It’s Not Hollywood

I’ve now watched every episode made of the new reality TV show Find My Family. (It seems to have disappeared from the ABC.com web site, so I suspect it has been canceled.)   I’ve traded kvetches with my birth family over it.  My birth brother called it bad art, arguing for better done shows like The Locator. My birth mother shrugged it off as good for somebody, perhaps for those birth mothers who have lived so much of their lives feeling alone in their guilt and shame.  Last month I watched on my computer the only four episodes ever aired.  I watched them in bed, next to my husband, reading his New Yorker magazine and enduring my groans over just how terrible it was.  He would never have been able to make it through a single episode.  I kept watching, though, simultaneously repulsed by the melodrama and the generalizations (“as every adoptee feels….”), and utterly moved.  Each show tapped into some well of emotion deep inside of me, and I found myself crying, connecting, in a way I never cry over or connect to TV.  Books, yes.  TV, no.   It would have been embarrassing had it not felt more real.  Plenty of critics–and average folks, complained about the show.  And for good reason.  In each show, adult adoptees, most of them my age, meet their long-lost birth parents under a tree on top of a hill in California.  It reminded me of the opening scene in Little House on the Prairie, when Laura and her sisters go running down that too-green hill.  Only in Find My Family, they crawl up a desert brown one.  Every episode ended well because that’s the point of such shows.  And that’s what bothered me more than anything, the cut at the end of the hugs, before life really got going.  It’s fascinating, of course, to watch people come together who have been separated.  I’m a sucker for a long-lost reunion.  One of the reasons I dislike the  security set-up at airports these past 10 years or so is that you miss out on a lot of emotional reunions in the gate areas.  I could watch those for hours, imaging stories for the people hugging and crying over one another.  But adoption reunion isn’t like that, at least it isn’t for me, and I imagine it isn’t for most other people, too.  I’m talking about the reunions that actually take place, not the thousands and thousands of them that end in disappointment, sadness, further hurt and rejection.  I’m talking about the “success stories,” when adoptees and their birth families agree to meet, to come together, to create something for which there is no blueprint.  Find My Family is like a wedding without a marriage.  It’s like a marriage without the work.

In the last few days, the marriage has soured.  It feels terrible.  I’m bewildered by how terrible it feels.  And because life is not Hollywood, I have absolutely no idea how to fix it, how to write a less hurtful scene.  A year out, I wonder how many of the reunions on Find My Family bring as much hurt and sadness as mine does right now.

When I began the search for my birth family, my guiding principle was “do no harm.”  Right now, that sentiment, though I stand by it, feels incredibly naive, if not impossible.