Two peas in a pod.

Two strawberries in a bowl. Two hearts, shared.

Two weeks have passed since Debbie and I got to spend the first two days of our life together, together. Nothing has changed. Nothing except, after many years as "only children", related to no one of our generation or preceding, we now have each other. We laugh, we joke, we share our hopes, dreams and fears. Honestly, if I had gone to the Sister Store and placed my order for a sister who understood me and loved me despite my foibles, I couldn't have gotten anyone as nice as she, as perfectly suited for the task as she.

And our lives go on. We talk about planning another trip to get together. And we go on with our daily routines. We text several times each day, sharing the goings-on of our lives. We occasionally talk on the phone. But we're both busy with activities—and life. So texting works the best.

I continue my research on Ancestry. My current objective is to find a cousin or two of our mother's generation or our own. But I'm not finding much success. I'm finding VERY interesting people. Our Sayward ancestors, about whom I was reading yesterday in "North America, Family Histories, 1500-2000," produced, I read, many teachers who migrated westward and were highly regarded in their cities. How cool! I read about many, many babies who died within days or months of birth and I think about the sadness that permeated those families. I read about my male ancestors who were deep sea fishermen by trade and lost their lives trying to provide for their families. My heart aches trying to imagine the anguish of waiting and hoping for someone to come home.

So my research is no different than it was before I found Debbie. The difference now is I have someone with whom to share my amazement. I have someone who cares about me and about my life, as I care about her and hers.

In a word, I am rich. My life is richer for having this person with whom I share genes and traits. With whom I share life.

I am rich.

Face to Face, Finally

I did Match .com dating for years. Interminable years. I can't tell you the number of awful first, and even second, dates. Just awful.

How different was the promise of Debbie's and my meeting from the promise of those dates? Not much!

But we had the knowledge of a pre-established relationship. I had seen her original birth certificate. She had seen our mother's signature relinquishing me for adoption. Even though our DNA tests suggested we might be first cousins, we knew we were sisters.

We found each other on April 5, 2016. We texted frequently and within two weeks I offered to fly out to Arizona from Northeast Ohio to meet her. We met face-to-face on May 6, 2016. We motherless daughters spent Mother's Day weekend.

[Ironically, my adoptive mother chose May 3, 2016, four weeks before her 103rd birthday, to die. Doors close, doors open.]

This visit could have gone oh-so-poorly. As I was flying out on Friday, I remembered a Match date where I drove from Tucson to El Paso to spend time with a man I had met in person once before. When I walked into his home, I saw a thick coating of dust on every surface, and an unscooped litterbox still on the floor in the dining room, even though his cat had died a year earlier. A wise woman would have turned around and walked out. I was not wise; I was lonely.

While I tried to imagine what awaited me in Kingman, I visited every dark corner of my mind. But reality trumped fear.

Debbie and her oldest child, Cindy, share a home. They live a very quiet life. They both have health issues and serve as each other's devoted caretakers. The home is immaculate. There's not a speck of dust, a clutter of anything. A harsh word is not spoken. A raised voice is never heard. Their living room sliding glass door looks out on a patio and desert-landscaped backyard with flowering plants in pots, a porch swing, and mourning doves and Gambrell's quails vying for the food and water which she supplies for them. The walls of each room are adorned with framed family photos. This is the home of a mother who has raised her children to respect and love each other.

In a word: peace.

---

Here I will share with you the nutshell report I posted on Facebook while waiting for my early morning flight home from Vegas:

I know many of you are wondering, so I'll give you a brief report here: My lovely new sister, Debbie Davis, and I had a wonderful weekend together. We had lots of quiet time in her home in Kingman, AZ, trading stories and filling in the holes of 65 lost years. Her daughter, Cindy, lives with her, and younger daughter, Cathy, drive up from OC to join us for the Mother's Day weekend. We had lunch out on Saturday, with thanks to the nice young (I think) Australian man who looked at us like we were crazy but complied when we asked him to come over and take our picture. Later on, an enjoyable and educational visit to the Keepers of the Wild wildlife refuge, which required a drive along historic Route 66. Sunday morning Debbie and I drove up into the mountains south of Kingman to the Hualapi Lodge for brunch. There was not a moment of discord or disagreement. We both have dealt with the adoption syndrome of "who am I" our whole lives. Now we look at each other and shake our heads as we realize we're finally related to someone.

It was a wonderful weekend, and we're already looking forward to the next visit.

Thanks for all the wonderful comments and for following our life-changing story.

---

Debbie's daughters are kind, thoughtful, and generous-of-spirit fifty-something women. Their love for and tenderness toward their mother is touching.

(Debbie's son, Bill, lives south of Boston and called on Saturday to arrange to pick up the tab for his sisters' lunch and Debbie's and my brunch on Sunday.)

This is clearly a family that loves each other.

And Debbie and I count ourselves among the truly lucky to have met each other, to have so much in common, and to find such a seamless merging of our lives.

I've been rejected, multiple times–by my birthmother at my birth; by my adoptive mother by her insistence to prove to me how unloveable and unacceptable I was; by my first husband by his (I believe) insecurity-fueled need to show me how far superior he was to me in every facet of my life; and by my birthmother again when I found her and she chose not to rock the boat of her life.

I know rejection. What I experienced from Debbie last weekend was not rejection. It was total and complete and loving acceptance. Someone was finally thrilled to know me.

I am the luckiest.

Where Did It Come From?

I began playing piano by ear when I was 3½ years old. Next came accordian lessons at age 5, piano lessons at 6, organ lessons at 7 or 8. At 8 the church choir director realized I had perfect pitch. In fourth grade I started playing clarinet. Then from fifth grade through high school, I was first chair oboe. As an adult, I sang alto with The Washington (DC) Chorus, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus, and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Now I accompany the opera program at Youngstown State University.

I always wondered where my musical ability came from.

While I wait for the results of my DNA test, I'm doing more digging into my family tree, seeing how many more branches I can hang leaves on. Mainly I'm looking at the twentieth century nodes, trying to find cousins.

In the 1940 census, I found the listing for my first cousin, once removed (i.e. my mother's first cousin). At 34, Eleanor L. Griffin was listed as single and living at the Taunton State Mental Hospital. Her job was Musical Director. In 1930, at age 24, she was living at home with her parents, Harvey and Amy, in the home so beautifully memorialized by Edward Hopper. Her occupation was listed as Music Teacher.

Posts I've written about Hodgkins House - during a trip to Massachusetts, and on a trip to Chicago to see the painting in person.

The first musical person I found in my digging was our grandfather's great-uncle (our 3rd great-uncle), Charles [Stearns or Stevens] Hicks, who was born in Gloucester in 1812. The 1860 census shows him living in Boston and lists his occupation as a piano maker!

And of course I must reiterate here that my sister, Debbie, started piano lessons when she was six. Within a few years of my employment at Walt Disney World in Florida as staff accompanist and later as a Dickens Caroler, Debbie was living in Anaheim and singing for fun with a choir at Disneyland. She told me when she sings in choirs, other singers want to stand close to her so they can get the right pitch.

I will continue to be delighted each time I find a musical connection.

The Basics

Gertrude was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts in July of 1912. Her ancestors had first settled in Essex County, Massachusetts, in 1622. She had a long history there.

Gertrude had two brothers, Roger and Raymond, who were thirteen and eleven years older than she. She was tightly bonded to her father, John, who died in the summer of 1929, shortly before her seventeenth birthday. She never felt her mother loved her. Her mother, Helen, died in the summer of 1934 when Gertrude was twenty-two.

Her oldest brother, Roger, was married and moved to Pennsylvania, to the Pittsburgh area, in 1924, when Gertrude was twelve. He died on Leap Day in 1932. He was thirty-three years old. His little sister was nineteen. Look at those numbers. She could hardly have known him.

At age twenty-two, Gertrude was left with one brother. He was thirty, she was nineteen. They continued to live in their family home for a few years before moving to an apartment near Green Marsh.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1934, at age twenty-two, Gertrude would have discovered that she was pregnant. Her mother had died only three months earlier. She and her brother were probably still reeling from that loss. I try to imagine her relationship with her brother. She had aunts and uncles and some cousins on her mother's side, but we know there had not been a close relationship with her mother, so would she have also felt distant from those relatives? Her father was an only child. Her maternal grandparents had evidently died in 1917 and 1915. Her paternal grandmother had died in 1909. Her paternal grandfather was 75.

To whom could she turn? I hope she had friends. Maybe she had a church family. I hope there were people in her life she trusted and could talk to about her fears. She was unmarried and pregnant in 1935.

Ultimately she traveled down the Massachusetts coastline to a home for unwed mothers near Plymouth, Massachusetts. In early July, she gave birth to a little girl whom she named Geraldine Rae. That little girl was six weeks premature and weighed only two pounds.

Had Gertrude planned to keep the baby? Why would she have named her if she didn't plan to keep her? Or did she expect such a small baby with a genetic heart problem to die quickly, so she gave her a name to carry to her grave? We don't know the answers to those questions. We can never know the answers to those questions.

What we do know is that baby Geraldine did not die, was given up for adoption, and ultimately became Deborah.

Fifteen years later, sometime in October of 1949, Gertrude again discovered she was pregnant. Her brother Raymond, her closest relative, had moved to Orlando, Florida. She was alone in Gloucester. Sometime during the next eight months, she moved to Orlando to stay with Raymond until she gave birth. She made no plans. She spoke with no adoption agencies, no lawyers.

On a late June evening, she went into labor. When Gertrude arrived at the hospital with no plans, her doctor called a colleague who had mentioned that he and his wife wished to adopt a baby girl. Reportedly, he said, "We have a woman here in labor who has made no plans for giving up her baby. If it's a girl, you have a daughter." The next morning, around dawn, the doctor and his wife received a second call. "You have a daughter."

Gertrude gave me no name. My original birth certificate listed me as "Baby Girl Hodgkins." My replacement birth certificate, issued six months later, after the adoption was finalized, named me Janet Gail Crews.

I always knew I was adopted. My beloved daddy called me his "Special Delivery Baby." I always knew my birthmother's name. I always wanted to know about her. Years later, after marrying and having two children, after growing up feeling out of place, feeling that I didn't fit in any place, I decided to search. I was living in suburban Dallas at the time, and I enlisted the aid of a Dallas search agency.

Within only a few days, they found her. She was living in Orlando! She had moved to Orlando in 1954 (according to her obituary). I had lived in the Orlando area almost continuously from my birth until I was about 28, when I moved to Sarasota for two years, and then to Dallas/Ft. Worth for my husband to attend graduate school. I had been geographically close to her for most of my life. We might have shopped in the same stores, attended the same concerts. I never knew her.

When the search agency called me to tell me her [now married] name and phone number, I hesitated only a few moments before closing my office door and picking up the telephone handset to call her.

She answered.
"Is this Gertrude Hodgkins Verburg?"
"Yes."
"My name is Janet Clark and my genealogical research indicates you may be my birthmother."
Long pause.
"I can't talk to you right now."
And she hung up the phone.

She had married six years after my birth and evidently had never told her husband that she had ever been pregnant, much less pregnant and had given up the baby for adoption. Much less twice!

I never dreamed she had been pregnant twice! It never occurred to me that she would have had a baby fifteen years before she had me.

Throughout the years I kept tabs on her, checking city and county records to see if she and her husband were still listed at the same address. At one point in the mid 90s, I lost track of her. I asked a high school friend who was a private investigator to see if he could find anything. He told me she was in a retirement home.

About ten years later, after the popularization of the Internet and the beginning of electronic records (with thanks to the loyal Latter Day Saints who travel the world taking pictures of graves and visiting dusty archives to take notes), I again searched for her and learned she had died.

Three months before my beloved fourth husband had died of prostate cancer, while I was spending every day worrying about him and tending to his needs and his pain, my birthmother died.

I had never been allowed to know her. In our one written communication–my typewritten letter to her, her handwritten response in the ½-inch margins around my letter–she told me she had blocked me and my father from her mind and asked that I never contact her again. I complied.

We adoptees. Always compliant. Always afraid of being given away again.

Years later, out of curiosity, I continued doing research into her family tree on Ancestry.com. I was certain there were no siblings. Then one day Ancestry tacked a little leaf on the corner of Gertrude's node on my Hodgkins family tree. I clicked it and it suggested I look at another member's family tree. I saw just a 17-node tree. At the center was Gertrude. Suspended from Gertrude's node was the pink node of a living female. A female child of Gertrude. I sat there stunned. Had someone copied my tree? I stared at the tree, then saw there were three children–two girls and a boy–suspended from the second node. What did this mean? What could this mean? First off, it meant it wasn't me, as I only have two children and whoever created this tree had three children. A sister? I had a sister?

(Every time I say that, I hear the "Into the Woods" soundtrack with The Baker asking "I had a brother?" and The Witch replying, "No. ... But you had a sister.")

Here, staring me in the face, is the possibility that I have a sister. The date was March 29, 2016. I jumped over to Ancestry's mail service and sent the following note to the member who owned this new-to-me tree.

Hi,

I'm curious about your research on Gertrude Ida Hodgkins Verburg. Do you mind telling me how you're related to her?

Thank you,
Jan Crews
Youngstown, OH

And then I waited. Every day I would check Ancestry several times a day to see if there was a response. Finally, on April 5, Ancestry sent a notification into my Gmail inbox. I dropped everything and clicked on my Ancestry inbox to see the life-changing one-line response.

Gertrude is my birthmother.

As fast as I could type, I replied.

Oh My God. Gertrude is my birthmother. I have a sister?!!!!!!

I spent most of that day texting with Debbie, my new sister. We exchanged data and information. We're both musical. We both type 120 words a minute. We both suffer from migraines (as do her three children and one of my sons).

My life will never be the same. I now have a real relative, and she wants to be part of my life and for me to be part of hers.

(Debbie told me later she didn't click on the Ancestry notifications and read all the notes from me sooner because she thought I was just an Ancestry sales representative trying to get her to spend more money. I laughed.)

And on May 6 I will fly to Vegas and drive the two hours to her home in Arizona to meet her and her two daughters.

My mother didn't want anything to do with me. My sister is making up for it!

---

Photo © Brian Andreas, StoryPeople
I love this story person from Brian Andreas:
"When I die, she said, I’m coming back as a tree with deep roots & I’ll wave my leaves at the children every morning on their way to school & whisper tree songs at night in their dreams. Trees with deep roots know about the things children need...."

Mending a Soul

I always think people don't like me, that I am unlikeable.

My birthmother gave me away. My adoptive mother was the consummate narcissist in her dealings with me and raised me to believe I was dumb, ugly, and incompetent. I was never good enough.

My mother's life centered on her church and its people, and I found it and them highly critical and backbiting. I was raised in the South in the 50s and 60s where a girl's primary objective in life was to find a man, marry him, have babies, and raise them. My mother told me I'd never get a man because I was too obstinate.

Well, I showed her. I found one at college, married him, and had two babies. I adored those babies, but I had little more, emotionally, to give them than she had given me. And that husband? He was—I see through the magic of hindsight—extremely insecure and used his power of words, of belittlement, to continue what my mother had so adeptly begun. And I believed him. I believed I was of no value to or in the world. After ten years of marriage to him and two suicide attempts, I walked out, leaving my precious babies with him.

[I'll skip the part about the tricks he played during the divorce negotiations, and his years of trying to turn my sons against me. He was unsuccessful—my sons still love me and understand why I left their father (and them).]

I just wanted to be loved.

[I'm also skipping, in this account, the impact of my adoptive father in my life. He wore a halo. He loved me and gave me the only self-esteem that was to exist for many, many years. But he was somewhat absent, due to being married to a woman who couldn't let him feel loved and the possession of an occupation in which he could immerse himself (family doctor and general surgeon) to escape her emotional cruelty. In his medical practice he was greatly loved. He would leave for work before I got up and get home after I was asleep. I would see him a couple of afternoons a week, until my sophomore year in high school, when he drove me to the school bus stop every day and we had the longest conversations of my formative years. I loved him. He loved me. He died when I was 34.]

[And we'll skip the boring part about the two brothers in my adoptive family who were five and seven years older than I and wanted nothing to do with me. Later in life they would blame me for Mother's inability to mother me. They still exist. They still have next-to-nothing to do with me.]

At 33, I found my birthmother. She wanted nothing to do with me and told me never to contact her again.

After two more poor-choice marriages in search of someone to fill the holes in my soul, I found the right man for the job. His mother had died when he was three. It was 1938 and his widowed father didn't know what to do with him and his five-year-old sister, so he put them in an orphanage. This precious little lost boy was bounced from foster family to foster family for five years until he found a family with enough emotional generosity to give him what he needed—acceptance and a place in the world.

When he and I met, he was twice-divorced to my thrice. After eight years as friends, we married. We found in each other and in that marriage exactly what we had been looking for all our lives. Our similar-though-different backgrounds enabled us to understand each other's insecurities. We were each able to ignore the other person's foibles and fill in the holes with acceptance and love.

Six months after we were married, he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. Twenty-one months later he died. We had a wonderful marriage as we walked the crooked path to his death.

But the patterns formed when we are children follow us everywhere despite brief reprieves. Baggage can be forever.

Skip forward twenty years. I now have a wonderful and loving partner who is able to overlook my very old and very deep-seated insecurities. But they're always.always.always lurking in the shadows, waiting to pop out and whisper in my ear, "See, you really are unlikeable. You only thought that had gone away."

I'll close with an amusing anecdote from last summer that illustrates my cloak of insecurity with crystalline clarity:

Last summer, when my partner and I had been sharing our lives for five years, I went away for six weeks to work as a collaborative pianist at a well-known arts camp in northern Michigan—a dream I had been harboring for twenty-five years. While I was away, my loving partner spent every spare minute painting the kitchen. He scraped the ceiling, steel-wooled the seventy-year-old wood cabinets, removed all the hardware from both cabinets and doors and made it sparkle, scraped and repaired all the cracks in the walls, and changed the walls from ugly institutional 1950s blue-green-crud to delicious warm buttercream, and the trim to glossy whitewhite. When I walked into the kitchen after six weeks away, I didn't even notice. Didn't even notice!!

Two days later, after repeated queries from workmates and best friends, "How did she like the kitchen?" ... I was standing at the kitchen sink, doing dishes and watching the activity at the bird feeder. He walked in and said, "I have to tell you something."

My gut reaction? I immediately thought he had met someone else during the six weeks I was away and was going to leave me.

Once given away, always give-away-able.

(What he wanted to do was show me his beautiful handiwork and describe his ideas for his next house project.)

A New Life

It's time to drag this blog out again and record my new life as a sister with real relatives. Relatives with whom I share DNA.

I used to blog here daily and multiple times each day. Then I met the Jazzman and didn't have any funny dating-for-oldies stories to tell. I started working from home, so didn't have input from anywhere outside my brain. And the motivation faded. I started my other blog to showcase the garments and bags and gifts I make. And this blog just fell by the wayside.

Now my world has not only turned upside down, but begun to spin and spin and spin. My brain is full and whirling every day. On days when I need to spend hours at the piano perfecting very difficult music, I am drawn to the computer to do more research and to my phone to text my sister. MY SISTER!!!

I have a sister!

I have someone who understands how I feel about being given up for adoption because she, too, was given up for adoption.

I have a sister who is as thrilled to learn about me as I am about her.

Life is oh-so-very good.

So this blog is being pulled back into use so I can document this new journey. We're both aging. Time is moving on whether we want it to or not. And I don't want to forget the wonder of learning, at age 65, that I have a sister.

Stay tuned.

Late Discovery Adoptee

I started this blog post on July 14, 2015. And then life and busy-ness got in the way and I forgot all about it. Now my life has changed completely and in searching all the blog posts I had written about adoption, I found this again. So I'm publishing it today, nine months later, before starting my next set of blog posts about my newfound sister.

Here's a bit about Kevin Gladish's blog:

A friend of mine in Chicago emailed me a link to her friend's blog. He's a Late Discovery Adoptee. There should be no such term!

Why can't parents read more about adopting before taking it on. Why can't they understand: We know. We know! Deep inside each adoptee is a sense of dis-ease. A sense of not belonging. A sense of being, always being, in the wrong place. (This is merely my opinion, based upon the reading I've done. I don't have a doctoral degree to validate my "facts.")

As I read this beautifully written blog, one statement Kevin made struck me this morning.

I know there are those who will tell me that being adopted "shouldn't matter." Though I have never once heard or read this sentiment from a fellow adoptee, it comes up as a thing people say to be helpful. After all, you might argue, I was chosen. I was wanted. I was given opportunities that I may never have had otherwise. I was loved. So why should I insist on digging up all this stuff, when none of it should matter?

The answer is that it does matter. Plain and simple. It matters to me. It matters to a great many of us.

I wasn't chosen. How can you tell me over and over again that I was chosen.

My parents chose to adopt a baby girl. It had nothing to do with me, personally.

Here's how it went for me:

Daddy was a doctor. He told all his OB/GYN buddies that he and his wife wanted to adopt a girl. (Yes, OB/GYNs were all men in the mid-20th century.) He let them know that if they had a pregnant patient come in who wanted to give up her baby and had made no plans, that they should call him.

I don't know if my birthmother ever went to the doctor after escaping from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Orlando to live with her brother after discovering she was pregnant. She was 37 years old and had never been married. Her mother had died when she was 16 and her father, whom she adored, when she was in her early 20s.

And now I stop this post and continue tomorrow with my new story. I hope you'll read that and marvel in it, as I have been doing for a week.

In the Mind's Archives

This morning on my way to work I was trying to remember today's date. I could remember that the Thursday while we were on vacation was 9/11. The Thursday after that would have been the 18th, plus Friday, Saturday, Sunday made today's date the 22nd.

My birthday is a 22nd. Each month, if I think about the date on the 22nd, I count ahead to see how many months until I'll turn the next year older. Ticking fingers down to count, I realized that in nine months I'll be 65.

And then it struck me. Nine months = pregnancy. Right around this date 65 years ago, my mother was having an affair or a one-night stand or a loving relationship with or was being raped by the man who provided half of my genetic makeup.

In adoption, those are facts one rarely knows. I was lucky enough to have the obstetrician who delivered me–who arranged the private adoption–procure and release my hospital records to me in the mid-80s. I knew my birthmother's name. From those records, I was able to find her. She wanted nothing to do with me and said she had blocked me and my father from her mind. She had two brothers, neither of whom ever had any children, and I was the only child she ever had. So it's a great big dead end.

But to not know leaves holes in one's soul.

Would my life be different if I knew it was a loving relationship? That's what I like to project. What if I knew I was the product of rape? I don't know. If I were caused by rape, I really wouldn't want to know. But I don't think it would change anything.

The only thing I think would have changed how I developed and grew up would be if I had lucked into an adoptive mother with the emotional ability to make me feel loved and secure.

That's my greatest wish/dream/fantasy. To feel loved.

That would have made a tremendous and wonderful difference.

I wonder who I'd really be.

The Why and Wherefore of Adoption

I'm engaging in nostalgia this week as I wander around Interlochen Arts Camp and observe young artists developing and honing their skills and their passions.

And, of course, as I write that I have to look up the definition of "nostalgia":

a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time:

My nostalgia is not for what was but for what might have been. It's not for the happiness of a former time, but rather from actions that might have allowed happiness in a former time.

I fantasize about having been adopted by a family who was cultured and musical. I have often said that I was lucky to have been adopted by a family that recognized my talents early in life. But they didn't know how to best nurture those talents. (And I also acknowledge that there is more to nurturing talents than just lessons and training. There's emotional nurturing, also.)

Sometimes, in pondering "life" and "how did I get here", one thinks about those notions of having a life after a life. I'm not saying I believe in the concept of reincarnation. I truly don't know what I believe. But I hear the stories of there being legions of spirits flying around who need to come back to earth to complete their mission. Or something like that. And I wonder why I was chosen for this particular family. If I was, indeed, chosen. For this family.

And as I ponder "why didn't I have a different family," I have to stop and say—almost aloud in my head—It's Not All About You!!

Maybe the fates or the universe or God or whatever chose not that family for me, but me for that family. Or for that man, that wonderful, nurturing daddy, who had a marriage he felt trapped in. He loved me to his core, and he nurtured me as no one else did. He gave me a sense of being loved, wanted, and valuable. Where my mother taught me that I was dumb, ugly and incompetent, he taught me that—at least in his eyes—I was cherished and precious.

And what did I give him? I have no idea. He was not a man to share his feelings. But I'm sure having me mirror his feelings right back to him was significant in his life.

So what if I didn't get a sound footing that put me in a career path the end of which would bring me retrospective joy. I made it through. I accomplished not giving up. I have good kids and grandkids that I'm able to encourage and nurture and—hopefully—guide.

And I was loved, without equal, by Daddy. The most important man in my life.

Maybe he was the why I was adopted by this family.

And that's good enough.

Photos: At top, an Interlochen practice room where a high school string bass player works on his repertoire. Bottom, panorama of Green Lake with oncoming storm whipping up the waves.

Your Moral Obligation

That's me, on my first birthday. I celebrated my birthday earlier this week. To my utter delight, 70-or-so friends sent wishes on Facebook. One son wrote a beautiful tribute to me on Facebook, the other (who lives nearby and talks to me almost daily) texted me. Close friends mailed cards. My two closest female friends sent lovely gifts, and the Jazzman gave me hugs and kisses and a fabulous Bose Bluetooth device to connect to my iPhone and iPad for playing music with Bose playback quality. I had a wonderful day. I felt loved and treasured by my friends.

So who didn't I feel loved and treasured by? Why, my mother, of course. I hadn't spoken with her since my trip to North Carolina at the end of May for her 101st birthday. That's three weeks. Sometimes I get busy and forget to call. Sometimes I'm so discouraged after phone calls with her that I just don't put myself out to call, as I don't want to feel that discouragement again.

Let's be clear here. The woman's brain is in great shape. Her hearing is dicey, but her mind works fine. She—understandably—gets discouraged with not being able to hear conversations around her. And so she won't attempt to carry on a conversation. But she is perfectly capable of doing so when she's willing to put forth the effort.

But she is and always has been a narcissist of the highest order. You know the saying, "It's not all about you"? Well, everything is all about her. Even fifty years ago when her hearing was fine, thankyouverymuch, she wouldn't listen to the conversation. She would just say what she wanted you to hear without paying any attention to you or what was going on with you.

She has two beautiful grandsons (my two sons) and two incredibly beautiful great-grandchildren (again, my offspring). But she is not one whit interested in them or their lives. My older son neglected to thank her for a Christmas gift about 22 years ago and she wrote him off then and there. She never asks me how they are or what they've been up to. Here's the thing: She. Doesn't. Care.

To give you an example, I can remember many conversations where I'd say, "I have a performance this weekend with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus" or something to give her similar insight into my life. She would not respond with questions about what we were singing or how I enjoyed that activity. She would say, "My neighbor's daughter sings in her church choir." Hey, Lady, I don't care about your neighbor's daughter. I want you to care about your daughter. Oops, your adopted daughter. I forgot, momentarily, that I don't matter to you.

But back to the topic at hand. Amidst all my birthday greetings, I heard nothing from my mother. She couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone and call me. I refused to call her, mentally challenging her to call me. #FAIL. Monday afternoon, after returning from the lovely birthday weekend on the shores of Lake Erie, I called her. She sounded glad to hear my voice. She asked when I was coming to visit again. (I wanted to say, "Why should I?" Instead, I told her I have rehearsals twice a week from the second week of July through three September performances, after which the Jazzman and I are heading to California for a week's much-needed vacation.) She asked if I had a nice birthday. (What? You couldn't pick up the damned phone and wish me a happy birthday?) When I would try to carry on a conversation with her, she would sing or hum into the phone. The nurse walked in to test her sugar and then to give her the required insulin injection, and she kept me on the phone while talking to the nurse.

After a whole lot of nothing, I was able to get off the phone. As I pushed the End button on my phone, I yelled—to the no-one who was listening—"just shoot me now."

And in the middle of the night, awakened by a hairballin' cat, I lay in bed, listening to the thunderstorm and thinking about Mother's attitude toward me since I was six days old and she brought me home from the hospital to adopt.

Here's what I would say if she and I were ever in therapy together:

When you adopt a child, it's your duty to enable that child to feel loved, to feel secure, to grow up as a person who matters to her family—the family who chose her.

It doesn't matter how much or how little love you have to give. It doesn't matter how your parents treated you. Whatever amount of love is swirling inside of you, you have to give this adopted child more. You have to give more than you have to give, as difficult as that is. You chose to adopt her; now you are saddled with the inadequacies of her genetic line. It seems hard? Tough. Your inability to love her makes it even tougher on her.

You cannot and must not just write her off when the going gets tough.

I asked Mother one time, shortly after my first divorce, why she didn't give me more guidance in some aspect of life that was troubling to me at the time. She made a statement I can never forget:

"When you were 14 I didn't know what to do with you, so I just washed my hands of you."

And after another conversation at a later date:

"All you adopted kids had problems."

I was raised by this woman to believe I was dumb, ugly and incompetent. I'm now 64 years old, hold a B.S degree and a J.D., have two children, two grandchildren, and a DBF—all of whom love me deeply and unwaveringly—and I still struggle daily with the thoughts that I don't fit in anywhere, don't belong, am not a person that anyone wants to have around. I fight these thoughts Every Single Day. Don't tell me to go to therapy. I've had years of therapy. And in my mind, in my mental baggage, I still don't fit in.

Okay, it could be worse. It could be so much worse. But these are my feelings and this is my blog, so I'm going to tell you:

When you adopt a child, you have a moral obligation to pour love and security and the tools for self-worth into that child. You have a moral obligation to enable her to develop into a grounded member of society.

If you can't do this, then don't do it. Don't adopt. Don't further cripple this baby or child so that, as a 64-year-old adult adoptee, she still struggles with daily pain.

Don't keep breaking her heart over and over again.

Be responsible.

The Rolling Stones Had It Right

You can't always get what you want.

I have said time and again that when my mother dies I will not cry. There is not the bond between us that–I presume, I imagine–most daughters feel. Those daughters grieve when their mother dies. I will not.

If I am to cry, it will be soon, and maybe even now. At two months from turning 101, her communication skills are failing. Hard and fast. The frustration of trying to determine the slightest thing is horribly frustrating.

I try to be considerate of and thoughtful toward her. I try to let her know she is in my thoughts. But it doesn't matter. She's all that is in her thoughts. I imagine she was a narcissist since long before she participated in the decision to adopt me. She does it so well. She does it with the skill of someone who has been practicing for decades.

I made the mistake of calling her today. She flashed across my mind and I thought it would be nice to let her know that. I looked at my watch, and it was a time she might be in her room. So I called and she answered. She recognized my voice-she has a decent memory.

I asked how she was, and got the same answer I have been getting for 20 years, "Pretty good for an old lady." I guess if I want a different answer I should ask a different question. She didn't have much to say.

I asked if she had gotten the clipping I sent her a week ago. I accompanied a one-act Mozart opera recently and my picture was in the newspaper. I sent her the clipping, thinking she would enjoy reading it. She had no recollection. After trying several different ways to jog her memory, she said, "Oh, yes. That was nice." No questions about the program or my performance, no interest in prolonging that conversation or learning a little bit more about the woman her daughter has become.

I tried to tell her that her great-grandson had been in the local spelling bee last weekend, but could not get her to decipher my words. Nor would she admit to not understanding my words. I gave up, closing with "I'll talk to you soon."

I can hear what you're thinking. You're thinking I'm a self-centered, spoiled brat. Maybe so.

For over 60 years I've been trying to get this woman to care about me, to be grateful for my life. She doesn't. She isn't. At 101, how many years does she have left? Certainly not enough to change this deep-rooted behavior.

My life partner encourages me to quit trying. He recognizes her for who she is. And he sees clearly her inability to care.

Maybe I can borrow his glasses.

Hidden Messages

Still suffering from jet lag, I've been doing a lot of online reading between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. every day this week. Three Facebook friends had posted this link, Parent Pressures Gay Son to Change, which I read this morning. But it was not the main theme that caught my eye. It was the subtext that the parent forgot the son's birthday.

Who does that? What parent has such a busy, all-consuming life that she can forget her child's birthday? Oh, wait. Mine. She forgets (or ignores) my birthday and those of my sons and my grandchildren–who, by the way are her only grandchildren and only great-grandchildren. Whenever I might get her on the phone (she is incapable of picking up the phone to call me), she has no curiosity about my life or the lives of my offspring.

Don't bother to take her side and remind me she's 100 years old. This behavior has been in place for 25 years!

Here's what caught my eye:

When you “forget” a child’s birthday, you are basically negating him as a person. It is as if you are saying that you have forgotten his presence in the world. How very sad for him.

Without knowing for sure, I have long suspected that my daddy was the main instigator behind the decision to adopt a baby girl, who just happened to be me. I believe Mother went along, then found out I wasn't what she bargained for.

She told me once, 16-or-so years after the fact, "When you were fourteen I didn't know what to do with you, so I just washed my hands of you." Really? From what parenting book did you learn that technique?

My spousal equivalent has been telling me for several years–since he first met her–that I need to accept the fact that my mother just doesn't love me. Or, really, doesn't even like me.

Slowly, with enough reinforcement, that fact will sink in. With the support of my children and my friends, who love me, I can readjust my world view.

But that doesn't make it right.

A Step Into the Past

Last month the Jazzman and I drove to Maine for a week of vacation. We decided to spend the final two nights a little closer to home, to cut a couple of hours of the last day's drive, and found an inn in Ipswich, MA. My ancestry, back to around 1630, lies in Gloucester, MA, just a few miles away from Ipswich. As I had recently uncovered some previously unknown genealogical information, I suggested to the Jazzman that we drive into Gloucester and out around Cape Ann. We would couple my research with a stop in Rockport as we drove out around Cape Ann to visit the recently-sold home of a relative of his. He had visited this home overlooking the water several times in his life. We would be walking through our minds a little on this trip.

In research I had done over a year ago, I learned—to my great sadness—that my birthmother had lost her father, whom she adored, when she was 16. How did I know she adored him? When I was 33 and she was about 70, I found her. I tried to speak with her on the phone, but she simply said, "I can't talk to you now," and hung up the phone.

My darling daddy—in a quite astonishing turn of events—was her doctor. He didn't realize she was my birthmother until I solved the puzzle.

When he learned she was my birthmother, he pulled her medical file from the file room in his office. That way, if she came in to see any of the doctors in his practice, the nurses would be searching for the file, and he would know of the visit. Voila! One day a few months later, a nurse started looking through the files on his desk while he was sitting in his consultation room. He asked what file she was looking for and, when she said "Gertrude Verburg," he replied, "Tell her I'd like to speak with her."

So when she was situated in the examining room, before starting her appointment, she was visited by Daddy, with pictures of me and my sons in his hand. He said she had no look of joy or familiarity on her face. She showed no emotion. When she looked at the pictures, she simply mused, "Oh, aren't they nice." She was having hip problems and had surgery scheduled later that month. She said she would accept a letter from me if I'd send it to Daddy. He would take it to her while she was in the hospital, preventing her husband—who had no knowledge of my existence—from seeing the letter. A few weeks later, I got an envelope from Daddy in the mail. Inside was my letter to my mother. She had written me back in the margins of my letter. What she revealed shocked me.

She had never felt her mother loved her. (Ding! Ding! Ding!) She was very close to her father. (Ding! Ding! Ding!) She lived for Sundays when he didn't work and they would spend time together. I could not believe the parallels in my life and hers.

And then she asked me never to contact her again. Which I didn't. About ten years ago, I learned she had died in 1998. In the past week, I learned that her husband died last year. Done. Book closed.

I've thought so many times about that girl who lost her beloved daddy at age 16. How that must have changed her. Her oldest brother moved to Pennsylvania to work. Gertrude and her brother still lived at home with the mother who couldn't show her daughter she loved her. Then, five years later, at age 21, her mother died. At 21, she's all alone with her brother who was fifteen years older. She was only 21. She was barely an adult. She had no parents to turn to for guidance and nurture. She had only her brother, himself never married. They lived together in Glocester for several years, then he moved to Florida. To Orlando. When she got pregnant at age 37, she went to stay with her brother to hide her pregnancy. To hide me.

I had also, about a year ago, determined the location of Hodgkins House. To that point, I had thought it was the house my mother or grandmother grew up in. But when I started examining and comparing dates, I realized that could not be. More research revealed that my great-uncle, Harvey Monroe Griffin (my grandmother's year-younger brother) and his wife, Amy, had been the owners of the house. Why the painting was entitled "Hodgkins House" has been lost over time. My grandmother's married name was Hodgkins. It is unknown what relationship the Hodgkins family had to the house. I know my great-grandfather Hodgkins was a carpenter. Could he have built the house? There were numerous "housewright" designations in my ancestry. I never determined the provenance of the name, but I now knew where the house was, and I was determined to see it in person.

After standing in front of the house where my mother had grown up and taking a few pictures, we drove out around Cape Ann. On the north shore, as we were heading to 505 Washington St., we took a wrong turn, so we turned around and went back to a beach we had passed. We got out, admired, the view, snapped a few pictures, and talked to some divers. I had no idea how serendipitous that wrong turn and the time taken to enjoy the view would be.

Getting back in the car, we continued on around to Washington St., just a couple of miles further down the road. After so many years of admiring the photograph of the painting, I recognized it instantly. The Jazzman pulled to the curb and I got out to take pictures. He drove ahead to find a place to park.

As I was taking pictures, I noticed a woman leave the house and get into her red Mini. As she drove down the driveway, she looked over at me. I smiled and held my hand to my heart. She pulled across the street into the driveway next to where I was standing, rolled down her window, and asked, "Are you a Hopper fan?" I smiled and said, "No, I'm a Hodgkins." For the first time in my life, I had said, "I'm a Hodgkins." I felt who I was. She asked more and we talked about the Griffin/Hodgkins connection. She also told me about having found the headstone of an ancestor, Moses Hodgkins, in an outbuilding when she bought the house. It now sits in her second story studio.

Our conversation drew to a close, and she handed me a card with information about her recently published novel. I glanced at the house again, and ran across the street to get into the car and recount the incident to the Jazzman.

And we drove to Oak Grove Cemetery.

As soon as the city offices opened that morning, I had called the Archives Department and asked if they had a master index to all the cemeteries in the area. I gave the woman who answered the name I was seeking—John Hicks Hodgkins—and she called me back half an hour later, telling me exactly where the grave was located. We pulled into the cemetery, which is situated across the street from the Derby Street home where my mother grew up. I looked at the cemetery map and, after scratching my head a little, suddenly saw a monument marked "Griffin." I raced over there and saw names both familiar and unfamiliar.

Lying in this plot are the caskets containing the remains of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, great-uncle, his two wives and the son he had with his first wife, my grandfather, and my grandmother.

Let me just say here that I cannot speak for all adoptees, but much of my reading has indicated—and many adoptees I've spoken to in person have indicated—a sense of not belonging. It was not until I first discovered the microfiche of the 1920 census in the National Archives in Washington, DC, that I felt I belonged on this earth. That I had an entitlement to walk on this planet.

Walking around that cemetery last Friday gave me the same feeling. I had to fight back the tears as I tried to elucidate my feelings to the Jazzman. Those were my ancestors. We had driven through the cemetery and seen lots and lots of surnames that are in my family tree: Babson, Lane, Hicks, Allen, Swift .... These were people who would have acknowledged my existence. They would have loved me, as my grandfather loved my mother, or they would have tolerated me, as my grandmother tolerated my mother. But I would have belonged.

My heart was full.

---

You can read about the rest of our vacation and view more pictures on my travel page.

Joined at the Heart

My son left town last night. I'm filled with sadness.

That statement makes me sound like some sort of Sarah Braverman, angsted out over every situation that involves her children. But, truly, this is different.

The root of most everything in my life is my adoption: The physical rejection by my birth mother, the emotional rejection by my adoptive mother, and the sense of being totally alone and adrift in the world, knowing no one with whom I share one drop of blood.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I would joke about not knowing what was going to come out of me. And when my first son was born and began growing and developing, he was the spitting image of his father. He bore no resemblance to me. (As an adult, he does have emotional similarities to me, but they took his lifetime-thus-far to become manifest.)

My second son, born seventeen months later, was an entirely different creature. We bonded hard and strong. We were close in a way I had never been close to anyone. (It didn't change how much love I felt for my first son—it was just different.)

Where my mother had always led me to believe that I was dumb, ugly, and incompetent, with this child I felt wanted and needed.

After the divorce, which occurred when he was five years old, he kept asking to be with me. On the weekends when the boys were with me, I would have them take their baths and put on clean clothes on Sunday evenings before I took them back to their father. I wanted their homecoming to be stressless—change into jammies, read a book, go to bed. An easy transition.

Son Number One readily complied. No problems. Going home.

Son Number Two fought me all the way. He dragged his feet. He sensed not that he was going home, but that he was leaving his home.

As he matured toward adolescence, I could—on each of his visits—see more and more of myself in him. He was darling. He was vivacious, funny, cute. He possessed a charming personality. And if I saw so much of myself in him and he possessed so many wonderful qualities, then was I really so bad? Could my mother's words have been misleading? Could I really have been as horrible a child as she portrayed me to be? For the first time in my life, I felt some self-worth.

When my son was 14, he knew he was mature enough that the courts would consider his desires, so told his father he wanted to live with me.

We had a magical life together. I worked like a dog to provide for him—for us. He went to the boarding school that fulfilled all his dreams. We were—as from his birth—joined at the heart.

When my son graduated from college, my husband had just died. My son and his soon-to-be wife moved in with me, saving me from my overwhelming grief and loneliness. Our lives were, from that point fourteen years ago to this past summer, closely intertwined on an—almost—day-to-day basis. For the past three-plus years, we've lived three blocks apart. For the past two-plus years, I've worked for him, helping him with his business.

Then business started having problems and marriage started having problems and he's moving to a city where jobs aren't as scarce as the proverbial hen's teeth.

I know I'll talk to him as frequently as I did when he was three blocks away. And I'll see him almost as frequently. Technology of the ages deems that we are all far more connected than ever before.

But he won't be right here. Around the corner. And so it feels like we're separated. And that brings tears to my eyes.

It doesn't change the worth his life has sprinkled over me like pixie dust. It just feels different.

Who knows what lies ahead?!

I wish him a speedy resolution to the business and financial challenges and a life of renewed happiness.

I won't "see [him] in my dreams." I'll see him on Google+ and Facebook and Twitter and Skype. And every couple of weeks, in person.

Life goes on.

TMI

Is there a point where information becomes Too Much Information?

I continue searching for facts about my birthmother. This morning I discovered the record of her marriage to Gerrit Verburg. I knew she had married him sometime after my birth, and that she had never told him of her pregnancy or my existence. I knew they had lived in Orlando, and believed them to have moved there in 1972. (I don't remember what piece of data which I read in past research led me to that belief.)

They were married in Orlando in 1956.

I was living in Orlando in 1956. She was living in Orlando as I was growing up. We might have passed on the street. We might have shopped in Gibbs-Louis or Ivey's at the same time. She might have attended some function at which I was playing the piano. Or, per her statement that "I blocked you and [your father] from my mind," I might never have even crossed her mind the entire time.

Still …

You know the phrase "too close for comfort." Well, this was very close but no comfort.

---

Further to yesterday's post re learning that she lost her father when she was 16, I learned late last night that her mother died when she was only 22! What must that have been like for her? To lose the father whom she adored while still only a teenager, then to lose her mother six years later. And fifteen years later to become pregnant out of wedlock (in a time when that was not accepted as it is today), with only an older brother to turn to.

I project that she was somewhat relieved when her mother died. She and her brother, 11 years her senior, continued to live in the family home for about four years after her mother's death. At some point he moved to Orlando. At some point he had heart problems and went to a local doctor, Dr. Crews, for treatment. While he was ill, she visited his home in Orlando and took him to his doctor's appointment. Long before my conception, she met the man who would ultimately become my daddy.

What a bizarre, small world!

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Longtime readers will recognize today's post photo as Edward Hopper's "Hodgkins House," from the work Hopper completed while living in Gloucester, MA.

Life-Changing Events

I spent a little time on Ancestry.com this morning. I was searching for further information on my biological grandfather, John Hicks Hodgkins. He was born in December of 1873 or 1874. He was married in 1898 at age 24. I have him in the 1910 and 1920 census records, but couldn't find him in 1930. Finally it occurred to me to search the 1930 records with his wife's name. Bingo! She is listed as a widow.

In the one letter I received from my birthmother, written in the margins of a letter I had written to her, she revealed that she never felt like her very critical mother loved her. She was very close to her father, who worked as a bookkeeper. She lived for Sundays, when she and her father would walk along the nearby beach.

I saw myself in her words. How uncanny that my relationships with my adoptive parents was a mirror of my birthmother's relationships with her her parents. I never felt loved or even accepted by my mother, who raised me to believe I was dumb, ugly and incompetent. I adored my daddy.

I've searched further and cannot find a death record for my grandfather, John. I found a city directory for 1930, so sometime between the publication of that city directory and the visit of the census taker, he died. Gertrude, his beloved daughter, ... (Edit: I found the 1932-33 Gloucester City Directory. He died in June of 1929. His daughter was 16 years old.)

Unmarried, she is resigned to living with her mother, with whom she has no bond, no loving relationship.

Then, ten years later, she is suddenly pregnant. All I know about my birthfather is that he was a pilot or captain (I can't remember which) of a fishing boat in Gloucester, and that he was a pilot with the Civil Air Patrol. I don't know if they had a long term relationship or if it was an affair or a one-night stand. In any event, she's pregnant in 1949 with no family support. Her father's father, Nathaniel, lived with the family, but his wife had died. Her two brothers had moved away—I believe one was already deceased.

Can you even imagine the feeling of aloneness in which she must have been wallowing?

When I think of all that, it's no wonder she gave me up for adoption and, in her words, "blocked you from my mind."

What enormous impact the early death or abandonment of a parent has!

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.)

Please Tell Me I'm Not Insane

This morning I'm again driving to North Carolina. I'll stay about 36 hours, then turn around and head home. I don't want to go. I go because of [perceived] duty. I go because I try to treat my mother with respect. (I had to figure out on my own how to do that.) I go because I need to view myself as a good daughter. I go because it's the right thing to do.

Each time I set out on this drive, I think this may be the last time I [have to] make the drive. (Mother is 98 years and 160 days old. If you're counting.)

Family and beloved advisors ask why I do it. Maybe it's because I'm responsible. Maybe it's because I'm looking for approval and acceptance. More likely, it's because I'm trying to reinforce my attempts to view myself as responsible, approved of, and accepted.

I've been looking for approval and acceptance for about 61 years now. (And 138 days. If you're counting.) All I ever got, in my perception, was criticism and disapproval. The implicit message was "You're not good enough." I always expected to be given away again.

As Mother was preparing to go into surgery in mid-June, she said to me something about how happy they (she and Daddy) had been to get me. What a gift I was.

I heard the words. I didn't feel the meaning. I couldn't feel the meaning.

How can I analogize this deafness, this inability to feel? Is it similar to the medical student who has attended so many rock concerts that he needs an amplifier on his stethoscope to clearly hear the patient's heartbeat? Is it the person with the deviated septum to whom all food tastes bland? Is it an abused child who was locked in the blackened closet for so long that he lost his sight?

My experience tells me that one with whom the mother has not bonded does not develop the ability to bond.

I was told I was special, I was loved, but her words were far louder than her actions. There were no loving actions to believe in, therefore I never developed the ability to believe in her words.

And therefore, my ability to believe, to trust, to bond, is stunted. I continue to believe that I am forgettable. I continue to believe I'm not someone that others want to have around. It's a sickness. It's an awful, miserable, painful, heavy sickness.

A 61-year-old sickness.

If I had a platform, I would gather around me all adoptive parents on the day—about six months after they receive their "special delivery baby", about the time the thrill starts to be dulled by the enormity of the task—and tell them this:

Listen carefully to me. This child needs more love and attention and approval and acceptance than you ever imagine. More than your natural children need. More than you realized you had the ability to bestow.

You need to dig deep down into your gut and pull up everything that's there and form it into loving words and actions. To not form those loving words and actions and envelope your new child in them will forever alter who that child is. You need to go above and beyond each and every day until that child is an adult. Then you can relax.

Demonstrate that the child matters to you, is good enough to you, is acceptable just as she is, without change now. Now! Don't wait until you think you're on your deathbed and say, "I loved you so much I would stand by your crib and cry." That's not good enough.

I hate that writing this brings tears to my eyes. I hate that at the age of 61 years (and 138 days), these feelings still ricochet back and forth in my skull with the slightest provocation.

But, at least until the day she dies, it is what it is. To expect to feel acceptance and approval from her, especially at this point in her life, is insanity.

I accept the lack of acceptance.

And then I'll return home to love and acceptance and approval and joy and laughter.

A Shy Inner Light

Today's post is precariously multifaceted. Let me see if I can make sense of both these faces.

I just finished reading Kim Edwards' The Lake of Dreams. Several Many times while reading, I wondered why I had selected to download this book. Then, a third or a half of the way in, the content grabbed me.

When I look back at the Audible.com description of the book, I think I was drawn in by "secrets" and "glass artist". But what hooked me was the little girl who had been abandoned by her mother. I walked in her shoes—but also in the shoes of the mother—as I continued reading.

Lots of feelings surfaced—of abandonment; of wondering what was happening for my birthmother in 1949 Gloucester; of examining how I could have handled my untenable marriage differently in 1980; of the sometimes-perceived emotional imbalance that trails a life of feeling like I don't belong, I don't fit in.

Then this morning I read the latest blog post by my artist friend Lynne Farrow. [Lynne and I are fellow alumnae of the "Design Outside the Lines" seminars hosted by designers Marcy Tilton and Diane Ericson.] Lynne's post today includes a quote from author John O'Donohue:

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence as a blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish and sustain us.

The phrase "shy inner light" grabbed me. I posted a photo the other day on Facebook of 3- or 4-year-old Jan sitting with her mother. Sober Jan. A friend of mine commented, upon viewing the photo, that I was so serious. Well, I remember my childhood as being serious.

I went to school, where the only place I felt accepted was on the piano bench, accompanying choruses and singers. I went home and practiced piano, then read or worked jigsaw puzzles while listening to music. There were no other kids in our neighborhood—I didn't play with the neighbor kids. There was no television. My brothers took each other water skiing or through the chain of lakes to downtown Winter Park in the boat. My brothers were five and seven years older than I and had no time for me. My mother was always in the kitchen—there was no interaction with her. I grew up alone, feeling totally out of place. I lived inside my head.

(I loved the picture of me as a baby because I was smiling. Little four- or five-month-old me was still in the honeymoon phase with this family who had taken me on. They still found me cute, sweet, lovable, desireable. Soon the honeymoon/honeymood would end, and I would start fearing that the slightest misstep would cause them to seek to annul the adoption.)

When I stop and wonder how I got to today, to age 60, it must have been that "shy inner light" which O'Donohue recognizes, that enabled me to hope for a better future, for a tiny space somewhere in this world where I might fit in.

I am thankful for those tiny spaces that have occurred.

Thank you, Lynne, for a beautiful post.

Stories to be Told

Today's Daily Thought from Real Simple magazine grabbed me:

“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t …. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.”   ― Dorothy Allison

I watch and read anything regarding adoption that comes across my radar screen. So many stories are of wonderful, heart-wrenching reunions—hugs, kisses, tears, the sharing of stories that fill the holes of the missed years.

What you don't hear are stories like mine, where a parent or a child is found and doesn't want anything to do with the finder. Those stories don't raise ratings and sell ad time. They're personal—so very personal.

I know how isolated I've felt throughout my life. I know the feeling of not belonging anywhere or to anyone. I know how I felt when I received the letter from my biological mother—written in the ½" margins of my letter to her—requesting that I never contact her again.

I know. But can I communicate it to you in a manner that allows you to really understand and fully comprehend how it feels to me? Probably not.

The unsuccessful or less-than-fully successful stories are the ones that need to be written about. These stories, if added to the library of adoption literature, would help potential adoptive parents and mental health professionals understand how to treat and deal with adoptive children and what these children are experiencing.

How different my life might have been had my parents realized the turmoil that was swirling in my mind, had they been able to sit me down for six months with a sensitive and caring therapist who could help me feel grounded within myself.

But it is what it is. I am where I am. I look in my invisible mirror every day and watch my words and actions to make sure the Little Adoptee is staying inside. I've tried to make a comfortable home for her.

In the meantime, I keep hopping up on my soapbox to say, "Adoptees have needs you can't imagine. You must look for those needs and fill them."

The world keeps changing. Our body of knowledge keeps growing. Maybe ten or twenty or fifty years from now there will be no unsuccessful adoptions.

I can only hope.