both of my grandmothers lost their mothers when they were very young – 3 mos and age 11.

It seems that people often died back in the early 1900s of something or other but given that both of my parents were lost to their mothers through a relinquishment to adoption, I felt that not having mothers mattered.

Without the support of one’s mother, it becomes easier to lose one’s child when a woman is still very young herself. My paternal grandmother lost her first born son when she was only 23. My maternal grandmother lost the only child she ever birthed when she was only 21. It actually isn’t unusual when a mother loses her child that way to never have any more children. It is a secondary infertility that statistically has a greater risk of occurring when a mother loses her child against her will, as my grandmother did.

I didn’t realize when my own daughter went to live temporarily with her paternal grandmother while I tried to make some money driving an 18-wheel truck that it would become permanent. It did though, when her dad married a woman with a child and then they had a child together – a yours, mine and ours family.

I thought if she lived with at least one of her divorced parents it was an equivalent situation. I didn’t think I really mattered that much. Only recently has she admitted that she suffered from my absence. And only recently have I understood that I mattered more than I had imagined.

I have learned a lot about the impacts on women who lose their mother to death (which is very permanent – as was the situation for my grandmothers and my mom’s half-sisters) by reading an excellent book by that title – Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss – written by Hope Edelman. I highly recommend it for any woman who has lost her mother – even those who only lost their mother the way my daughter did or through relinquishment to adoption.

What Happens in the Womb . . .

Stays in the Child.

One of the most helpful of the books I’ve read in the last year was The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier. She is the mother of two daughters – one who was adopted and one who was not. Her clinical work has been with adoptees and other members of the adoption triad. With these experiences, she has come to believe that even newly born infants, when separated from their mothers, are deeply wounded and that their pre-verbal state of consciousness renders these wounds into a feeling state without the verbal context that memories require.

This has not been well understood until recently. But upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense. The gestating fetus grows inside the mother’s body. This is a very important time in both the mother’s and the infant’s lives because they are bonding and preparing for their lives together, once the child is delivered into independent life.

Any woman who has given birth, upon reflection, will realize that her infant knew her from the first moments of its life. Taking this child away from its mother causes deep anguish and sorrow. When placed in the adoptive family situation, the infant instinctively knows this stranger is not the child’s natural mother.

While in good circumstances, the child will learn to accept it’s placement into an adoptive home, deep inside there are fears of rejection and abandonment. Individual children will deal with these anxieties in one of two ways – either they will be compliant and do their best to live up to their adoptive parents’ expectations (while fearing all along that if they don’t they will be sent anyway, causing a lifelong insecurity in the person) – or they will act out. A defiant adoptee will often disrupt the family they have been placed within, causing biological or other adopted siblings to resent them and causing feelings of rejection in the adoptive parents – if, they don’t understand the source of the challenges they face in trying to parent this child.