Writing My Wrongs

Self Fulfilling Prophecies

"Not only is another world possible, she is on her way.  On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." - Arundhati Roy

I spoke with a Mom friend today. A dear friend, recently in reunion, a reunion I assisted with.  During our discussions of the various states of our reunions she said to me:

"I have accepted that I will never have the kind of relationship with my child that many of our other friends in reunion have with theirs."

Has she really accepted that? So soon? Can you accept that?

Should she accept that?

And if you do, if you truly believe you will never have X don't you end up someway making sure you don't? Can that line of thinking become a self fulfilling prophecy?

I urged my friend to think a bit deeper about that. It is early in her reunion. She might be surprised.

I challenged her partly for her benefit and partly for my own.

Why does it really matter?

Negativism attracts negative things. Have you noticed how easy it is to get sucked into negative morale at the office? How listening to someone bitch and complain makes you feel sick or uneasy and perhaps even provokes your own complaints?

My life is fulfilling the predictions I embrace. Will they be the negative messages, or will I choose to live out the positive ones and be happy, successful, believe that my daughter does care about me and want to know me? It is an intentional decision on my part to ignore or overwrite negative messages, and a deliberate stance to take on life half full.

As challenging as my lukewarm reunion has been with my daughter, I have never given up hope. I feel, deep in my core, that given time, maturity, freedom from the power of her adoptive parents and many other things, that my daughter and I can and will have a relationship. That fact has never ever left me. I have faith in her. I have faith in me. I know how strong of a person I am. I know how caring, consideriate, educated, self aware, adoptee considerate. I am 100% confident that if and when she gives me that chance, we will be okay. I know she will like me. She is just afraid to.

Will we be mother and daughter in the traditional sense?

No.

I did not raise her. She doesn't look to me for those type of motherly things. I don't expect her too. I did not wipe the boogars, change the nappies, bandage the skinned knees. As much as I may have wanted to, I didn't. She will not innately look to me for comfort or direction or assistance.

But she is my daughter. And I am her mother. And I believe in her. I believe in me.

I do believe, with time, we will have a close relationship.

I have not given up hope. I have never felt anything different. It is that driving force, the fire in the pit of my stomach that pushes me forward. That helps me when I feel ignored by her, abused, and neglected. I know what is there. I know what is waiting for both of us. She doesn't.  I remember what it was like to hold her. She has no conscious memory of me.

Even if no one else believed in the value of our mother child bond, I do and always did. It just took me a while to really articulate that and act on it. Now that I have, I am not going back.

I do believe.

She and I can define our relationship and with time and her own emotional maturity, I do believe we will.

A new day dawns every day and some day that daily sun will shine on us.

Of that I am sure.

Muy necesitado

"We can find the balance between needing people too much and not letting ourselves need anyone at all." - Unknown

A few years back my husband and I began providing my eldest son with a weekly allowance. There were many motives behind doing so. We wanted him to understand the value of money, to think about saving, spending and the difference between needs and wants.   

We informed our son that his allowance was his spending money for things he wanted versus needed. If he needed new shoes, mom and dad would purchase those. If he wanted a pack of pokemon cards while we were grocery shopping, they were his to purchase. He had to decide how valuable those pokemon cards were in the great scheme of things. Sometimes he bought the frivolous items. Other times he saved and saved well. (He saves so well that I am often caught borrowing money from him!).

The concept of need vs want occurred to me last night after a number of conversations and blog comments about needy mothers or needy adoptees.

Again, I question if need is the right word in all cases

I understand what is meant by suggesting a person is “needy”. In my world that means they are high maintenance, unable to source their own soul, demanding and emotionally draining. They look to the outside world an those around them for love and validation and constant stimulation.

But I wonder if that “neediness” isn’t a symptom of something else, specifically, a desire to be loved or part of the others life. Furthermore, the rejection of such needy people is truly a rejection of love. Love that frightens you. Love that makes you unstable and unsure.

Early in my reunion with my daughter I wrote her fairly frequently. Even if she did not answer I would write her weekly, sometimes several times a week.  I would share family events, status of her brothers, pictures, and my own life happenings. I included her on every set of family event pictures ala Shutterfly. I would ask her questions about her life, her school, her likes and dislikes.  More often than not these notes fell on onto a deaf keyboard. There was no reply at all.

As our reunion progressed, I began to write less frequently. Lacking any sort of feedback from her on even the most benign of emails, I began to feel that I was going to appear to her as a high maintenance needy person. While she never told me so, I suspected she was sitting at her keyboard, launching her gmail and upon seeing my address in her inbox, she would roll her eyes, expel a loud breath of air and quickly hit the delete key.  After doing so, she would say to herself “Gosh, that woman is so frikkin annoying”.  Alternatively, I have also assumed that I am simply marked as spam and she never even sees the mail I send her.

I began to feel as if, and I had no proof of this, that I was one of those needy annoying mothers in reunion. Writing her too frequently, asking too many questions, being too interested in her life, violating some invisible boundary. If I wasn’t, wouldn’t she respond? If she was interested in me, capable of talking to me, wouldn’t she? 

So I decreased communication. I have even ceased sending gifts for holidays. I feel our relationship is very one sided and that I – with all my good intents – am making her feel stalked, uncomfortable and bothered.

I am not a needy person. In fact, I have been accused of not needing anyone, of being too cold, too independent, too analytical, and too guarded. I have been told I don’t let anyone in and I spend too much time in my thinking self – versus my feeling self.

(I could argue that this personality trait came from being left by all when I needed them the most but that would be an entirely different post.)

So if I know I am not a needy person, but I fear I am making the impression of a needy person to my daughter, what does it really mean? Am I just a nutter or is there something more here?

I suspect there is something more.

Do I need my daughter? Does my entire existance depend upon her and her alone? Of course not. 

Do I want to know her? Hold her? Talk to her? Love her? Help her? Hear her giggle? See her latest hair color up close and personal? Do I want hear her dreams? Help her achieve those? Do I want to hear her voice? Go shopping with her? Share a vodka martini with her? Discuss literature with her?

Oh god yes.

The Notebook

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” - Virgina Woolf

No, I don't mean The Notebook as in Nicholas Sparks' Notebook. I mean my notebook.

The red spiral bound notebook I came across tonight. I am cleaning my home office. I emptied out a laundry basket that had collected random junk of mine. Most of it is related to my daughter, to my time in the maternity home.

The first page is dated 8/10/86 which would make it 3 months after my daughter was born and surrendered. Its heart wrenching for me to read. I flipped through a few pages. I smiled. I laughed. There is the page that has a list of names I scribbled as possible names for her. There is a page that has the list of names of all the other inmates at the "home" with me. There are letters written but never mailed. There are doodles.

A twenty one year old notebook.

Flipping further into the year there are scribbles that I apparently wrote while on a phone call with my daughters father. Its obvious I was in Chicago, my roommate was present in the room and knew who I was talking to.

[section deleted]

Another section has an angry letter to my mother, telling her to stay out of my business and to never speak to me about my daughters father again...

And still farther back there is a letter to him telling him I wanted to see him again but we could not tell anyone because others wouldnt approve.

One of the most deeply healing things that has occurred for me in the years since reunion is uncovering the truth. I had spent so many years hating him. It ate me up inside.

Now I know, I see again, it ate him up too.

I suspect many good blog postings will come from this notebook. That is, if I can muster the strength to read the age old words of my 19 year old self.

A new MAMA

"History must be written of, by and for the surivors" - Anonymous

I wonder if such a thing exists. Or if it could exist?

It came to me in a dream over the weekend. I have been having lots of adoption related dreams lately and I am beginning to think the triggering event is that I am finally seriously working on an adoption related novel. I believe mulling over the many years of adoption trauma is causing more memories to surface.

I am managing them okay. Sleep can be fitful and I am bit distracted at times but so far, I am doing okay. It is not like days gone by where I was unable to eat, function, sleep and worse. I don’t have that waking terror feeling. I can put the feelings into an invisible fanny pack and go on with my day.

Over the weekend I dreamt of an adoption museum. It was odd, interesting, and I found myself waking and wondering if such a thing existed. In my dream I was walking right through it…looking at all the visual displays of adoption trauma. Thankfully, I awoke from the dream.

The more I thought about it afterwards the more I realized it should not be called Adoption Museum. Adopters and politicians would jump on it and use it as a chance to rant about the wonders of the American adoption machine. It must show the horrors of the machine much like the Holocaust museum in DC shows the horrors of that time in history.

Perhaps Family Preservation museum? Rape of the Soul Museum? Museum for Mothers and Children? Perhaps some variation of MOMA (not to be confused with Museum Of Modern Art. Maybe MAMA as an acronym for something?)

I see it full of Fesslers exhibits (quite powerful), Celeste Billhartz work, adoption music, Lina Eves work, my friend J’s exhibit that did interesting things with her birth certificate(s)…..poems, stories, pictures, music, for all to see. How about a single registry that you can walk into and do a look up on?

Do tell me, is there such a thing? If not, there should be, don’t you think? As a communications professional, I believe we need to utilize a variety of mediums to appeal to people. Some people are auditory, some are visual, some need to touch, feel and experience.

Hey, I heard the “Back to the Future Ride” was being shut down at Disney.  Imagine if we could give a person a VR ride of what it feels like to lose your child? Or how about the experience of having multiple names and identities?

The difference between the adoption VR ride and real life adoption is that the VR ride you can get off of. You can walk away from it. Its not real.

Adoption trauma never leaves you. And it is very very real.

Now about that museum…..