Scarlet Alphabet

Yesterday I was helping get a mailing out at the botanical garden where I volunteer weekly. There were 7 other people sitting around, two of which know the bare bones of my story. A woman who has been very open with me asked how many children I had altogether and I told her (and everyone else at the table) that I hadn’t raised my firstborn who was adopted. It was the first time I’d even met one of the people there. A ripple of silence went around. Then a woman with a strong leadership style said her friend in birdwatching group recently reunited with her “first daughter” which invited me to share that my daughter and I have been in reunion nearly 20 years, said with a smile, followed by another ripple of silence.

 

We turned to talking about good books and literature which turned to Am Lit and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The woman next to me said she saw someone on Halloween with a scarlet A on her dress and standing next to her a child wearing a B. The group cracked up laughing and I sat quietly not getting the joke. My sense of humor was so absent! Why would Pearl be wearing the letter B?

Later thinking about it, I thought B for *astard, which made sense but the humor in that was a bit too harsh for that crowd. This morning the thought was B as in the second letter of the alphabet. A,B,C indicating the scarlet A no longer had the meaning it originally held.

 

Writing this all out gives me a fresh perspective. They were shocked, startled, to briefly hear my story. They haven’t shared that experience, but the experience we shared yesterday was one of acceptance, even though it took me 1/2 a day to figure it out.

Mean/Grace

In loving, I don’t have to defend anything or attack anything. I fall out of that loving daily. I have put myself on “pause” and re calibrate.  What do I really want here? What does the other person want?

Observing the challenges to my emotional experience, I am  learning.  Inhale, exhale, whoop I’m still here. Every experience is for growing and expanding. The purpose of my life is to turn all experience to good use. 

This every other daily blogging thing is interesting.  Really what do I have to say?

Oh, glory how happy I am

This being adoption month and nablopomo (or whatever) I’m inspired to keep my blog active with little tidbits. Back in November many long years ago I was living in a studio apt with my dearest friend and getting quite a big belly.  We were happy to stay home and teach ourselves to knit and listen to the Reverand Gary Davis.  Joy said she sang about being saved in the blood of the lamb.  When I googled it on youtube look who popped up!

Perhaps she picked it up in the womb.

Oh, glory how happy I am. Wait for it to load and skip ahead to about 2:20.

A Sunday in October

The previous post leaves a bad taste. I want to override it. So looking into unpublished drafts I found this, written just over a year ago. It’s something worth remembering.

I keep telling myself I’m not going to argue.  I’m not going to get defensive.  And yet there I go defending and arguing time and again.  I argue.  I defend.

Joy and I and Ezzy had a fine time on Sunday.  First, Ezzy took me to church with her friend, Mickie.  I called Joy when we went inside to let her know where we were.  I called again when we headed out to eat.  I kept looking back at the door during the meal even though I knew Joy didn’t know where we were so couldn’t possibly be meeting us.  Ezzy said, “Mom, she doesn’t know where we are.”  So I know she saw what I was doing.

Joy called to find out where we were and caught up with us as we were leaving.  She met Mickie briefly.  And we set out to see what we could see.  We casually walked over to Joy’s new place which has gorgeous “bones”.  Then to the library because we all three love libraries.  LOVE libraries.  I tracked down a favorite quote which I read aloud.

Ezzy and I have read to each other all her life.  We like the sound of our own voices.

Then we proceeded to Ezzy’s much less glam home, gently, gingerly trying out the everyday simple activities of daily living together.  Just this is where I live.  This is how I live.  How is this for you?  Simple.  Just hung out for a couple hours and then back to our regularly scheduled lives.  We said goodbye at the BART station.

Ezzy and I went to pour wine at a fundraiser til 10pm.  Back at her place she read poems of Octavio Paz in Spanish to me.  In the morning I went to dance class with Ezzy and took the train back home.

Walked around gingerly for a couple days thinking that went ok.  We’re doing ok.  Then last night I tripped up.  I’m not sure how it happens.  Joy and I were on the phone, talking, laughing… and then things slid down down.  I went back to fretting, feeling disconcerted, as though there was something I should do and I didn’t know what it was.

Figuring out these new pathways, building relationships among familial strangers, I feel so awkward.  Joy and Ezzy have things in common as daughters of me.  I have things I’ve shared with Joy and different things I’ve shared with Ezzy.  I’ve known Ezzy five more years than I’ve known Joy.  I raised Ezzy.  Now we’re learning to share things together.  They’re getting to know each other under the tension of me trying to insure that everything is OK.  As if I could.  As if there was a question whether everything is ok or not.  Everything IS.  We are OK.

Keep Looking

Grown in My Hearts Adoption Carnival this month is about ‘treasured adoption photos’.  This is really hard for me to grasp. Treasured would be something I like, right? The only adoption photos I have are the poorly lit fuzzy polaroids taken of me holding Joy before signing the relinquishment papers. The best one went to her father. I wanted him to have some remembrance as he never saw her.

I’ve been ashamed that that was the best I could do.  She was an absolutely beautiful baby, and fuzzy polaroids  didn’t do her justice.  They are the only photos.

If there are no images of the tender beauty of her infancy, maybe the wrenching separation is my favorite. It is the most impactful. I remember a video of two figures running away from a burning village, one smaller than the other. A sudden violent separation from home through a personal bomb blast.

My British heritage objects to this sensational image. But in closed adoption there aren’t really applicable  “treasured adoption photos”.

Looking Good

Last night Joy mentioned how I portray myself, suggesting my motivations are often to “make myself look good”.  She said that based on my answer to an earlier commenter’s question  I am pretty naive about how I look to others.  How did I think that me makes me look? Not good.  Then why did I say it? Because it’s the truth. I like to keep it simple. I don’t want people to approve of me based on erroneous information.

I have been overly concerned about what she thinks about me.  By not raising her, I missed out on the lovely assurance that no matter what; I am her mother.  I  have feared her judgment against me could separate us forever. How bizarrely I’ve handled that concern illustrates why worrying about what other people think of me just doesn’t work.

One of my references for a good life is an image I got from a side bar commentary running throughout much of the Last Whole Earth Catalog by Ann Herbert. It’s where the quote “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” came from. She described the way running for the bus with your scarf flying can be a senseless act of beauty  contributing to the well being of all. ( I can’t find the article of my memory but you can see some of her writing here.) Joy is a great appreciator of beauty. I think she would appreciate me looking good. Maybe fleshing out the circumstances of how I came to have the painting I had been assigned to give to my uncle can make for a nicer picture.

In 1995 my mom died of cancer.  I had flown to CA from KS just 5 days before to be with her as she completed her life. I stayed on for another couple weeks for the memorial service and to help make arrangements for my dad who had two herniated discs and high blood pressure.

Both his parents had lived to be 97 and I fully expected him to recover from his back problem and his high bp.  So when he asked me to be his trustee in the event of being incapacitated or dying I said sure, without giving it much thought. Five months later he had a series of strokes that left him totally dependent. There were letters being printed in his computer to people all over the country. There were thousands of reel to reel tapes he archived for the local chamber music society. There were decisions about how and where to care for him physically, emotionally and financially.  And I lived 1500 miles away.  That could be blog fodder for years.

Nearly a year later he moved to  a nursing center in KS. Another year later I sold his house, after emptying it. There were lots of oil paintings, all but two done by my grandmother. Two of them went up in his room at the nursing center, a portrait of his wife and one of his childhood backyard in Lansing. I shipped a sunset over Wing Lake to my cousin in MI. Most got boxed up and stuck in the garage. I sent Joy photos of many of them.

I was instructed to ship the portrait of my grandmother to my uncle, upon my father’s death. It was the one of the two paintings  I would have liked to hang in my house.  Meanwhile, my dad was alive and kicking (and biting) and keeping me busy in addition to substitute teaching, raising two kids and reunion.

In 2000 we moved it all back to CA, from 3000 midwestern sq ft to 1100 CA sq ft, leaving Buster behind as a freshman at KU.  Neither my husband or I had jobs, but we still had two mortgages.  It felt a little tight. My dad was in a nursing center just a 12 minute bike ride away.

DH got a job pretty quickly. Ezzy was making new friends and falling in love and learning to drive. There was considerable tension between me and DH completely apart from reunion. Joy’s and my relationship was still riddled with ambivalence to put it mildly.

Anyway, when Joy said “Send me the portrait.” I was still under obligation to Uncle, my dad’s brother.  I didn’t know his interest. I hadn’t asked. He was 7 years older than Dad. Ezzy and DH and I had talked about hoping we’d get the painting eventually.  If Dad died first, we’d probably get it back when Uncle died, no guarantees.

Dad died in 2004.  My brother & I went back to visit Uncle & family after the memorial service. Their health was failing.  My brother was aware of the dispute between me and Joy. He didn’t feel it was appropriate to ask Uncle about the portrait while they were concerned about bigger issues. They were barely able to navigate their current situation. Aunt died the following year.

About that time Buster helped me unpack the portrait and start making arrangements for it to be copied.

Last year I visited again and Uncle talked incessantly about the sweethearts of his youth and how much nicer the house in Lansing was than where he currently lives.  He moved out of the house in Lansing before WWII. These days when I call, he doesn’t answer. Cousin says he doesn’t hear very well but is “doing fine”.

I asked him about the portrait. He said he doesn’t want it.  So yeah, I held onto it long enough and now consider it mine. For some reason Grandmother covered her face with lacquer, which has yellowed over the years making her look severely jaundiced.

The first symptom of my mother’s cancer was jaundice. Whoa, that didn’t look good.

What am I trying to prove?

Three years after Joy was born my best friend shocked me by asking me, “What are you trying to prove?”  I had no idea what she was talking about.  Moi?  Trying to prove anything?  Looking back from here, I’d been trying to prove I was worthwhile, trying to earn a place in the world.  Theme of my youth.

Relinquishing my baby to adoption was the greatest trauma of my life.  I lost both my baby and my fragile sense of worth.  I had been convinced I couldn’t care for her and told not to speak of her again, when my parents  took me home from the hospital.

I insisted my mother take pictures of me holding my baby girl before signing the termination of parental rights.  Holding her again was similar to her birth, a sense of heaven, suspended in joyful knowing beyond anything slse.    Then she was taken from my arms and I was ushered into a small office to sign the prepared paperwork. I couldn’t see what I was signing for the tears.

There was no discussion of “feelings”.  There was a lot of silence.  I cried in my room for a couple weeks or so…  The opinion of the world as I knew it was that my baby and I did not deserve each other.  She was pure and good.  I was unworthy of her.  The world hadn’t made much sense to me before that.  Giving my baby to strangers stood my sense of right and wrong on its head.  At this point I really didn’t care to live in the world I’d known so far.  Losing my firstborn daughter to adoption through submitting to the idea that I wasn’t good enough to be her mother devastated my self esteem.  I was supposed to suppress my grief in favor of shame.  Finding myself waking up alive day after day was a bit of a surprise.

It shifted to seem I was playing Rapunzel, waiting to be rescued from my parents’ protection.  I realized it was time to leave my parents home and find my way in the world, to make a new life.  The next move was up to me, to get up and go back out in the world to see what I could find.  For about a year, I told everyone I met about losing my baby, until a young man looked at me with a shocked expression and told me my baby needed me and that it was wrong to leave my own flesh and blood behind.

I started trying to push this significant point in my life story back as far as I could.  Sex, drugs and rock were no replacement.

Inwardly I was both at war with and worshipping the god of opinion.  Others opinions and even my own, conflicted with my true inner goal of living as a divine creation of God. Jesus was my secret role model.  I grew up in the sixties and attended Love-Ins with the youth minister from my family church. “Hippies”, free love and the “spiritual” aspects of the popular culture appealed to me.  I was both baffled and curious at discussions about “the purpose of life”.  People were studying meditation and experimenting with psychedelic drugs to uncover life’s meaning.  My sense of spirituality was that it was way more mysterious than I was.  Privately I contemplated  and processed these messages.  My personal answer to “What is the purpose of life?”  was “To have fun.”  It sounded too simple and maybe sacrilegious, so I kept quiet.

It was beginning to discover my purpose, expressing my worthiness as a child of God.  Just like everyone else.  I am.  That’s what I was trying to prove.

Trying to prove it is counterproductive. It’s something to be experienced, not proven. Trying to prove my worth indicates  I’m not experiencing it. Trying to prove my worth is siding with the devil of separation.

I want to fulfill my purpose of living and loving who I am.

Vote for Dawn

This is my little bit of political action. VOTE FOR DAWN over at “the Bump” where there is a contest for BEST ADOPTION BLOG. Remember her blog’s name is “this woman’s work” and if you’re reading me I’m sure you’ve read her.  Her blog is head and shoulders, knees and toes above the others competing, if you have any interest in adoption reform or ethics or learning or…. Please go vote for her. She’s barely ahead right now. I think you can vote multiple times. In fact I’m going to go back right now and vote again. Click on the purple words above.  Ok? Then just scroll down until you can click on the little circle next to This Woman’s Work. Yeah.

Crazy Weather

Yesterday we got nearly 7 inches of rain with terrific winds swirling around the house. This morning there are little branches from the neighbors trees in our yard and the new Chinese pistache out front was bent way over. The underground stream running through the backyard will be flowing for the rest of the season!

As the winds roared I thought about leaks. Two winters ago a small dampness appeared in the NE corner ceiling. When I tried to assess the damage I saw a vent in the shallow eave very near the wet spot and imagined the rain swirling into the opening, soaking the insulation and gradually dripping down through the drywall. I enjoy standing in the laundry porch watching the gusts of rain switching directions, but worried about it getting in the vent. Then last winter it bloomed into an ugly patch of mildew over 2′ across.  It had been my youngest’s room, now used as a guest room. I tried not to look at it all winter, but the image of the rain swirling up into the vent every time it rained nagged me.

So mid morning had I started worrying out loud about that vent that we still hadn’t done anything to block it. And my dear DH looked at me through  bleary flu clouded eyes and said, “Remember it was the flashing around the electrical pole where it comes through the roof. We put roof tar on it last spring.”

DUH. That’s right. Last spring when we checked out the situation  we discovered that my concern for the vent was mistaken.  We just pulled out the roof tar and fixed the leak so fast it was completely forgotten. But the memories of the worry lived on and were front and center when it started to rain again.

Memories playing tricks on me. If I am so easily deluded, I think others may be too.

ETA: I posted my remembrance of “the painting” debacle a couple months ago.

Whose Fault?

Aerial view of the San Andreas Fault slicing through the Carrizo Plain just east of S L Obispo, California

My youngest came home for her birthday this week, preferring a quiet time for introspection after a hectic month of transitioning from one coast to another, finding a place to live and work and school, again.  It was a treat to hang together for a day. I told her that Joy and I are doing well and took credit by saying our reunion was better because I was doing better. Ezzy looks at me and says, “You’re not guilt tripping yourself anymore?”

Uh, I guess not. (?) I was surprised by her words and felt a tad foolish.

No, I’m not guilt tripping myself.  It sounds much easier than it is. It’s like walking a slithering tight rope.  Not just a balancing act but attending to and being present with a constantly moving line of truth. I have easily slipped into blaming or defending at any subtle hint to discredit me.

But that last word on Ezzy’s question, “anymore?” We’ll have to see about that.

A recent revelation is the way I tried scapegoating Joy’s father. It was easy to do, but the payoff was sour. He and I broke up immediately after signing the TPR. There was some duty to maintain a facade of support until then. But when I was confronted by him dating someone 6 years his junior I was devastated.  I knew our relationship was a dead end. But I still loved him and was furious that he found it so easy to “move on”.  Moving on seemed so different for him than me.

I kept loving him, thinking of him, doing things for him.  An older guy took me in like a wounded animal he cared for.  He envied the love he saw me continuing to send towards my baby’s daddy.There was a year of wild living after that before I gradually started to clear my head.

I’m lucky to have floated up to safety after having given up on myself.

Many years later, Joy’s call from 2000 miles away, awakened old memories. I told her his full name and his married sister’s name. And off she went to find him.

The little bit I heard about him from Joy triggered some old resentful feelings. He wasn’t who I wanted or needed back then. He just wasn’t. But even after all that time apart there were remnants and feelings of betrayal from his romantic notions and suggestions. I was annoyed that he might do that to her or for her and come across looking better in our daughter’s eyes than I ever would. Jealousy.

There were so many questions to answer. How? Why? Why not… One plausible story is that I fell for a guy that was not there for me.  We lived in a society that expected the father to step up and provide for his family. And he was MIA. It was easy to see he failed his responsibilities to me and to her.

Did he really know any better than he behaved?   Were we the only pressure in his life?  We had come sooo close to breaking up after 3 years of a steady relationship.  We started heading off in different directions and BOOM, I was suddenly pregnant.

I didn’t want to involve him.  But his sense of doing the “right” thing interfered for a few fateful months turning my plans around. Then we lost our jobs and therefore our room in a rundown beach hotel. “Morning” sickness manifested as morning, noon and night sickness.  Living in the van was plain uncomfortable and indiscreet with me throwing up unpredictably.

So he turned me over to my parents. When I asked him why he didn’t show up for his job interviews he was evasive, just like when I asked him where he was living. I don’t know what was going on in his life, his head or why. I think he was spending a lot of time stoned and I was tired of that.

I tried blaming him for a while, trying to deflect the guilt trips. But I was only using him as a scapegoat. His actions were  his best efforts to cope with growing up in the 60’s in a dysfunctional family. He’s got a couple other excuses too.

It gets down to a couple of almost adults interacting, in a changing society that didn’t support us taking care of our child, and learning some hard lessons. One of the things I’m still learning is to stop looking at what I or anyone else did as wrong. I don’t get a “do over”. My life is my life. It’s mine and I’m doing the best I know to express loving to all my family.

When I let go of my ego demands, my personality, my opinions and points of view, a feeling of joy and peace expands inside me. That’s what I want to share. I get a loving consciousness and awareness that I am loved by Spirit and by God and that I am safe.

It’s an exercise. I have to do it daily, just like someone training for a marathon.