More Mama - from #2

Here's the beginning of my story about finding members of my birth family. Yup, I'm adopted.


Seeking My Birth Family - Part I

As an adopted adult daughter, my experience of parenting is complicated by both biology and history: my own little replicant runs by my side, hugs and kisses me, yells at me, cries and laughs. I have someone who really looks like me in my life! For the first several months after her birth, it was unimaginable that I could look into a pair of eyes the exact shade of brown as my own. Same skin color, same hair color, same eye color, same build. It’s still freaky! While emotionally significant, biology cannot compare to the past and present of my adoption, my history.

History is something altogether more complicated than biology. In my parenting adventures I have found many opportunities to grieve for the mother who never got to breastfeed, cuddle, or change and wash the diapers of her infant. When I felt that powerful mother-love, a surge of violent protection instinct, I wondered what parallel emotion my birth mom must have felt, and then grieved that loss, too.

Prior to the birth of my daughter, I didn’t want to imagine and experience so much loss. All this wondering got me off my butt and into the post office. After two years of putting it off for no good reason, I finally submitted my registration as a seeker to the State of Illinois Dept. of Children and Family Services.

After I sent the registration, I didn’t hear anything. She wasn’t looking either! I was disappointed again (I had registered all over in previous years, including the huge, and free, ISRR). I then discovered I could ask the State to seek my parent on my behalf. The stipulation: one relative only, and if they said no, or if they could not be located, too bad so sad. After some debate, and despite an ambiguous feeling of dread as I checked the right box, I chose to search for my birth mother.

Almost a year passed before I heard anything from the agency. I moved to another city and quit teaching part-time English composition to technical college students. I contemplated getting pregnant again. We night weaned. So I sent my worker an email asking what was up, and she called me the next business day. She was making progress, and my case was next on her list to work on.

Eventually they sent me a form with non-identifying information on it, culled from our 30+ year-old files. My birth mom was 19 at time of placement, blond and blue-eyed, a college student from a French family! My dad was olive skinned, dark brown hair and eyes, 21 at time of placement, a factory supervisor from a German family! I don’t look like my mom, but just like my dad. There was very little else in the file that could really sustain me, but every letter gave me something I didn’t have before - links to my physical place in the world, my family, my heritage. Was my birth father Jewish? Catholic? When did my mother’s family emigrate to the U.S.? Why were they Episcopalian? Her hobbies were art and music. Mine too! And when I was born, the cord was wrapped around my neck once, but it wasn’t a big deal in the medical record. So much I never knew, never. Maybe all I would ever know.

Then, a few months later, I received a letter from the agency: my old worker left the agency unexpectedly and my case had been assigned to someone else. More delays! More chance for failure! It is an emotionally risky business to wait for news of the biologically related.

But my skepticism was misplaced; this new worker contacted me in a month with concrete news about my birth mother. “Bad news, I’m afraid: your mother is deceased.”

Dead.

It took a very long time that day for this change to really sink in. Despite my being in a kind of shock, I sent my mom an email soon after I got the call. I wasn’t even thinking about what it meant, what I was now: an orphan. A motherless child. A mother without a past and no family history. She called me as soon as she read the email, asking if I was OK. “Oh,” I numbly answered, “I’m OK. Sad, but not devastated or anything. It wasn’t like we had a relationship or anything.” She knew I wasn’t thinking clearly, bless her wisdom. In a devastatingly appropriate and compassionate gesture, my mother wired two beautiful plants with her condolences to me, and a gift for my daughter. This made me finally get it - my mother was dead.

In the phone call, the worker told me she couldn’t say how my mother died, or when, or what her name was when she died. It was agency policy, she tactfully informed me. In situations like this, I could choose another relative. Did I want to do that? If so, there were two maternal aunts, both younger than my mother. She suggested I seek the youngest, since she was, well, the youngest. She did not recommend I search for my birth father.
I agreed, asked for the paperwork, and sent all the approvals and changes back, with a brief letter stating why I was searching and a very tiny bit about me. Another chance to find someone of blood.

A week later, I received another phone call: good news. She had managed to contact the youngest aunt, and my aunt was overjoyed that I was searching. A very emotional phone call, the worker said. She really wants to contact me. I was totally stunned. I couldn’t even react emotionally - I could speak, but not really think at all. Thoughts would form and float around in my head with no order, no logical progression, no way to make sense out of any of it. “Uhhh...” I said.

“She is willing to follow your lead. Whatever you want to do next, she is OK with that. What would you like to do next?”

Silence. “Uhh.... I don’t know. Ummm...”

“We strongly recommend you exchange anonymous letters for first contact.” She added reasons why this is reasonable. I thought exchanging letters sounded reasonable. No need to jump into something I couldn’t even pronounce at the time. “OK, letters sounds good. But no need to be anonymous. I don’t care if she has my address and phone number. I feel safer with letters. Emotionally safer.”

My worker chuckles lightly. Warns me, “You might get a phone call!”

A phone call! My heart skipped one beat.

“Oh, that’s all right. What am I going to do, tell her get away from me? Don’t ever contact me again!?” And I am confident that I can handle anything from this point on. Any one.

Careful what you say, I think. But jump off the cliff anyway. So now I am thinking about the letter, writing this instead. Wondering about my biological attachments in another state, in someone’s body, all my potential for history and biology and fear and closure and who knows what else. And I will write.

Which photos will I send? Will I look like her? Like my mother? Like my father?

What, ultimately, is the cost of passing on? Of belonging?

Part 2 - from Issue #3

SEEKING MY BIRTH FAMILY, PART 2

This part of my story is necessarily more detailed, more pragmatic and less imaginary. And, as memoir, perhaps less poetic. This is where I get to discover how physical relation may yet redeem years of alienated, self-protecting behaviors, the result of years of combat with self-doubt. I would like to cash in my savings now, please, my private stash of likeness, for one relative with a whole lot in common, for what I have always imagined would be the redemptive feelings of faith, or of love.

It has been almost five months since I met two of the three surviving relatives in my birth mother’s family. Five months since I first heard P.’s voice, full of the unexpected, and five since I met her sister S.’s obedient dogs. And seven months since I learned that there are almost no more of my birth mother’s family left alive at all. As the second youngest DeBord member left, I am astonished at how I may have been spared by being raised outside of the family, a feeling I never knew I would come to accept.

In half a year I have understood great loss, my own and those of my relatives. I have witnessed the gaps in history and the hopeful similarity of biology. With no direct physical link to my self, I have encountered my mother’s sisters and have found it is possible, without the familiarity of time, to reflect and be reflected, to be like.

I knew this time would be full of feelings hard to describe and face, or understand. Every night during my daughter’s nap time I dove into research, looking for anything online about the family and my relatives. I found that my maternal grandfather died the year my daughter was born. Another death. Who else? So close on the heels of learning of my birth mom, Judy’s, death and our beloved dog’s recent euthanasia, I seriously wondered how deeply my heart could break. Each time my heart opened wider and deeper, each time I became softer. These lessons really aren’t so obtuse; but learning them is why I’m human and how I love.

I also read online advice about meeting and contacting one’s birth family. I read horror stories, stories about people whose parent or family was truly needy and psychotic. Stories about birth relatives addicted to drugs, in denial, or who were born-again Christians looking to convert their newfound family member. Stories about the sadly dysfunctional birth parent and the wonderful or interesting aunt or uncle. I cried a lot, reading these stories. But more than that, I hoped my connection would be healthy and solid, something I would enjoy working on and developing.

Thoughtfully, at my computer, I wrote my first real letter to P. In retrospect, my letter sounds so upbeat, optimistic even. Little did I know how the loss of years would later seem, even at this distance. It began, “Greetings from your long-lost relative!” I described how I found her, and what I expected/hoped. I asked many of my most important questions: who was my father? who do I look like? how and when did Judy die? from whom did my daughter and I inherit our wide feet? Worried about sounding too exuberant, I posed far fewer questions than I had and instead focused on what seemed necessary in my first correspondence. I enclosed a couple of good pictures of me and my daughter, and mailed it the next day.

About two weeks later I received an envelope with pictures, and a letter from P. I learned that Judy was killed instantly in a car accident when she was 33. That no one living knows who my father is. That the remains of the DeBord family are pretty small. That I look almost nothing like my mom. Cheekbones, same thick straight hair (but different color), but that’s it. She was tall and slender, I’m a good four inches shorter than she was and stocky. I don’t even resemble grandparents, or great-aunts. Really, I don’t look like anybody.

I don’t look like anybody.

Physical identity is for most adoptees largely a moot point; we’re raised by people with whom we don’t share any physical traits. Our siblings don’t look like us. Many of us don’t share any significant personality traits with our adopted families, either. Most stories I’ve read by adoptees don’t discuss this alienation from our parents and our adopted families, and the implications of identity later in life or after our children are born. Or, if they do mention it, it’s as a symptom of a larger malaise or dysfunction, part of a larger picture of developmental disorder. What about those of us in between dysfunction and alienation?

So here I was again, different, an olive-skinned, dark-haired and dark-eyed woman faced with a blue-eyed, blonde-haired parent of origin. Again, the other. Again, without anchor.

My adopted family and I do not share a lot in our world views. I’ve never really understood how some of my peers have such close relationships with their parents or aunts and uncles. Mine are so radically different from me, even my own (adopted) brother, that as a young adult and adolescent I frequently shuddered at the possibility that I could be considered genetically related to my adopted parents (to be fair, I’m sure they shook their heads more times than I could count at my strange attitudes and behavior). My brother, lucky to be able to conform more closely with my parents’ values, may not have experienced this split quite the same as I. Perhaps my feelings were the same family angst so many of us experience, but filtered through the lens of adoption and sense of otherness, I never felt very close to my parents. I hear this a lot with my gay friends after they came out to their hostile parents - you just learn to accept what they are capable of giving and decide if that’s enough. For me, I never looked for more than the love they gave and continue to give.

To my infinite delight, and utter surprise, I discovered that P. and I have much in common. We each slowly revealed those parts of ourselves that we have been shamed or dismissed or ignored: our similarly radical political views; our belief that medicine has limited but miraculous use; that birth is better at home; that schools don’t really support children’s learning; that parents who can stay home have better bonds with their kids; that breastfeeding is important and natural; our open-mindedness about learning other ways of being in the world; our gay friends; our love of reading and of books; our passion for nature and animals and being outdoors; our wry sense of humor; critical thinking; anger and rage at injustice/prejudice/oppression; our love of men; our inability to be quiet when someone says something stupid, yet afraid to start an argument; being the family peacemaker and the one to set and enforce boundaries against dysfunctional family member behaviors; our love of dogs; Monty Python and Terry Gilliam movies; our despair and anger with the US’s consumer culture; consideration or belief of far-out theories about history and the world; and real respect for children. I’m telling you, it’s never before occurred to me that you can have something important in common with your family.

So I share some fundamentally important qualities with P. Mind blowing. Exciting. Right. But the best thing? In the picture I have of us when we met the first time, standing next to each other and smiling genuinely, nervously, the resemblance shows. I look a bit like her. She looks a bit like me. We are as connected to each other, superficially, as leaves on a tree.

The eeriest thing I think about on magical, dark nights is this: P. named me before I was born: Dawn Rochelle DeBord. Judy let her adolescent sister name her unborn baby, a gift of relationship that spared my mother the anchor of naming her child. I understand this act completely. Is P.’s naming me significant in our current relationship? What kind of magic did she create by naming me, giving me a place in the family? Did she think of “Dawn” around my birthday? Have I two selves, one hovering around me like an aura, a translucent part of the DeBord family, the other a day-to-day familiar, a creature of my adopted family?

After writing each other and sharing pictures over the summer, we decided to meet when I came down to southern Missouri for my grandma’s 90th birthday party. I would pack in a thousand miles, two birth relatives, a very tall Civil War Re-enactor with a gift for engraving, 5 dogs, tornadoes, flash floods, Coors and Bud-drinking relatives, 30 adopted and extended family members, one cranky toddler and too many hotels. In the end I got to know P., and S., and was again amazed at my parents’ compassion and grief for me. But that’s another story...

In the final installment, “Seeking my Birth Family, Part 3”, I will describe our first meetings with P. and S. face-to-face and my long-awaited visit with my dead relatives. Yes, it does end.

First Chill and Frost - November 2004

So many changes now. As if life weren’t only about our adaptability and response to change, our feeling about change, our seeking out and thriving under change.

New employment for Tata, new life lurking and growing in my belly, and my daughter’s language has just exploded into solar systems and galaxies. She now sings entire songs from memory and makes up her own lyrics. She also makes up words and phrases with nonsense syllables and sounds. It cracks us both up when she substitutes a familiar, expected word with something like “bahhhhlths!” At almost-three, she is a witty chronicler of her own history, of our life.

These changes still come from my body. It is a myth that children only come from our bodies once. As they grow our bodies accommodate their changes: sleep, hugs, boundaries, playgrounds - the constant bridge to their consciousness and conscience. With my daughter’s changes and cognitive development have come her need for more of my body - more nursing requests, sleeping with her, napping with her, feeding her. Necessarily my time in the woods is now less frequent. I do suffer, and appreciate any moment when I can move outside. Like the worried squirrels, I adapt when faced with harsh conditions and put away what I can, knowing the hard winter will eventually change to thaw.

Last week, on the brink of my first positive home pregnancy test, feeling depleted without much time alone, I walk again in my favorite county park. Just now the temperature has turned chilly. Just now, the frost lingers in the morning. Fall has really graced us this year and I love it. This transition was gentle and sweet, full of color and time. I can take it into my body without exception, this autumn, and return it to the earth changed, inside.

Most walkers come to this park with their big, bouncing dogs. I love the dogs, and greet their people. Merely seeking dog exercise, these folks regularly avoid my favorite part of the park: the very narrow path between the cattail-thick lake and the duck pond. In the summer this path is crowded with insects, tall weeds and bushes, and the walker’s legs must push aside the grasses and ivy in order to get through. Earlier this fall, when I first approached after months of absence, it is illogically intimidating, and after a moment of hesitation I walk anyway. I am hit with the impression of the path as doorway, as the way to enter the park I need. Too far from the parking lot, most hikers never explore this part. By the tracks on the ground I know that deer and a few hardy folks like myself, seeking contemplation under bushy trees and piney woods, have passed here at all. Few come here at all, and none see me today. It is quiet.

Today under this mostly leafless path, in the afternoon, frost greets my boots in the shady pathway under the tall pines. Without hanging on plants or water, it simply lies on top of the soil, on the blades of doomed, still-green grass. I am stopped by this change, the first real harbinger of cold hard winter coming, coming soon. The days will be filled with frost and freezing breath and snow. It will come that the fox tracks and deer prints cross mine, lead away and toward my endless loop around the trails. Hard change is upon me, and now I know, I must prepare.

Resignation and submission take me and I think: Land, please take my changes as lightly as this frost. Let them lay on me as effortlessly as this, as inevitably as this, as gracefully. Meet my feet from below and I will protect you as gently as my own flesh and blood. My commitment, my walk, my body, the pulse of winter freezing the living, changing life to begin again with the peeping frogs and tantalizing hints of spring thaw. I think: this is what grace must feel like, to the ones who pray for a light step in the coldest of ground.

*copyright Kim Blue 2005

Simply Mama

These days there’s a lot going on, processing poverty.

All of my days are struggles. Recently, with nausea. Some with no money. Some with the lack of support of friends and family. This drains me constantly.

But all of my days also fill with the things I’ve identified as my most important values: the shape of my family; our rhythms; being available to nurse my daughter on demand; independent thought; forgoing a stressful, productive office job for the joyful and creative and unpredictable life we’re making now; the ability to enjoy the earth, walking, breathing, being slow and unpressured; unschooling; cooking; learning; self-definition and worth.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to walk the precarious and netless line of the non-compliant. The life of the anti-patriot. Of the non-TV watcher. Of the non-religious. Of the non-vaccinating. Of the nursing on demand. Of the writer. Of the impoverished. Of all the other actions and decisions that make my life apparent to others, including this zine. The line marks me, even as I draw it.

I am not merely complaining. This culture is intolerant of and notoriously hostile to children, families and family-supporting policies. Its agents and authorities do not believe stay-at-home parents need to be compensated because that is the best way to care for children and parents. It is not supportive of anything that does not help businesses make more money. And definitely, child-rearing does not make anyone money -- not even child care providers! We have been trained to believe that parenting is wonderful and beautiful and important, but not work. Not worthy. It is not a secret that most parents work because they have to - to make the house payments, the car payments, the rent, the food, the insurance, the cable, the vacations, the restaurants, the SUVs, the Playstation, two computers, the theater television, the DVD collection, the private school, the electronic gadgets and educational toys, the swimming and dancing and gymnastics and music lessons, the gym, and all those necessary facets of this modern middle class life. Really, it is true that income is necessary and unavoidable in some way within our current economic structure. I am trying to analyze the difficult shift I have faced recently, defined by others as the shift from a successful, praised, achievement-defined person in this modern world to simply, mama.

Most people I meet here in my new life don’t know I have earned a master’s degree. That I taught pre-composition classes at a good technical college. That I have lived in big cities and small towns. That I’ve traveled outside of the U.S. That I write. That I think a lot. That I enjoy talking about ideas. That I have hosted a local radio show. That I am in many ways utterly deviant. I tell them I stay at home with my daughter and I write. Their eyes glaze over, and I am suddenly unimportant, unseen, the lower caste. “Oh,” they assert. “Good for you.”

It can be quite humbling to simply be in the world, without the usual markers of middle class achievement, order, and discipline. I am learning to let go of ego when it no longer suits me, even if it takes a lifetime. And truly, I do not make choices that I have in order to please anyone but me. But then there’s the poverty.

I do have a few people who support my choices. These people are blessings, even if they just say “thank you for being you,” and offer me the produce from their beautiful organic gardens. I need a community of these people, as do we all. What do you think the US could look like if we all could support stay at home parents no matter what? What if we all felt children deserved the same kind of respect for their personhood as employed adults do? No interference, no arbitrary or needlessly authoritarian rules, just enough support to survive. We could provide a wage to compensate otherwise unpaid workers - stay at home or part-time employed moms and dads.

According to an interesting book I just finished called At the Breast, white family-focused activists in the US at the turn of the last century could have chosen to follow a European model for maternity reform, inlcuding nurseries close to or at work and cash maternity benefits for mothers who stay home with their young children. Instead, they chose a more punitive support system, “fearing that such [European] provisions, by removing the disciplining effect of the family’s dependency on the father, might encourage men to abandon their families (as well as cause labor unrest).” (p. 23) They had the choice to do it right by moms, and they chose patriarchal control of women and children and capitalism. Are you surprised that that’s what is still supported by the current state of public assistance now?

Just what, exactly, is the “disciplining effect of the family’s dependence on the father”? This question has plagued me since I read it, and I would be interested in your opinion. Families need married fathers to curb female wildness? Chidren’s exuberance? Just what is it that is disciplined through marriage? Insidiously, I don’t believe that this attitude is terribly unpopular today, even with very liberal/progressive folks. Marriage is still viewed as the settling down, the anchor, the real bond that ties a man and a woman together. And let’s not even talk about lesbian moms, right? No man = no discipline = radical women with no real attachment to patricarchal society. There is a paradox worth pointing out, an ideological flaw in the system: while dependence on fathers positively disciplines, dependence on the public trust becomes a personal deficiency. The only difference is private control or public control of women and children.

On a discussion board I frequent, I recently read a deep criticism of the uniquely American attitude that insists we can’t possibly support families with taxpayer dollars no matter what because what if some woman abused the system and cheated the taxpayers out of all that money?! The Australian critic wisely pointed out that it’s not about the cheating, because of course there are always some people who cheat in any system, like, say, taxes or government (campaign financing, anyone?). But people in the U.S. have been trained to think that government assistance is equivalent to childlike dependence on others, a sign of moral deficiency and personal failure. That we should all work and be productive for everyone else except our own families. And asking for financial assistance implies you have failed to provide financial and economic resources for the system itself (through employment and truly productive work), the most important goal of all citizens. Just because our government has trained us to believe that we don’t deserve it doesn’t make it true. I ask you, what would it look like in your town if we all just agreed that compensating parents with young children was so important that as a society we simply can’t do without it? That to do without it unconditionally or selectively simply ensures homelessness, poverty, parental stress, hunger and undernourishment? And that this is totally unacceptable in any civilized world?

There is nothing shameful about knowing and asking for what you need to make your life your own, to make it meaningful to you and your family. For me, it has meant financially relying on my partner and the tax-supported government assistance I paid into for years and years before needing it myself (that is, besides parks and roads and street salters and subsidized gasoline and corporate welfare and prisons and sign makers and highways and all those tax-supported services).
So what? If I am so proud of my choices, and if I am not ashamed of my current path, why complain at all? Why criticize the hand that feeds me?

Indeed. Why.

Our family has no disposable income. This means fixing the car is impossible. Gassing it up is hard, but doable. Eating out almost never. No paid movie rentals, no cable (don’t miss that anyway), no extra insurance, no new clothes for me or my partner, no unnecessary driving, few treats at the grocery store, no impulse buying at the thrift shop, no long trips, unpaid student loans, subsidized rent, food stamps, medicaid, WIC, and lots and lots of nosy prying by well-intentioned federal employees enforcing patronizing rules and regulations. We are impoverished, but not desperate. Poor, but not unhappy. What we don’t have in our wallets we have made up in time and attention with our family. Our daughter has me when she needs me. She knows and loves her dad, and misses him when he goes to work. We have quiet time together. We listen, and we love. Inside it doesn’t feel like control. To the state, I am, and we are, undisciplined.

Analyzing my own poverty here in this zine was prompted by the cumulative effect of seeing the reactions of others to my own money-free life. With no job, I apparently have no responsibilities. With no outside responsibilities, I evidently appear more peaceful and centered. Strangers have referred to me, longingly, as “simple”. I am now officially a simple person, with a simple life. Not in school, not employed, not bound to outside time and conditions of employment. This simplicity is both the goal and the burden. Even if it is secretly or blatantly aspired to, yearned for, applauded, it is still with some distance and patronizing that I hear the praise of simplicity. The status of stuff and outside achievement and compensation is heavy duty, what we are trained to aspire to, how our worth is measured, and, if we’re not careful, how we measure our worth. For it is of the culture, even ingrained in all of us, that a busy life is most rewarding. This is what we are taught and rewarded for in school. This is one of the main reasons we left the city. We called it distraction.

It is deceptively easy to be busy with your young child. Stay at home moms are routinely afraid to have unplanned days and weeks for their young children. Witness all those preschool and toddler age classes and structured play groups to learn music and dance and roll around on mats with others in comfortable clothing. We are told to make sure they’re learning, to get a head start in life (work? school?). Invest money in them now, and they’ll be that much smarter or better adjusted later. What did we do before we all had money to spend on socialization?

I even see the overvaluing of distraction and achievement activity in lefty and anarchist activist circles when there is discussion about what is really activism. Can raising liberated children be considered activist? Wouldn’t agreeing with that simply acknowledge that there’s not one way to change the world, that parenting can be more important than work? That to some, writing and parenting affect the world just as much as busywork, sit-ins and rallies and voting and canvassing? Why does activism or important social change work have to involve strangers?

Leaving jobs and friends and a social support network to move to Menomonie, we acknowledged that no one is able to lose their distractions when there is disposable income and lots of businesses at which to spend money. I see this phenomenon here in Menomonie, too, but mitigated by the overall poverty of our underemployed, undereducated rural area. We all don’t have any money, and yet we still feel the need to be - or look - busy.

So we struggle with money, with society, with lack of proper government support. We struggle with dignity and perseverance. I often struggle with feeling isolated, but that is changing. Our families live far away, but maybe that’s a good thing. Our parents have dutifully given my partner and I grief for my being pregnant even though we don’t have extra money. The stigma of reproducing while poor is one they have avoided in their own lives with great effort; we applaud them and respect their years of struggle and of not having enough. Despite their real fear, parents everywhere always make due, giving the best they can, no matter what. It would take and it would represent a fundamental change in U.S. society to hear “congratulations” at this point from our parents. At least now I am at a point where I can tell it to myself, and mean it. My struggle has not passed without an unshakable trust in the foundation of my self and my inherent worth as a parent, a woman, a writer, a person. No amount of busyness or distraction would change that.

My daughter, my partner, baby #2 and I have nothing less than undisciplined world domination and true social change in mind. Join us in our inappropriate joy at life and birth and love and family, and change the world just a little, all the way through.

Some zine teasers...

I'll start posting a few essays from my zine, mama. I'm already up to issue #3, #4 is due in October. If you'd like more information about my zine, contact me through this blog or the post: PO Box 484, Menomonie WI 54751.

Mama's Big Ol' Blog

Welcome to the home spot of Mama!

You will eventually find my essays here, plus stuff that filters through life to my second-baby awareness. And because you asked for it, you'll also find updates about our family.