Risk

Shortly after my dad died, I came across a handmade card in the top drawer of his dresser. I had been in my dad’s dresser before, mostly to put away his laundry, but seldom in the top drawer, unless at his direction. That’s where he kept the crisp $20 bills he brought home on pay day, the cuff links he never wore, the new brown billfolds and the cotton handkerchiefs that hadn’t yet made it into rotation, and the Kennedy half dollars he never spent. When I close my eyes, I can still feel the weight of the glossy, walnut-stained drawer in my hand as I slide it from its slot; I can smell the wood and new leather, the unopened shine of my dad’s things. In the back of that drawer was a stack of cards that my siblings and I had made for him over the years, including one of my creations drawn on red construction paper. At first I mistook it for a Valentine until I opened it up and read:  “Happy Adoptee Day, Mom and Dad. I luv you!” For most of my life, I have insisted, to myself and to others, that being adopted didn’t make an ounce of difference in my life. Unlike adopted kids in earlier times, other places, other circumstances, I didn’t consider my adoption to be an important part of my identity. Rather, it was one of many labels I positioned behind my name:  twin, sister, daughter, granddaughter, niece, Midwesterner, Missouri Synod Lutheran, student, athlete, musician, writer, and somewhere in there, adoptee. The list grew as I did, changed as I did: vegetarian, Catholic, East Coaster, professor, wife, mother. Somewhere in there still: adoptee.

It’s hard to say what part of me is who I am because I am adopted, and maybe that is the reason for my reluctance to attribute aspects of my personality to the fact that I am. I am a quilt of selves, none of which overshadows any other part of who I am. But I can’t deny anymore that being adopted made no difference in my life at all. It did. It does. I understand that when I look at the card I made for my parents to commemorate Adoptee Day, March 17, 1971, the day that we legally became theirs. In my crayon rendering of that day, my sister and I stand beside the judge, dressed in Bible-style tunics with ropes around our waists. We look like sacrifices, like Isaacs on the legal altar.  The judge’s words in the bubble next to his head are a warning. There’s risk involved in adoption. There’s risk involved with these two girls. You don’t know who you’re getting, what you’re getting yourself into. Be wary. Be careful.

Was I going for humor?  Or was I tapping into an anxiety I imagined for my parents, then took on for myself? Perhaps a bit of both. I’m not sure.

I do know that when I was a child, I worried a lot about being a financial burden on my parents. I never wanted for anything, but there were times when money was tight and we ate government cheese and butter and discounted boxes of food from my dad’s union. There were times when my dad lived away from home for weeks and months, working at nuclear power plants on shutdown in neighboring states because those were the only jobs to be had. I began to think of myself as a liability. Even before those tough times, I worried. My sister and I never asked for anything when we were in stores with my parents, never once resorted to childhood begging for something that caught our eye. We just knew, in words we whispered only to each other, that we shouldn’t ask, that asking for too much of anything might make our parents doubt their decision to keep us. Our younger brother, he asked for things because he wasn’t adopted and he could, and we understood that, too, and didn’t resent him for it. Years later, when I told my mom about these childhood fears, her face crumpled in anguish. I never knew, she said. I would have assured you that there was nothing that would have made us not want you or love you. Why didn’t you girls tell me what you were thinking? 

Because children can be irrational. Because adopted children can be silent.

I don’t know.

But this I do: The first few months after giving birth to each of my three children, I lived in constant fear that someone would take them from me. Part of my fear–the part that I connect to adoption–was the knowledge that my babies, so young, would forget me. They would never remember my face as it gazed on them with such love and longing while they nursed and slept.  They would never remember that love itself other than, perhaps, as something of a shadow. For the first months of their lives, maybe the first years, it was hard to leave them, even to go out to dinner for an hour or two with my husband. What if I never came back? What if they were gone when I got home? I knew that my panic was drenched in the most unlikely of catastrophes. But tell that to my adopted-nursing-mother-sleep-deprived self, grappling, each birth, with more profound love than I ever thought possible. There is a risk to that kind of love. Take them at your own risk.  

There were times, many times, days, months, years, when my birth mother stayed at the back of my mind, so quiet I didn’t even notice her. When this thing called adoption works as my birth mother and parents were promised, that’s exactly how it should be. We go on with our lives. We are loved. We forget what we were too young to remember. Our innocence spares us of the pain.

But it also spares us of remembering another mother’s love.