Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Abandon or Be Abandoned?

Lately, it seems that every book I download from Audible and every TV show I add to my Netflix queue ends up having an underlying adoption or abandonment theme. So—of course—my mind's wheels are turning.

I've said multiple times that if I could change only one thing about my life, I would have kicked Father-Of-My-Children out the door and not left my sons. At the time, in the mental and emotional state I was in, I did the very best thing I could do for them. According to my damaged psyche.

Child-rearing is subject to a sort of trickle-down effect. You learn from your parents, who learned from their parents, and so on.

You only know what you've seen around you. Your dysfunctional situation is your reality.

The Jazzman's niece is expecting her second child, which we've just learned is a girl. As he and I were talking about what wonderful parents the niece and her husband are to their beautiful little boy (and how they'll continue their greatness with this lucky little girl), I told him how, when I was pregnant with Scott, the doctor told me it was a girl. As soon as I left the doctor's office, I sat in the car and sobbed. I did not want a girl.*

The Jazzman asked me why that was my reaction. That's an easy question for me to answer. My mother always told me, "You don't want to have a girl. She'd be just like you, and nobody would want that."

He just stared at me. "But didn't you know that wasn't true," he asked. No, I didn't. This was my [adoptive] mother, and she was telling me how horrible I was, and it must be the truth. (And that emotional abuse was not an isolated incident, just in case you're wondering.)

Watch a book or watch a movie about someone who has been physically or emotionally abandoned. We behave in ways to prevent our being willfully abandoned a second time. We say cruel things. We act in ways to anger you to the point of forcing you to abandon you.

This is one way we can be in control. We can force you to abandon us so we can say, "See, I told you so."

Or, we can retreat into ourselves. We can go along to get along. We can adopt your way of thinking or your religion or your [whatever] so you'll think we're wantable. We say please and thank you. We feign gratitude because we must. We morph ourselves into what you want, even when to do so causes a raging cancer in our souls.

When we marry for the second or third or fourth time, we keep a constant mental bead on the storage location of our suitcases. Throw away or recycle a packing box? — Never! We know we'll be given away again.

For me, the cycle broke with the 10-year relationship with John. He was as damaged as I was. He had been abandoned far more times than I. His mother died when he was 3, and he was bounced from foster home to foster home until, at 8, the right situation finally found him. During our first two years together, he continually made bad choices regarding a selfish woman who couldn't stand that he had chosen me over her. I hung in there, kept letting him know how I loved him, and—when she finally decided to leave her husband and break up her marriage to be with John (and subsequently dumped him)—maintained a friendship and open mind with and toward him. About six months before he died, almost two years into our happy, contented, and comfortable marriage, he wrote me a note that thanked me for never giving up on him and said he wished he had been able to see, in the first two years, what I had known all along.

He filled the holes in my soul, and I filled the holes in his soul. By the grace of all that is good, we were able to fix what was broken in each other.

I can't go back and fix the damage I caused to my sons in leaving. They both have told me they understood why I did what I did. They have told me they forgive my leaving. We maintain good relationships. But I'll probably never be able to forgive myself for leaving—for not being smarter or stronger or more sure of myself and my abilities.

That was then. This is now. Now I stand on every soapbox I can find and shout to every person thinking of adopting a child: "That child will require more love and compassion and understanding than you can even imagine possessing. If you can't find those qualities in yourself, if you can't give that to the child, don't adopt."

My mother, in excusing her failings, said, "Oh, all you adopted kids had problems."

That doesn't have to be so!



* (This continued with each prenatal visit. Scott's heartbeat was a consistent 144, and the median between boys and girls is 140. Even on the delivery table, the doctor got Scott's head out and said, "What a pretty little girl's face" and then when the rest of the body came out, the doctor said—with surprise—"Oh, it's a boy." And I breathed an enormous sigh of relief.)

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