Distilling Knowledge

Kerry and Sam...1990

When I first reunited with my surrendered daughter and then my son, I knew that I was entering a strange land. All the maternal feelings were there, but there were kinks in the chain. Little did I understand at the time, or for years, how that gap in years, and missing out on sharing their childhoods would dash any expectations of a normal relationship and cause a lot of hurt and frustration.

I can see jealousy in my surrendered children, towards their siblings...not hostile but wistful that my raised children have something with me that they don't. It speaks to the importance of shared experience.

You see, my raised children, Kerry and Sam, were my babies, then my toddlers, then my little girl and little boy, then my rebellious teens before they became my adult children. I can recall, with them, special moments, traumas and happy times. My surrendered children were my babies and then they were gone. All the in-between was lost and I admit to searching, hungrily, in their faces for the children they were rather than the adults they now are. That was MY bad.

In 1993, I was hit by a storm of emotion and confusion, with two reunions in one year, just as I was going though a very tough time in my marriage. It took me a long time to accept and mourn the fact that what I had lost would never be returned. Those precious formative years belonged to someone else. And to say I was displeased with what took place with my babies during those years would be an understatement.

I tend to over-analyze a lot. And often, I have to stand back and quit going around my arse to get to my elbow. Accepting what I can't change has always been a challenge for me, but I find myself in a much better state of mind when I do that very thing.

Yes, I am the Mother of the two children lost to adoption...their true Mother. But they are not, nor will they ever be my little girl and little boy. Those years will always belong to someone else.

My daughter's adopters are deceased, but they are still a living presence in her. She often posts tributes to them on her FB page. Now that is not the norm for children raised by their natural parents, but what the hey...whatever floats her boat. I just cannot read those paeans without feeling a bit of a knife in my gut. I have to wonder if that is why she does it.

I feel the family connection more keenly through my granddaughter and her children. I wasn't there when she was a baby, but then lots of grandparents weren't. Our relationship is easier, laughter comes to us more readily and we don't try to burden each other with our troubles. And she gave me a gift when we visited while I was in San Antonio....the gift of her truth and the verification of a lot of my suppositions. The weight of the world was lifted from my shoulders.

Now I know that in any dysfunctional family, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. But this is the first time I have really listened to my granddaughter and heard her pain and frustration. Once I had boiled down all this information to the inner essence, I knew that I had to distance myself from a toxic relationship. I would do no one any good by enabling them.

So here I sit, on Labor Day, having been greeted by my raised children and my granddaughter, and getting on with the bigger fish I have to fry. We have to figure out how to make our move to WV, on hold for four years, now, due to a badly damaged economy and corrupt, political shenanigans. We also have to re-work our budget, deal with the expenses we have without incurring any more and make sure we are covered, health-wise. One of my raised children is going through a terrible time and needs a strong shoulder on which to cry. Oh Bla Di, Oh Bla Da and all that.

And even that pales when I remember riding through the countryside of Texas, to the west of San Antonio, and seeing the devastation of drought and heat that is ruining the livelihood of millions. I watch the news when I feel especially brave and I have to do what little I can to aid in preventing our Nation from going completely down the tubes greased by greed and arrogance. I can write, I can vote and I can talk. Like I said..bigger fish to fry.

And as the song says, "You got your troubles, I got mine." My little girl and little boy were taken from me and I have accepted that. And maybe that tragedy will be a learning tool for someone else and a preventative from falling into the same trap. Instead, I am concentrating on what I do have, and I am one fortunate woman. I need to remind myself of that on a continuing basis.

Sometimes, you just have to boil it all down to the basics, distill your knowledge and go with the essence. Simple, but not easy...but then the simplest truths are never easy to take.

Life Is.......

When I was small, my first memories are of being held, coddled and played with by my parents and my relatives and I thought, "Life is warm and caring."

When my father left us in my fifth year, and I watched my mother cry, I thought, "Life is scary and troubling."

When I suffered a severe burn on my hand as a child, I thought, "Life is physical pain."

When I would play with my toys or my sisters and friends, I thought, "Life is fun."

In school, I thought, "Life is working and learning."

When I approached and reached puberty, I thought, "Life is confusing and full of strange feelings and thoughts."

When I became interested in boys and had my first serious boyfriend, I thought, "Life is being in love."

When I was a single, pregnant teen, sent away by my family, abandoned by my lover, alone, frightened and told I was unfit to raise my own baby, I thought, "Life is about debasement, loss and shame."

Each time I gave birth and felt that wonderful feeling when I held my child, I thought, "Life is about fleeting moments of joy."

When I met, married and lived, day to day, with my wonderful husband, I thought, "Life is mature, comfortable yet still exciting love."

As I struggled on, as we all must, through all the different highs and lows of life, I learned that life is all of that and more...joy, grief, peace, worry, fun, fear, loss, serendipity and epiphanies. Some manage life better than others. Some can't deal with it at all and decided to opt out. Others in my life have shown me the meaning of courage, self-honesty and, as my late aunt put it, "keeping on, keeping on." My husband honors his lost child by making his life the best one he can make.

But the most important thing is that I think life is worth living. In all its joys and sorrows, it is a miracle created by the Universe and something which each person makes as good as they want it to be despite the pitfalls.

But that good life can only be made in the environment of true freedom, where with rights come responsibilities to each other and our world and where each person is free from ANY kind of oppression, be it physical, financial or spiritual. We must be free from the dogma of the self-righteous. We must be free from ignorance, want and hunger. We must be free to learn, to explore and to be enriched by art, science, literature and music.

That is why we must not let the direction that is being taken by the extremist Right determine our future. We must say NO to fascism in the name of religion and NO to corporate person-hood and the idea of alms to the rich. I don't know about any of you, but none of my family, friends and associates are named Exxon Mobile. We must continue to say NO to racism and the encroaching idea of a Christian theocracy. This country was founded by people who felt strongly that the Church and the State should always be separated by law and logic.

So, to counter this, we must say YES to progress, YES to equality, YES to compassion, and YES to all Americans sharing the load.

When we do that, we are saying YES to a life worth living for ourselves and the generations to come.

Footnote* A friend posted this quote and I thought it appropriate to the news of the day;"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." — Aristotle

Wheel's Turnin' Round and Round

Have you ever crawled into bed at night, so tired and sleepy that you can't wait to hit the pillow only to lie there, wide awake, while your brain goes into overdrive? I had one of those nights not too long ago. It seems that the more I tried to stifle the inept problem-solver between my ears, the harder the wheels turn.

It's not an uncommon phenomenon. My hubby is the world's worst at being unable to sleep in. Once he wakes up, no matter how early, his active brain won't let him go back to sleep. That is why I find him asleep in his recliner so often. All those thing he felt MUST be done, that wouldn't let him stay in bed, don't get done. It's a vicious cycle.

But I digress. I started thinking of all the things that I had discovered about surrender, society, adoption, reunion, closed records and the memories of my time in the Unwed Mother Hot Seat. I started playing "what if" and imagining what I would have done differently and how. I flashed back to April 30, 1993 and my first reunion (I had two that year...WHEW!) and what I might have done and said had I known then what I know now.

I remember that contentious phone conversation with the woman who adopted my daughter and I went through a litany of other things I might have said. When she told me to "cease" the "nonsense" of reunion, I just replied that I was leaving that up to my daughter. I came up with quite a few much better responses 18 years too late.

One of them was a keeper, though. It was a point we Mothers have discussed among ourselves on many occasions. Say it takes 18 to 22 years to raise a child to productive adulthood. Once our children have reached that point, they become responsible, in every way, if we did a decent job, for themselves. But, even though my daughter was in her 30's at the time of reunion, divorced with two children she was raising, the woman who adopted her still seemed to think of her as a possession...an eternal child. I wish I had said, "She belongs to neither of us. She is her own person, an adult. We have no control over what she needs, wants or does. Live with it!"

If we do our jobs well, and forge bonds of love with the children we raise, then there will be a relationship after they have left the nest. But their decisions, their relationships and their lives are their own. No one "owns" them but themselves. It is a natural part of life that children grow and go, form partnerships and start their own cycle. It is natural but it seems that, in adoption, there is an "eternal child" clause. Someone once likened it to slavery and it does have its likenesses.

There are many Mothers who have had an adopter tell her that she was their worst nightmare. That is the insecurity that goes with adopting. The one thing that the courts of this land cannot create with their almighty decrees, contracts, agreements and judicial signatures is that blood bond. That has to be what the adopters can't face. The fear of losing the child they raised to the Mother who bore that child tends to interfere with a fully healthy relationship. If they have done their job well, then that shouldn't be a problem. And it wasn't for my daughter. Her love for those she calls her parents never wavered. But their fear still invaded what could have been a wonderful reunion.

I understand the fear, but I don't condone holding an adult hostage to it. My daughter was threatened with having herself and her children cut out of the will. What should have been parental love became conditional. I felt sad for all of us. While I respect my daughter's feeling where the people who raised her are concerned, I found that I had little feeling for them one way or the other once I worked through the anger. It wasn't about them...reunion was about US.

All that should be a moot point by now, since both of them passed away within a couple of years of each other a few years back. I have neither resentment nor any other feelings for them. They were not and are not a part of my life.

Yet, in my daughter's life, their ghosts loom large. Though several years have passed, she can tell you the exact date of their death without having to refer to any paperwork. She still mourns and I wonder if it is them or the idea of the dream of the "ideal" life and family she had that she mourns.

My mother passed away 43 years ago. The only reason that I can remember the date is because she died at Christmas. I can't tell you the date of my father's death. I remember them on Mother's Day and Father's Day and sometimes will have a memory that makes me smile. I miss them but know that this is the cycle of life. I do NOT post paeans of praise and love to them on the anniversary of their deaths, nor have I held my grief to me like Linus held his blanket. Grief is a process with a beginning and an end and reaching acceptance and peace is the goal.

That's when I realized what was keeping me awake. I was trying to free my daughter with my mind. No can do! The only one who can release her into a full and happy life is HER. I can toss, turn, suggest, obsess and you name it and it won't do a lick of good. I needed to let go and let IT go. "What if" is a dangerous game to play when you need sleep.

I finally nodded off and slept late the next morning...if you call 8:00 AM, sleeping late. The problem was solved by my recognition of the fact that I can't solve the problem. I had a chuckle at my own expense, talked about it with my friend, and, for the most part, am letting it lie. I took a mental health day, yesterday. I didn't watch a minute of news, chatted a bit online with some friends of like mind, and took an afternoon nap with hubby and pooches.

It felt so good, I just might do it more often. And I slept so well, last night.

Too Much Life Going On....

I was perusing the web looking for images of women juggling all the aspects of life. Most of the pictures were of women juggling home, children, mate and work or even items in a recipe. That's not really where most of us are, right now. The world is changing into a strange and scary place.

Most women are NOT singly focused on home and hearth or even jobs. We have our philosophies and our causes. These days, it's more like we are juggling chainsaws on a tightrope.

In every area of life, including the area of natural disasters, we are all cringing while waiting to see what comes next. The political scene, alone, is enough to make a grown woman cry. Like my friend said, there is more ugly stuff going on in the world other than adoption and some of it is worse.

That is not to denigrate the pain of those still working through the impact that having a child taken for adoption or being adopted has on one's life. It's just that if I had to pick a trauma, there are others that are a lot more crippling. I listed some of them in a previous blog. It seems we have a culture of victimology. "Get over it," is a bit harsh, but "recover and live" is workable.

I went through rape crisis counseling. One of the counselors said that, for her, it was about going through stages. First came the victim, then the struggler, then the fighter and, finally, the survivor. Funny, but she never referred to "victim" as a bad word. Also notable is the fact that many Mothers refer to ourselves, as a group, as survivors.

It was also important, in our recovery from being victims of rape to being survivors, to place the blame where it belonged. One woman wanted to blame her mother who was so insistent that she be "popular" that she encouraged her to date the guy who raped her. Many of us blamed ourselves for poor judgement of character or for choosing the wrong ride home, etc. ad infinitum. The fact is that we were afraid to narrow our focus on the person who was the real villain..the rapist. It was another way to avoid facing our fears and memories.

20th century psychiatry made blaming one's parents, chiefly the mother, for one's pain a popular concept. Many took that and ran with it. It gave them an excuse not to take responsibility for their own actions. It is always easier to blame than to examine who might be the real malefactor in adoption. It is especially difficult to blame a faceless Industry, a long-forgotten social worker and deceased parents. It is harder, still, for adoptees, to see the role of the adopter in the mix.

But once victimized doesn't mean forever a victim. There comes a point when it's not important how the jackass got into the ditch but how we can work together to get it out of there. As adults, we are responsible for our own survival, our own actions and words and how we respond to those in our arena of adoption activism. In every case where I have sought healing, I have found the tools were with me all along...inside me. So, if we looked inward for healing, perhaps we could look outward enough to work with each other and pull that damn donkey out of the ravine.

This issue is not 24/7 for me. As the title says, there is too much life going in. In the areas of financial stability, women's reproductive rights, the direction of our government, climate change and world-wide unrest, we are very busy keeping those chainsaws in the air. Our energies are being spread across a wider spectrum of causes and crisis. For OCD perfectionists like me, it is overwhelming. That is why the sniping, name-calling, carping, whining and otherwise making everything all about you in the adoption arena is trying my patience.

I am taking some mental health days...one or two a week. I'm retired, so that is no problem. Those are days when I don't worry about anything, turn off the news, step outside and know that the Universe is rolling along without the benefit of my august worry. While much of what goes on might somewhat affect me, not much of it is all about me...not even what happens within my own family.

Life today is frustrating. We are all survivors and we have earned a bit of serenity. There is no reason why we should allow our lives to be chaotic on a constant basis. Put down the chainsaws. Get off the tightrope. Now, breathe!

Doesn't that feel better?