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.
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.
posted by Skim @ 2:59 PM
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