Being There, and After

As the parent of two teenagers, I not infrequently discover new shades of meaning of the word “discouragement.” Even in my most realistic (and I read everything I could get my hands on while my husband and I waited to adopt, to be sure that my expectations would be realistic) parenting dreams, I never could have imagined the challenges that the teen years would bring. And it’s not even sex, drugs, firearms, or running away, the kinds of things I was ready to worry about. Who would have thought the field of opportunities for parent-child conflict and misunderstanding could be so vast? Who could have anticipated, e.g., how much self-assurance it would take not to be deeply offended by my teenagers’ tenacious conviction of my utter stupidity? And running along with the friction, in the background, is the awareness that such conflicts will soon be replaced by the calm of their absence.

“Vast” is a word that also might describe the doubts, the questions about the future, that plague the parents of teenagers, “Will they become responsible, considerate adults?” “Will they be able to take care of themselves, have jobs, pay their bills?” “Will they have close, healthy relationships?” “Will they ever learn to hang up their towels?” And, “Why didn’t I make this parenting decision rather than that one?” or, “Is there anything at all that I can do about it at this late stage?”

Getting out of this pit of discouragement and doubt only seems possible, paradoxically, when I am able to throw out the questions and evaluations, to drop the story line, to spit in the face of these most consequential concerns, at least for a little while, and only observe, register, imbibe, my sons’ simple physical presence. I am rewarded when I can manage just to savor the sensory data: their forms, their eyes, their whiskered chins, their mannerisms, their non-childlike voices, even those characteristic teenage olfactory features of which I try to get them to be less free in sharing. Once I can just acknowledge this physical presence with gratitude, any positive interaction can, and sometimes does, follow.

Physical presence. Being there. Above all, it has been this physical presence with which I, their second mother, have been blessed for all these years. It is exactly the same presence of which, during this time, their birth parents have been bereaved. As I face a time when my children will be on their own, away from me, I wonder again what that absence must have been, must be, like for their first parents.

Yet, at the beginning of my children’s stories, their presence in my life was not, of course, physical at all. It was their birth parents, with no involvement from their present mom and dad, who brought my children into being. I wonder if they, these creators, are sometimes able to see this event, this piece that is missing from my own parenthood puzzle, as a nugget of indestructible joy, buried as it might be beneath the landslide of adoption grief.

As I watch my children grow up, my parents (myself!) age, my extended family grow and shift, I am forcefully reminded of how life’s only certainty is change. And yet, in another sense, everything that happens actually is permanent, or at least can never be undone or subtracted from but only added to. I think that’s why forgiveness can be so difficult, especially if we mistakenly believe that it means trying to “annihilate” the offense. It’s why, despite what the “amended” birth certificate would suggest, adoptive parents don’t ever completely replace birth parents. It is also why a reunion of an adoptee with his or her birth parent(s) does not undo the adoption. And it’s why something of my children has remained all this time with their birth parents, and why the physical presence, and what flowed from it, that I’ve enjoyed with my sons, as sweet babies or as sometimes obnoxious teenagers, will always be with me.

Soon my teenaged sons will be out of this nest where I’ve wanted so much to nurture and protect them. I face the task of letting go of each one as a child and of getting to know him as an adult. I admit that I’ve had visions of them saying, “I don’t need to be here any more and I’m out of this lame, un-cool family. “ I admit to a nagging little fear that after all this time of getting to know them, they will become, as they strike out on their own, more like strangers. Already we divide, for example, on the quality of TV shows and on what makes something funny.
It’s not a pleasant thing for the people we love to seem like strangers to us. We feel close when we feel like we know them and they know us. Yet, because we are always growing and changing, it seems that every relationship has an element of being a stranger, of needing to discover who the other person is. This is reassuring because it means it’s ok if we don’t know as much as we’d like to about them, that we can always continue to learn. It’s also reassuring, I’m convinced, that whatever strangeness may appear can never completely revoke that gift of physical presence, once bestowed.

As my sons move out into the world, establishing their own identities and getting busy with their lives, I wonder about the level at which we will stay in touch. And I wonder how it will be for them and for their birth parents if and when my sons want to get to know them. I hope that they won’t be afraid to claim their original shared presence, calling on it to counter and heal the years of absence, of strangeness. I am hoping also that if and when this happens, I will remember to be steady in the face of the strangeness I might feel and always to cherish the physical presence I drink in today.

Birth Day

Today is my birthday. I'm 55 and still alive! Obvious, of course, at least while I'm doing this writing, but a non-obvious aspect is that today I am officially older than my older sister, my oldest sibling, who died at age 54. I felt her "presence" comforting and encouraging me this morning; still, it's sobering to stand at the front of the line. But not enough to reverse my love and gratitude for this day.

On my birthday, I almost always visit the concept of "birth," a particularly deep well among the deep wells that water the human imagination. (And for those of us touched by adoption, the well may be even deeper.) I wonder about my own birth, about birth in general: just what is it that happens, what are we celebrating? Of course, it's about coming to life, though before we are born we're already alive, if still aquatic, dark-inhabiting, and silent. At birth we claim our terrestrial, diurnal nature; we first receive the gifts of air and of light. We make sound, that first wail of terror and/or joy! It's about the first separation, the first foray from the security of confinement to the risk of freedom. (I will mention that there is an entire story about mothers and children here, but it deserves its own post.)

I wonder, too, about the birth of my children, from which I was absent. I who did not give them birth, vicarious mother, waited and imagined what it would be like, the primal mystery of heaven and earth, of flesh and spirit, happening so far from my own body. I know a few precious details about their births, such as, one had already evident broad shoulders and was delivered using suction to his head, the other was delivered with forceps, the dents from which remained for weeks. They are little proofs of my sons' arrival into the world by the standard method, which I've heard is a fact many adoptees often do not take for granted. Since their births occurred outside of our family, I wonder if there is an implicit urge to skip to the time when we were all together, to gloss over the birth chapter of the story, to not dwell on their own, private, day of Light and Air. In fact, once I heard an adult adoptee say that when she was growing up, her family celebrated her adoption day instead of her birthday(!?!). Though I think all of the partying distracts my sons from focusing on the fact of their births, I have always hoped I could make a comfortable space for each of them to hold and treasure his own birth day.

On my 55th birthday, on this day in midsummer when surprise lilies and cardinal flowers are blooming and cicadas are calling at high decibels, I am thinking about the natal gift of air. Talk about something we take for granted, something that usually seems more like a "nothing." But eagles and hummingbirds, not to mention 747s, are supported by it, it can feel good when it moves around us at the right temperature and speed, or, as the Talking Heads put it in the eponymous song, "Air can hurt you, too" (as in a tornado). And without it we're just finished. Even more than food or drink, it is what connects our bodies with the outside world. As BKS Iyengar said in The Tree of Yoga (I am paraphrasing), when we take in air, (inhale), we reach out, contacting the world; when we let it out (exhale), we return, retreat, to our self. Our first birthday present keeps on giving, with us reciprocating, the most basic form of balance, as long as we breathe. For free.

And that gratuity is, I think, the heart of the of birthday elation, celebration. A birthday arrives with its gratuity every year, regardless of one's laziness, carelessness, disorganization, procrastination, incompetence, immaturity, selfishness, or worse, along with chronic doubt and senseless guilt, the things that constrict the free flow of air in and out of us. It is entirely undeserved, like amnesty, like forgiveness.

Adoption and Trees

During my bike rides in early June, I was able to observe so many ordinary things as wonderful, among them the leaves on the trees at this time of year. The show of the flowering trees (Forsythia, apple, crab, cherry, pear, redbud, dogwood, etc.) was long over, but I’d never before really noticed the effect of all the green leaves, newly mature. Not only were they dark, full-sized, and numerous, but they were so precisely stacked and distributed, fresh recruits at the beginning of the season’s long labor of photosynthesis. Their shapes were so perfect, not yet exposed to the munching of insects or the battering of repeated storms.

I love trees for the sheltering, architectural living things they are, whose cutting down can hurt like the loss of a friend. One of my earliest memories, or maybe it was just a family story that became a memory, was of my father and his friends cutting down the trees (probably weedy Alanthus) in the back yard of our "new" house and my displeasure about it. And when we lost our American Elm trees in the front, my proposal to plant an apple tree in their place was rejected.

I love trees for the way they evoke the human figure, even the face. They are among my favorite things to draw or just to gaze at and “read:” arms, fingers, legs, torsos, in conflict, affection, supplication, passion, protection.
They are dancers. They are people in yoga poses: backbends, twists, and, especially, inversions, leafy legs in the air. (The Sanskrit word for handstand—Adho Mukha Vrksasana—actually translates literally as “downward facing tree.”)

I know I am far from alone in this love of trees; there even have been cultures who saw them as objects of worship. More abstractly, the idea of a tree has been used as a metaphor for a wide variety of concepts, e.g., the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree of yoga, and of course, the family tree. As a new adoptive parent, I had read about the ubiquity of the assignment to construct a family tree in elementary school and how it could be difficult for adopted children. I was prepared to draw creative trees with my kids, the roots representing their birth families and the branches representing our adoptive family. As luck would have it, however, my children (who both are already out of elementary school) happen to have been spared, or perhaps deprived of, the dreaded Family Tree Assignment. They didn’t have to feel uncomfortable and different about showing their family tree to the class, but neither did we have this particular opportunity to sit down and work through how they belong, in different ways, to our adoptive family and to their birth families. The tree they might have drawn would not have been quite the kind of thing one could find in nature, but it would have been a way to describe their reality.

Actually, the tree as a model for family relationships has its limitations, even for biological families. Where the tree “originates” is necessarily arbitrary, and information about the origins of members who marry into the family generally are not included. Describing remarriage after death or divorce also requires some creativity to portray. In fact, only if we reproduced by splitting in two like amoebae would a tree truly be an accurate description of family relationships.


The family of adoption often has been portrayed as a grafted tree, as in the collection of poems, Perspectives on a Grafted Tree, edited by Patricia Irwin Johnston. Sherri Eldridge, in her “Twenty Things” books (e.g., Twenty Things Adopted Children Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew, Twenty Things Adoptive Parents Need to Succeed) often refers to adoption in terms of a grafted tree. This metaphor has some glaring limitations, e.g., apple trees are grafted in order to propagate apples with as little variation as possible, which doesn't sound like what we are trying to do with our children. But the process of grafting is a graphic illustration of the loss and healing that happens in adoption. Adoptees are cut off from their genetic past, adoptive parents from their genetic future. While this doesn't replicate a non-grafted tree, when they are bound together, love, like water and sap, flows between the two parts. The roots provide the graft with water, minerals, and a secure connection to the earth; the graft then produces leaves for photosynthesis to nourish the whole tree and, ultimately, flowers and fruit. I love this image of intimacy and draw comfort and encouragement from it when the storms of the teen years rumble.

Sometimes I wish my kids hadn’t gotten out of the family tree assignment. One or the other may have worked through the complex tree idea, or, for the sake of getting it over with, and to not stick out among classmates, may have opted to use a tree that only included the family with whom they live. If it was I in their position, I might have wanted to change the focus of the assignment and offer a picture of the sawtooth oak in front of out house as our family tree, which we planted in cooperation with our city’s public works department. Besides being an example of how sometimes you really can do what you want when you grow up and have your own house, it does mirror some things about our family. This tree started its life somewhere else and was dug up and transplanted to our yard, where we love it, behold it change and grow, care for it as we can, and release it to elements we can’t control. Already it’s lost branches to ice storms, and who knows what pests lurk out there to threaten its integrity? But, mostly, each day’s disasters and triumphs don’t make or break it. And I think this year we will have a good crop of acorns.

A Vision of Mothers' Day: Birth and Adoptive Moms

Mother's Day arguably is a holiday invented by card companies to stimulate business, but regardless of its origin, it certainly stimulates strong feelings about motherhood. For those of us whose lives are shaped by adoption, these feelings can be especially powerful or even raw. As an adoptive mother, I feel more intensely around Mother’s Day my gratitude for the gift of motherhood, for my sons, who have brought more meaning to my life than I ever could have imagined. This gratitude is immeasurably sweet but always mixed with sadness. Some of the sadness comes from not having carried them in my body, but most is from the knowledge that what brought them to me was tragedy and loss. I can’t help thinking about how Mother’s Day feels to two other women, bereft of the joys of my life. I send them notes, photos, cards (our relationship could be described as “semi-open”), handmade cards, if I can manage, into which I pour as much love as such an offering can hold. Yet I know these really are feeble gestures that can’t begin (or maybe only just begin) to touch their world.

Although it’s not widely publicized, the day before Mother’s day has been observed, mostly by groups of birth mothers, as Birth Mother’s day, a day to acknowledge their unique, bittersweet experience of motherhood. A few years ago, I saw in the local Catholic newspaper an announcement for an observance of Birth Mother’s day at the chapel of a local hospital, hosted by a Catholic adoption agency. I was excited that someone had organized such an observance and eagerly wanted to be part of it, to witness, honor, affirm the experience of the attending birth mothers, of all birth mothers, and especially, even though they wouldn’t be present, my sons’ birth mothers. At the same time, the thought of being close up to a sharp reality from which I’m usually insulated, which can be scary even in my own imagination, made me hesitate, made me feel shaky as I locked my bike and walked through the hospital doors.

In the chapel, I was handed a program of songs, readings, and prayers. The gathering was small. Beside myself, I think there was a couple with their young adopted daughter, two social workers from the agency, and three or four birth mothers. I don’t remember the details of the ceremony, but the songs and readings were meaningful and beautiful. Each birth mother shared a brief summary of her story: how long it had been since the adoption, what her circumstances were, what her reunion and present relationship with her birth child was like. Needless to say, many tears were shed. Afterward cake was served, and more informal conversation followed.

Though I was glad to have participated, I wondered whether I should really have been there. No one made me feel unwelcome, and one birth mother spoke to me with tears of gratitude that I would want to hear her story. But I wondered if my presence made them hold back, feel uncomfortable expressing, say, their rage and frustration about having so little to say about the fate of their children.

Not everyone finds gatherings with songs, readings, and candles to be a comforting place to bring their feelings of gratitude and loss, but I for one, very much do. In the blur of bringing home a new baby, my husband and I didn’t attend the adoption blessing ceremony put on by our agency shortly after my first son’s arrival, but I know that his birth mother was there and read the prayer I’d written for the day we brought him home. Even this little report is an ember that still glows in my heart. The following year, I drove two hours to meet her at another such ceremony, where we sat together, listened, sang, prayed, and lit candles. Afterward, we talked about the things she was saving for my son, about her mother, about her Swedish grandfather. I remember that she took it upon herself to get me some cookies and coffee, like a hostess, and when it was over I gave her a ride home. It was like a dream, framed with poetry, song, candlelight.

I’ve attended, and even been involved in planning, several “adoption blessing” events since then. These events, organized by adoptive parents and adoption workers with all members of the “triad” in mind, always are emotional and meaningful for me but also a bit disappointing because few birth parents or adult adoptees attend.

Once I tried to organize a reading of adoption poetry by putting up a few fliers on bulletin boards around town. (What did I know about publicity?) I naively expected at least one or two birth mothers, adult adoptees, and of course lots of adoptive parents, to see my announcement and jump at this opportunity to share, through their own words or those of others, their experience of adoption. Not surprisingly, it was attended (yes, and enjoyed) by a few fellow parents and myself. A little reflection on a couple of pieces, quickly chosen from A Ghost at Heart’s Edge by Susan Ito and Tina Cervin (“Letter to the Adoptive Parents from the Birthmother” by Carrie Etter and “Hunger” by Julia Sudbury) made clear to me that the walls of the coffee house may have had a hard time withstanding the emotion, let alone strangers venturing to hurl or catch it.

Adoptive parents’ magazines feature articles that speak about the difficulty of a birth mother’s experience with respect and gratitude, but they never approach the scale of intensity I’ve heard from the birth mothers’ own unguarded voices from other sources. I wonder whether there just is too much pain for an honest meeting, a mutual witnessing and sharing between birth and adoptive mothers, to be humanly possible. Yet, this is my dream, my vision. In my vision, it’s Mother’s Day/ Birth Mother’s Day. We are together, reading, singing, lighting candles. We are sharing stories and feelings, shouting, “I need you to hear this!” raging, weeping. And we are silent, listening, listening. We are hugging. We are taking leave, exhausted, maybe carrying the seeds of forgiveness, of healing. We think about gathering next time.

Public, Like a Frog

Hello to the Blogosphere and to the humans who inhabit it! And welcome to my blog, "Adoption and Other Mysteries." As the "and Other Mysteries" part of the title indicates, this blog won't be just about adoption, but my most "advanced degree" happens to come from being an adoptive mother. Adoption, in my experience, speaks of some of life's deepest mysteries, it is the teacher from which I have learned more than from any other. In this blog I hope to share some of what I've learned as well as what I still want to learn about the relationship called adoption and how it's connected, even if remotely, to other parts of life.

Deciding to share thoughts about adoption over the internet makes me think about the strains of secrecy/denial versus truth/openness that have run through the history of adoption. As beautiful and sacred as adoptive relationships are, they are impossible without events that we would rather not have happened, like untimely pregnancy, giving up a child, infertility. When life gets messy we humans tend to judge harshly, we want to sanitize it, to push out the "bad elements," to not talk about it or keep others from talking about it. And when the chance to speak finally comes, we often explode with pent up anger, lashing out at the nearest target. Adoption is not the big secret it once was, but honest discussion about it still takes courage. In addition, it takes skill to speak out while respecting the privacy and confidentiality of others. My children, for example, have let me know in no uncertain terms that they do not want to be discussed specifically in this blog. I admit, for my part, that it's a little scary to be exposing my heart to the big, dark Blogosphere, especially to the the raw elements of adoption. Yet, the strange and untimely, recent death of my sister prods me, reminds me that all of us have a choice to articulate and share what we know, such as it is, possibly shedding a bit of light on someone else's path, or to take it to our graves. I know something, partial but real, about adoption. This blog is my humble offering, with love.

The following poem by Emily Dickenson isn't exactly about adoption, but it is about speaking out to the world. It could be, in an opposite kind of way, the anthem of the fledgling blogger, who, armed with only their little heart-gift, is about to go public.


I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog[or blog]!