The Eyes Have It
When I was growing up, I knew a few kids who were adopted but not many. There were the H. twins, adopted a year before my sister and me, through the same adoption agency, by a couple who attended the same church as my parents did. There was L., a friend from elementary school, and J., another friend from high school. All of us were adopted as babies, part of the last great wave of domestic adoption in the United States. Even at that, however, we were statistically rare.
I never minded being adopted, as unusual as it was among my peer group, and even in my own family, in part because I was treated as so usual, as if the different path I took to arrive at my place in both my immediate family and my enormous extended family never really mattered. And family was everywhere. Both sides of my family owned businesses in town. As a high schooler, I worked in the family meat packing plant and bowled from a young age in the family bowling alley. In church, when I looked around, I regularly saw over a dozen extended family members occupying their own pews. I am grateful that I always felt so belonged, even after the arrival of my brother, born to my parents when my sister and I were 20 months old. We were a family of different genes, a family of different origins, but we were as much a family as any of the others surrounding us. Unlike two other adoptees I knew, Korean girls adopted by white parents, from an outsider’s perspective, we looked like we belonged to one another, too. And in this age of assimilation-at-all-costs, it was surely much easier for us than it was for these girls.
Indeed, I spent most of my growing years ingesting this simple truth: genes don’t matter when it comes to family. In fact, in my early years, I refused to use the term birth mother. I called her birth woman, reserving the word mother for the woman who spent her life raising me. It was my way of honoring my own mother, of telling her that no one mattered but her. Who is your real mother? a classmate once asked me in third grade. I have NO idea what you are talking about, I hissed back, daring her to continue the conversation, staring her into silence.
If, as a child, I seldom lingered over the birth woman who had given me life, and even less over the birth man who walked off the edge of the notes from the adoption agency and didn’t look back, I never thought of the birth woman’s parents or siblings. It was hard enough to imagine a single face out of the blackness, let alone a cadre of ancestors. Sure, I sometimes wondered about my ethnic origin. In the notes from the agency, we were told our paternal origins were French and our maternal origins German. My adoptive parents were both German, so it was easy to feel and be German, just like they were, knowing there was some genetic truth to it. In my teenage years, when I was feeling ornery and tempted by the exotic, I sometimes told people I was French. Once, in a dim Vietnamese restaurant, when a waitress asked me if I was part-Vietnamese, I smiled and shrugged. When you are adopted, you can be anything. In the absence of sure knowledge, you can invent yourself.
But mostly, I stayed close to my familial roots, to the German butchers and tradesmen who were my people. My paternal grandmother was the keeper of the family genealogy, and I poured over her enormous family tree and accompanying notes and maps, tracing with my finger the history I claimed, too. In college and graduate school, I borrowed her notes to write essays and poems about my ancestors: my great-great-grandfather, a Bible-thumping preacher on the Illinois prairie who, in his 80s, raced to beat a train that rumbled past his house and was ground into the tracks when he didn’t make it; my great-grandfather, a record-setting minor league baseball player whose baseball card I finally acquired after months of searching on e-Bay. When my grandmother died several years ago, I inherited her boxes of family photos, her pages of family history. Nobody questioned why they went to the granddaughter who was grafted onto the family tree by adoption. This was my family as much as anyone else’s, my family, my roots.
Finding my birth family–for I call them family, too, now–messes with my world order, with how I have defined myself. It strikes at the very core of my identity, defiantly formed around this notion that genes don’t matter. My mother is my mother; my father, my father; my brother, my brother; my sister, of course, my sister, a double whammy of family and genes. And the grandmothers I considered best friends, the grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins–all of them, part of me, all of them mine. Our bond, our sense of family, it all exists completely outside the realm of DNA. I love them with a fierceness that defies biology.
And yet, there, standing in the wings, is biology. It’s German, and Swiss-Acadian (not French). It looks like me, a little. When my biological brother sent me a class photo from his elementary school years, I stared in wonder. He and my sister and I could have been triplets. In his own face, I see my eyes, my cheeks, my nose. It’s my birth parents who puzzle me for I always figured that the one way in which nature would trump nurture is by appearance. I expected, if I ever met my birth mother, that I would look just like her. In fact, I counted on it, in the years that I search for her in crowds: at Disneyworld, at the World’s Fair in Tennessee. When we finally did meet, we both admitted, had we passed each other in a crowd, we would have kept on walking. Our genes would not have drawn us toward one another. Our biology would not have turned our heads. We would have kept walking, strangers passing.
Yes, in many ways, this experience of finding a birth family has humbled me. It has knocked me off the high-falutin’ perch that I used for so long to keep myself connected to the family I had, fearing that if I believed any less, I wouldn’t belong as much as I did. It is fear, however unfounded, that makes me grab for them now, pulling them close to me, locking arms. Mother? Check. Sister? Check. Brother? Check. Confident of their presence, I now consider these others.
Indeed, I, who in an intellectual sense, a social sense, a moral sense, will define family in many different ways, who will insist upon a dizzying array of possibilities, now find myself needing to let go of my own definition and envision something new. There is my family who raised me, hundreds of years of them, holding me up in their branches, lifting me with their love. Then there is this other tree, standing on the hill, its branches holding aloft a birth mother, a birth father, a brother–and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and ancestors, strangers who I have yet to call “my people,” strangers who may never be “my people.” Still, there is room for both trees on this hill, beneath this wide sky. Under the soil the roots of both trees are entwined, tangled together, all of us family, all of us laying claim to one another in ways I cannot even begin to comprehend.
Opening the Box
In the late summer of 2008, I decided to write an essay for NPR’s This I Believe program. I had been chewing on this essay for some time, on this belief I held that had grown out of my life experience as an adoptee. I titled my essay, “Leaving the Blanks Unfilled,” and I wrote about how I had learned to live with the mystery that was my past. “I didn’t know” much about that past, I wrote, and “I will never know.” I submitted my essay to NPR, happy that I was able to articulate something so close to the core of who I was at 37 years old. I meant every word of it. I still do. I know other people involved in adoption have different stories, different journeys, different beliefs. I uncovered some of those stories in the course of research for my essay. But that’s where mine dropped me, in early June 2008, at peace with the unknown.
Except, after writing that essay, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Except, after writing that essay, life didn’t remain within the essay’s margins. My twin sister, who was diagnosed with PTSD after returning from Iraq where she had worked as a reporter, was teetering on the edge of death. I was desperate to save her, and in that desperation, I convinced myself that the only stone let unturned was the one covering our past. I knelt before it; I studied it for a long time; I talked to my mom about it, asking for her blessing; I told my sister as much as I could, when I could, knowing she was not well enough to join me on the journey. I also was keenly aware that I was about to break a pact that we had made long before: if we ever decided to track down our birth family, we would do it together or not at all. As twins, there was no separating the story of our birth, even though, as I later found out, in court records, we existed without mention of the other. One Christmas break, when I was home from graduate school in Pennsylvania, I ran into a childhood friend who worked for the adoption agency that handled our adoption. “I’ve looked at your file,” she told me over drinks in a crowded, dark bar. “What do you want to know?” I went to the back of the bar and picked up a pay phone to call my sister. “Do we want to know?” I asked her. There was a long pause on the other end of the phone before her voice came back in a whisper. “No,” she said. “Not now. Not like this.” And that was that–we closed the door together and walked away. And kept on walking for almost two decades more.
At the end of July 2008, I contacted the Confidential Intermediary Service of Illinois to find out what my options were. I had come across mention of the program in my research for my NPR essay. Illinois’ confidential intermediary program had become law in 1990, but only adult adoptees and adoptive parents could use the service and only if there was a compelling medical reason. In 2004, the program was extended to others impacted by adoption and there no longer needed to be a medical reason to do a search. You needed cash–at least $400–but you didn’t need a reason.
I had a reason, and also, fortunately, at that time in my life, I had the cash. In truth, I’m not sure I would have ever initiated a search had I not had that urgent medical reason. In the forms I filled out over the next few months, I often stumbled over choices I didn’t know how to make. Did I want a relationship? Was I seeking something beyond medical information? I wasn’t opposed to it, but I also didn’t know how to imagine it, so sure was I that I would never know my birth family. The word relationship implied a person on the other end, and when I tried to imagine that person, I saw nothing but darkness. I couldn’t wrap my arms around the very idea, let alone a human being. And once I acknowledged a human being on the other end, suddenly, it got complicated. My over-riding principle, guiding my every move, was, is, “do no harm.” I wanted the medical information; I needed it. I was well aware that to get that information, somebody had to be contacted, somebody who might not want to hear from me, somebody for whom the very mention of me might open a well of grief that had long been sealed over. After having my own children, I agonized over the decision my birth mother made when she decided she could not raise my sister and me. My body ached for her when my milk came in hard and fast, when my uterus cramped and contracted for days after giving birth and the blood still ran. My heart ached for her in those moments when I first held my children in my arms, and in the days after, when I looked into their eyes and fell in love with them so deep that I knew for the first time what it meant to feel vulnerable because you love so much and so hard.
I knew that, when she heard from me, the pain of her decision almost 40 years ago would wash over her. I did not want to open that wound unless I had to. I felt I had to. A year later, I have wrapped my arms around the woman who gave birth to me. I have stood on one side of her, and my sister on the other. Moments before the photo was snapped, she said, “This is the first time since you were born that I have held both of you in my arms again.”
Opening the wound, I have since understood, opened more than just pain. It opened a pathway to release grief and shame. It opened a place where relief and joy could enter, too.
Once my birth family began to take shape from the darkness, once they had faces and names, I knew there was no turning back. My birth mother told me that at first, she was reluctant to share her medical history, worrying that, once I had what I came for, I would disappear. Her words made me sad for I realized that she didn’t know me at all; I’m not the kind of person who would ever do that. Yes, I do have what I came for: there is diabetes and gout and high blood pressure and alcoholism in my genes. That isn’t insignificant as I grow older. That isn’t insignificant for my own children. But I opened this Pandora’s Box. I lifted the lid myself. It is my responsibility–and my desire–to see the process through, to wade through the complexities that make up an adoption reunion, to keep reaching out, to settle disagreements, to reassure, to ask questions, to puzzle through my own reactions and feelings.
Sometimes, it is exhausting. I don’t always know what the right thing is to do. Some days I feel like, no matter what I do, my decision leaves a wake of pain and trouble, especially for my sister and my birth brother, two of the innocents in this journey, two of the people who had the least choice, the least power, to control any part of their destiny.
But here we are. In the legend of Pandora, it is hardly her fault for opening the jar that released the world’s troubles. It was the gods who had made her so curious in the first place. The mother of all troubles has become the daughter, set on a path that she both did not create and did–now running after the troubles, trying to stuff them back into the jar, while letting the joys that also escaped remain free.
The Impossible Greeting Card
Tomorrow is my birth father’s birthday. As I stood in front of the cards at CVS this evening, I was reminded again of how poorly mass-produced greeting cards fit the circumstances of an adoption reunion. In fairness, perhaps that can be said of any situation outside the norm that is captured, marketed, and perpetuated by the greeting card industry. I didn’t bother to browse the cards for fathers, in part because I was confident that a card does not exist for a biological father I barely know and in part because I have not lingered in the father cards since my own dad died.
Sometimes it feels like an added emotional weight to bear, this new knowledge of a biological father when the man I consider my real father is gone. In truth, I spent very little time thinking about my biological father when I was growing up. My biological mother I considered on occasion; she was real in my imagination, in part because she was more real on paper. In the scant notes my mom took from information relayed to her about my biological parents, there is barely any mention of my biological father other than the fact that he and my biological mother planned to get married before he changed his mind upon learning that she was pregnant. Yet, the notes indicate, he “didn’t abandon her but tried to help.” I spent years puzzling over these words. Who gets a woman pregnant, changes his mind when she becomes pregnant, but loves her enough to try to help her get through that pregnancy and give up her, his, their children? It never made sense to me, and in all honesty, when I hit my teenage years, I dismissed him as a cad. Instead, I focused my attention on my biological mother, on her sacrifice, on her selflessness, on her courage. I never felt anything but gratitude toward her, forced into this situation, so I thought, by a man who didn’t want her babies. His loss, my heart shrugged. My dad wanted me. He held out his arms and folded them around me.
When the confidential intermediary called that day in early February, 2009, to tell me that she had located my birth mother, she told me that in addition to locating my birth mother, she had found a full biological brother, just one year younger than my sister and me. He was close to his parents, she said; in fact, they all lived in the same town. My mind spun as I stumbled over questions. “Does that mean they’re still together?” I asked. “Does that mean they got married?” The intermediary didn’t have that information just then, but she supposed so. I was stunned by the news. In the farthest wanderings of my mind, I never imagined that my birth parents would still be together. In fact, the search evaluation I had received from the Confidential Intermediary Service of Illinois had indicated that, after a preliminary search of court documents, finding my birth father would be nearly impossible. He wasn’t mentioned in any of the court records. His name wasn’t on my original birth certificate. And only his first name, not his last name, appeared in the adoption agency’s records.
In fact, as I later discovered, my birth mother had kept him a secret from the adoption agency. She didn’t want him to know that she was pregnant. She didn’t want him to marry her because he had to. She wasn’t sure if they should even be married. So, when she was five months pregnant with us, she told him that she had a tumor in her belly and needed to have an operation. And then she disappeared from his life–and from the lives of everyone she knew–until after she gave birth to us. She left the hospital and made her way home to the family farm in North Dakota, never telling a soul about what had happened. There, on the farm, just over a month after we came into the world, my birth father tracked her down and proposed. When she eventually told him about us, months after they were married the following May, it was too late to get us back. He wanted to, but she urged him not to interrupt the life we had begun with my mom and dad.
I feel for my birth father, for his lack of choice about what he didn’t know. It pains him. He calls it a regret. He calls it a mistake.
But my life wasn’t a mistake. I try to tell him that. It cuts too close to a fear so sharp that it takes my breath away: if he had been able to keep us, to call us back, to claim us for his own, I would not be who I am. My entire life would be something else, including my husband, my children. No, I say, it was meant to be. I call upon God himself: this is what God wanted.
There is nothing in a greeting card that can capture that complexity. Happy Birthday to my birth father. Your loss became my life. Can we just start over from here? Can we let this year be the new beginning without mourning the ones behind us? Because when I look back at those years, I don’t see or feel your sadness. I can sympathize, but only if I remove myself and insert a character another than myself. In the court documents, I am “Baby A.” Yes, let’s cry over Baby A, but not over me, the grown woman named by another father, raised by another father, loved by another father, who would be the same age as you are on this birthday, had he lived. Happy Birthday to the man who gave me life, who has spent his entire life saddened by the loss of me, who professes unconditional love, who wants to spend the rest of his life making up for lost time. Yes, for the first time in almost 40 years, I say to you, BioDad, Happy Birthday.
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.
One Year
As my twin sister and I were growing up, we celebrated one day every year that was unique to our experience as adoptees: Legal Adoption Day. March 17, 1971. St. Patrick’s Day. Only after our birth family became known to all of us this past year did my mother add color to the day: the festive green robe of the Irish-American judge who confirmed that my sister and me belonged to her and my father, the judge who not only sealed our fate but the pieces of our history that preceded the moments of another celebrated day, Coming Home Day, August 7, 1970. We were twenty-three days old when we landed in the arms of the family who would raise us, whom we would call our own. Other details spilled forward this past year, from a memory reopened or from a realization that suddenly, either such details might matter or they might not cause harm. They have always mattered to my sister and me. To some extent, they mattered more before, when we had little else. Whatever the case, my mom now says, “I remember a “B.” On March 17, 1971, she glanced at the papers on the judge’s desk, upside down in her view on the other side of the desk. She made out a birth mother’s name. She made out a B.
One year ago today, on January 30, 2009, the woman whose maiden named began with a B received a letter from a confidential intermediary at the Midwest Adoption Center in Illinois, the intermediary I had hired to find my birth mother. She at first thought that the crumpled letter with its return address label askew was a piece of junk mail. She didn’t look at it until later in the day. And then she gasped and stuffed it into her pocket, keeping it close to her, until the time she would take it out and tell her husband, my birth father, that we had found them. For years, he had dreamed about us showing up on his doorstep, two identical-looking women with long black hair, like his young wife’s, and dressed mysteriously in trench coats. Instead, we appeared before him in a letter, not yet named, only daughters looking.
Today, my sister and I received an e-mail from our birth mother. I had not heard from her since Christmas Eve when I called to wish her, for the first time, a Merry Christmas. I move through my days alternatively longing and forgetting. She doesn’t forget. She tells us that she can hardly keep track of the birth dates of all of her grandchildren, but this day, she remembers. I rack my brain to remember the very day that she became known to me, the day when the confidential intermediary phoned me while I was in my office at school to tell me about my birth mother. Glancing back through my calendar, I determine that the intermediary likely called me on February 3. But it is only a guess. I didn’t write it down.
From now on, I will write it down. It’s not a promise to her as much as it is to myself.
Twin Prints: An Adoption Story 