Hearts In Exile: A Story of Reunion
Fifteen years ago, I drove at dusk across the Golden Gate Bridge to a blind date with my birthmother. Rush hour. My excitement registering on the speedometer. The rear-view mirror cranked down, to check and re-check myself every other moment. In retrospect, I wonder, how bad could I have possibly looked to her for this, the second glance at her firstborn? My hands were moist with that rare and exhausting mix of exhilaration, apprehension, and hope. Most of all, hope.
It would be years yet before I came to the belief that an adoptee approaches the reunion with a birthmother on two levels—the adult searching for missing links, medical information, a face deeply familiar; and the child-in-limbo, who’s waited a lifetime to reach out again, this time not to a crushing void, but to Mommy. Not Mommy who wiped my nose and tucked me in and embarrassed me in front of friends, not the everyday Mommy of everyone’s understanding, not the psychological Mommy of whom clinicians speak. I mean the primal Mommy.
The Mommy whose abrupt absence creates spaces so huge we don’t see them as spaces, but as part of what’s so for us. Part of what is us. A reality so fundamentally different for us than for all of our friends and family as to make us strangers in a strange land, lacking even a cognitive and symbolic context through which to make sense of our alien status. So we slip into the crowd, watching how they do it and falling in with them, in step, in word, in deed. Looking around, always vigilant, “is this the way it’s done?” The grand charade of the false self.
However on that crisp February evening, I was 21 years old and racing with the fog, unfettered by complicated feelings. Yes, I’d been seeing a therapist for almost a year by then—I’d been having some intimacy problems with my (by then, X-) boyfriend. And yes, my therapist had helped me see that I’d felt from an extremely early age that I was on my own, needing to take care of myself, an island. But I was still deep in the dreamlife of denial.
Throughout my childhood, I had been very matter-of-fact about the idea of having another mother out there somewhere. I do remember fantasizing occasionally that she was really one of my mother’s friends, someone I’d known all along. But when my father asked me, soon after my mother’s death, if I wanted to find my birthmother, my interest blossomed from its long dormancy.
Since mine was an independent, open adoption, I had virtually no search. I didn’t learn until much later that the journey of searching can often lift the lid off some of the unconscious and long-repressed feelings; mine wouldn’t rear their heads until many years later.
I don’t really remember what Liz and I talked about during that first phone call. I was floating through an unreal place, and our mundane chit-chat juxtaposed oddly with that. The bottom line was the setting of the date, “tomorrow, 5:00, Henry Africa’s.”
We hugged awkwardly, and then talked—a lot. The content of that conversation has also faded from memory. It was beside the point. The point was to gaze at this woman and catch glimpses of my own face reflected back, not as in a mirror, but ethereally, like through a lake, or through enchanted eyes. That was an incredible high, and continued to be; in fact, it was that genealogical fix that overshadowed many negative aspects of our relationship in subsequent years, the heady rush of connection which kept me coming back.
She had a few pictures to show me, and the one that dropped my jaw was the one of Bob, my birthfather. It was taken at the time of her pregnancy, when he was about 28 or so, not much older than I as I gazed upon the photo. Now that was like looking in a mirror, and I will always vividly recall my feeling at seeing him—“I finally look like someone!” (He and I are very close today…but that’s another story!)
Liz and I went back to her tiny apartment to spend the rest of the evening looking through scrapbooks. There, she showed me pictures of my sister and brother who’d come shortly after her marriage, which had come shortly after me. Alongside pictures of Ted and Liz (yes, she named her daughter Liz) were pictures of me, which Mom and Dad had sent over the years.
And her story unspooled—she’d been going with my birthfather in Santa Barbara, had gotten pregnant, and neither of them wanted to get married. She wasn’t a teenager, she was 24. She moved in with Bob and they were living together, with no future plans. One day she poured out her story to a neighbor, named Marcy. Marcy happened to have a friend from Chicago who was hoping to adopt, and could she tell her about Liz? Sure, why not.
Liz didn’t think much of it until Marcy showed up on her doorstep soon after with Bee. Liz and Bee hit it off, and they made arrangements with a lawyer named Phil Adams in San Francisco—one of the pioneers of open adoption—and Liz moved up to San Francisco. They shopped together for baby clothes, and Liz came to feel that “I was carrying this baby for Bee and Bob.”
“After you were born, I held you once and you spit up on me, and I gave you back to Dr. Norris,” Liz said, “and that was that. I never did believe in ownership of children.” But it seems to me now that, having learned much about what birthmothers suffer after relinquishment, what anyone suffers after unrecognized, ungrieved losses, that wasn’t simply that.
Over the subsequent week of our ’honeymoon’, and the years after, I learned other things about Liz. I learned that sometime after her other two children were born, she was diagnosed manic-depressive; she attempted suicide numerous times; she was institutionalized for several years; she lived at a half-way house after her release. At the time of our reunion, she had an amicable relationship with her ex-husband, and a friendly relationship with Liz and Ted, who had lived with their father all these years.She was on Lithium and she had a job as a phlebotomist (someone who draws blood) at a local hospital. She hated her job and wasn’t very fond of the Lithium, either. She did Transcendental Meditation twice a day, and had a transactional analyst whom she’d been seeing for many, many years. She liked to drink, to smoke pot and to frequent clubs to hear classical guitar and jazz. She liked to flirt—with men, with women, with anybody who would listen.
Over the following seven years I fell in step with her as I’d done with all the other important people in my life, picking up her tempo and playing the tune she wanted to play. And the song was always about her, her needs, her interests, her spaces which needed filling. My spaces, my needs, were given little attention.
It felt a little odd to me when Liz went to work as a personal attendant for my adoptive father—he’d suffered handicaps from polio 17 years before. When her self-centered temperament proved unsuitable for the job, and Dad fired her, she went on a bitter verbal tirade against him in my apartment. I remember being very uncomfortable, with the same flush I always got when anyone was angry or in conflict and I felt somehow responsible and ashamed. At that time in my life, I wouldn’t have known what a healthy boundary was if it slapped me in the face, which it did with every profanity Liz spat at my absent father. I didn’t recognize it for what it was until 15 years later.
It was then, just in the past year, as I was at work researching a documentary on adoption trauma, that Annette Baran urged me to re-connect with Liz, from whom I’d been estranged for 10 years. Her self-centeredness had finally angered me to the point of a long, honest letter about my feelings, and ultimately, to a rescinded invitation to my wedding, which severed our ties. My only feeling then was one of relief. One less (demanding) person to dance for.
But I’ve learned much about broken ties and their caustic nature, and one evening last year, having just returned inspired from a day at a regional AAC Conference, I telephoned Liz. (I’d have preferred to write, but she’d moved, and only her number was available from the directory.) She was surprised and understandably cool.
In our 10 or 15 minutes on the phone, I shared with her about how I’ve been looking deeply at how adoption affected me, what was going on with Bee & Bob, and some of the theories regarding the primal wound and pre- and peri-natal consciousness. I know she was listening with that fine mind of hers, because she replied to the latter, “Then where is the healing?” I told her about the exciting healing work I’m doing—some of the cutting-edge mind/body techniques, the pre- and peri-natal oriented therapy. I told her that I am finding great relief, and even growth and joy. She asked me to keep her apprised of my progress. I immediately wrote her a two-page letter, recapping and expounding on what I’d said on the phone. Noticing that I’d felt the need to censor my words regarding my adoptive parents’ problems (“you should have picked better people to be my parents”?) I began by assuring her that I felt no blame toward anyone, that I hold a deeply cosmic view of my adoption, and have come to believe it is my karmic gift.
As I explained my reasons for that letter of 10 years ago, I finally discovered what my anger was really about. As I wrote about the incident with my father, the feelings flooded over me once again, only this time I had the tools, the context, to understand them. Deep anger, violation. “You violated me and my relationship with my father, a relationship that you created in the first place, without my consent or consult.” As I finally set the record straight for her, something significant lifted in me. Another secret unbound. An ’ah-hah’ moment of which Joyce Pavao speaks.
Liz didn’t respond for months, and when she did, it was on a postcard which apologized for not writing, and said that “there’ve been no letters to anyone…” To be reduced to part of her ’everyone’ felt to my child-in-limbo like a second rejection.
In my next session of Network chiropractic (a technique which unlocks stored memory) I lay on the table and felt the anger well up. Through my mind flowed the thoughts, “I hate you for being such a coward…” and then…“I don’t want to come out, because she’s going to give me away.”
Was the feeling of hating her for being a coward what I’m feeling toward her now for not responding to me, or an ancient feeling from then for giving me away? I think the answer is simply, yes. As Robert Anderson says, the unconscious mind remains unconstrained by logic. It is timeless and fluid.
I let Liz know that I’d like to find a place for us to have a relationship, but my tacit condition was that it be a place that honors how this journey of adoption has shaped us. Perhaps the prospect of connecting with her own feelings of loss over my relinquishment—as I have finally connected with my own losses—is just too terrifying for Liz, who has found a neat and orderly place to store it in her life. Could she really, down to her core, have felt simply that she “was carrying you for Bee and Bob”? I’ve accrued enough life experience to never rule anything out, but after meeting so many birthmothers and hearing so many of their stories of grief and the lifelong void—however manageable—I must wonder. And on the rare occasions when I speak with Liz, I get a sense that she lives a somewhat marginal life, emotionally, spiritually and physically. I get a further sense, as well, that it’s what’s inside the margins that she won’t face, and what’s inside the margins is me.