Writing My Wrongs

The Artwork of Joanna Fisher

" The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.  ~William Faulkner

The picture below is posted with permission of the artist, Joanna Fisher. 

This is but one in a series of adoption related photography and artwork. I want it all. At the very least, I want her to tour adoption conferences and other places and display it.  It is pretty powerful.   I will post more in the future.

As a communications professional I believe, preach, insist, that people absorb information via different vehicles. Art is one of the many ways we can show the world the trauma and horror that is adoption in the USofA.

Much of Joanna's work shows the pain and confusion of her own experience as an adoptee. It can certainly touch the dark places in others. I know when I saw it the entire piece for the first time it moved me to tears.

Click the picture to see the larger version. If it is not clear (it is my own crappy photo) the writing on it says:

In the Old Testament. the phrase "I will blot out their names" (to erase their identity...as though they had never existed)  is a more powerful threat even than physical death.  - Dr. Rollo May

Phoenix Rising

"It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes." - Ann Baxter

I am working from home today. It is the start of a long weekend and many employees in my office are on vacation. I had no meetings and plenty of work to do so I decided to be remote.

Right now classical music (violin) is floating in my front windows from somewhere in the neighborhood. I am not sure if it is recorded or if someone is practicing. It is quite lovely. I don't want to put on my headphones to continue editing the supremely boring wav files I have to slice and dice for a CBT I am developing. I would much rather listen to the faint sound of violins. Another option is Leona Lewis. I am addicted to her "Bleeding Love".

I have been avoiding this audio editing like one would avoid the bubonic plague. I need to learn the program (goldwave) and then I need to take four large wav files and slice them into a bunch of small ones and synch them up with slides. Not fun. I am struggling with the program. I wonder if there is an easier one I can buy and use?

I also have a newsletter to write and layout and a logo to design. Got any suggestions for visual imagery for the word Confluence? This is the name of my department newsletter.

Oh, wait, adoption, right, this is my adoption blog.

So yeah, I wrote to my daughter last night (I knew the words would come) and proposed a contact schedule. Also asked her if she had any organizations she would like me to donate to in lieu of sending her gifts. I told her if I don't hear back from her (approving the contact schedule or other feedback), I will move ahead with my own idea of the scholarship in honor of her and also contact her around Christmas.

I feel good about it all. So good in fact, I am about to put another relationship in order. This is a toughie. Tougher in some ways than my relationship with my daughter. However, it has been hanging around me for years, draining me and giving little back. I have been avoiding dealing with it, the pain of letting it go.

Time to move on so I can move forward.

I would like to enroll in school in the fall (new media and communications stuffs) and also make some serious progress on my book. I am still struggling with autobiographical fiction or memoir? My sense is that the autobiographical fiction approach will have a wider reach. More on that in another post.

For now, as my LiveJournal ID indicates, I am a phoenix rising from the ashes and reaching for the sky.

Seeing the Light

"A codependent feels their value is predicated upon a willingness to devalue themselves" - Eric Roberts

I am doing okay.

I am feeling that now, after nearly three weeks since I heard from my daughter, that I am recovering from the pain of our latest exchange. I feel okay about myself and how I handled it and the decisions I am making regarding the future.

I reflected a great deal on our three year reunion (technically, it is nearly six if you count the fact that she found me before I found her but she did not contact me) and much to my surprise completely overlooked our "anniversary" date of June 28th. The day passed without emotional incident.

I have spent alot of time analyzing my own behavior and expectations and interestingly was able to draw from my therapy and past work with codependency. I realized that much of my feelings, reactions, expectations with my daughter were very frighteningly similar to those that I have had in other one-sided or hurtful relationships. Common themes in those relationships, like the relationship with my daughter, are:

1. Me focusing on their needs and feelings and believing theirs matter more than mine
2. Consistently putting aside my own hurt feelings and rationalizing and defending their actions - no matter how poor, abusive or justified they might be. 
3. Believing that I deserve their poor treatment of me because either I believe I caused their problems or I am supposed to be able to fix them and I am unable to.

I reread some Melody Beattie and also picked up one of my favorite books on boundaries - Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting and Enjoying the Self by Charles Whitfield.

I still feel a bit shaky and anxious but the overwhelming feeling is a positive one and a belief that I do not need to be accepted or wanted by my daughter to feel whole or believe I have value as a human being.

I assign that to myself. She does not.

While I will likely continue to be sad that my daughter chooses to not have a relationship with me or her brothers, I must continue to believe that is a reflection of her and her choices and not me or mine.

She has given me many clear signs that I have foolishly ignored or avoided or simply did not see. She has never written me unsolicited. She has never asked any questions about her story, her first family or even her medical history. She has not responded to any emails or drawings her brothers have sent her. She has not acknowledged them. She has never mailed me anything via USPS. She has only once acknowledged a birthday or holiday. She has repeatedly said she is not wounded, does not want or need a relationship with me.

I don't state these things to highlight her behavior but rather to show how dense I was. In light of all that and more, I still wrote to her even when she gave clear signs she would prefer I didn't. I relied on common reunion thinking and believed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that she was "testing" me. I followed that reunion bible teaching of staying in contact even when gifts were refused and emails went unanswered. In the end, I fear I did nothing but make myself into what appeared to be a neurotic, clingy mother who could not take "go away" for an answer.  For certain, I continually set myself up to be hurt. 

Why?

I was looking at our relationship through glasses colored by my adoption work with others. My years in adoption search, support and reunion have provided me with access to a significant number of adoptees and mothers that want to know each other. I have helped close to fifty adoptees or mothers reunite and watched from afar (or even up close) as they struggled through those relationships. I have talked to them late on night on the phone or computer. I have comforted them and they have comforted me. My view of adoptees and mothers was limited to those that consciously wanted to know each other and were working hard at getting through the roadblocks of reunion. I therefore struggled with why my daughter might not be like them. It had to be me, right?

Again, no.

I see that now. Her last email was so, well, it was something. Lets just say that it contained the final ingredients I needed to put this reunion dish on the back burner. I will no longer stir the pot.

I get it now, M. I do. I will leave you alone.

I realize the appropriate thing to do is to let her know I wont be in contact anymore and as she has indirectly requested, I wont send her any more presents. (I am instead working on developing a scholarship for young, single moms using the funds I would have normally spent on her).

The words haven't quite formed yet in my heart and therefore my head and fingers are unable to craft them. I hope within the coming weeks I will find the words. The general theme will be that I am not leaving her but respecting her apparent wishes and should she ever want more contact,  I will be here. I will suggest a contact schedule (perhaps once a year?) and hope she agrees with it.

I am confident the words will come.

There is a great deal lacking in my life but words are usually close at hand.

Obligated

“Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.” - Richard Bach

Obligated.

The word has stayed with me for days. I have heard it over and over in my mind. I even looked up the meaning in wiktionary (even though I knew what it meant). I could even hear JM's voice saying it.

Obligated.

In a recent comment thread, my dear friend JM (an adoptee AND a firstmom), indicated she did not want to search for her first family as she did not want to find more people she was obligated to love.

The word "obligated" hit me between the eyes and caused a big owie in my heart. It is a rather telling statement when an adoptee says she does not want to search and find more people she is obligated to love.

I don't want to speak for JM (although I don't think she would mind THAT much since we were both incarcerated in the same maternity home in 1986 and have remained friends ever since) nor do I mean to suggest that all adoptees feel this way.

However, the fact that ONE adoptee does, and that one adoptee is a dear friend of mine makes me sad.

Obligated.

The word obligated is an adjective used to imply commitment, having an obligation or being obliged. It is the simple past tense and past participle of the world obligate. Obligate means:

1. To bind, compel, or constrain by a social, legal, or moral tie.
2. To cause to be grateful or indebted; to oblige. (transitive)
3. To commit (money, for example) in order to fulfill an obligation.

A synonym of obligate is the word force.

Does anyone but me feel that it is terribly sad that our children would not find us because they feel "obligated" to love us? That they feel they have to force love to their adoptive parents and/or their first family? What have we done to our children if this is how they view love?

Furthermore, where would that assumption come from? Perhaps the fact that they felt (or were made to feel) obligated to love the strangers that adopted them? Indebted? Grateful that they were adopted and saved from a fate worse than death (growing up with their first family)?

On a more personal level, this word hit me because I sense, from words my daughter and I have exchanged, that she may feel the same. I wonder if she, like other adoptees, might be so exhausted from fulfilling her obligation to those that adopted her that she is lacking the ability to love anyone beyond that? Or said differently, and perhaps more impactful, isn't it sad that our children would find reunion as taking something from them versus giving something? Isn't it a sad statement when instead of viewing reunion as more people to love them they view it as more people to demand something of them?

What is IS?

"No one can blame you
For walking away
Too much rejection
No love injection
Life can be easy
It's not always swell
Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl
'Cause it hurts like hell " - Music and Lyrics By David Bowie
From the Labyrinth Movie Soundtrack, 1986

To practice acceptance do you have to know what you are accepting?

Byron Katie likes to use the phrase "loving what is". Well, what if you don't know what is, IS. How do you love it?

How do you accept something you are not sure is the right thing to accept?

I don't know what I am supposed to accept. I probably should know that first, no?

Am I accepting a bad reunion? Is my reunion bad?

Am I accepting a daughter whose adoption worked and wants nothing to do with her first family? Do I know that for certain?

Am I accepting that my daughter wants nothing to do with me? Should I infer that from her writings? While she has not told me to eff off, you could read between the lines and assume that. Should I?

What am I accepting?

That I will never know my daughter?

Can I know that for certain?

Justice says "accepting what IS?"

I don't know what IS is.

How do you accept what you don't know and don't understand? Sure, the religious peeps can turn it over to God. Not believing in God, I cannot turn this over to the magical deity floating in the sky.

As a child I was taken to Alateen meetings by my mother. Anyone who has attended any sort of support group or twelve step type program is familiar with the serenity prayer.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference..."

I don't know what I cannot change.  How do I accept them? I believe I am pretty courageous in changing the things I can.  I know about them and I attack them head on. I am, however, sorely lacking in wisdom to know the difference.

Where do I go from here?