Facing My Creations

Caring for children, raising children is great creative  expression.  My daughter gave me an idea about creativity being a spiritual expression, that by creating we are emulating our creator.

Raising children can be contributing to the positive growth of a loving human being.

Looking at how this works as a natural but missing mother, I have to go past my own misunderstanding to loving myself.  I have to nurture awareness in myself. Awareness of me and my daughter and everyone else in our families. Before I can do that I have to love myself enough to bear the awareness.  If I had known at the time of relinquishment what I know now…

Many times I have not been able to bear awareness.  I have not had the courage, the heart to face the trauma.  So we have been over and over and over the frightening bits .

I wanted Joy to know I loved her.  I wanted her to feel it and know it, for it to be her reality that she was/is loved.  There have been so many times and ways that it obviously wasn’t getting through.

She did not know that I loved her for a long time.  Nothing in her formative years indicated that I loved her or that I was capable of loving her.  Then we met and were caught in our lies of self sufficiency.  Those lies led to a lot more misunderstanding.

As many times as it takes, as many times as I have to face rejection, as many times as I have to face hurt feelings, as many times as I have to forgive myself and the world I know; for what I have created, is how many times I have to do it.  I have to do it.  There isn’t any other alternative but to go forward.  When she feels rejected I do too.

I go down and touch the sadness that sits next to the old conditioning telling  me I was not good enough for her–that I was undeserving to be her mother.  Then the defensiveness is triggered and I’m fighting to justify myself, to prove that I have a right to hold my head up and breathe the air everyone else that has ever been born has the right to breathe. I have to breathe no matter what, no matter how unconscious I may be.  Breathing my way back to the present, through the pain, until I’m watching myself from an inner distance.  Then I know that I don’t know.  I don’t know how to work this except to keep looking for the good.

And asking.  I am learning to ask for help and for clarification, and that I have the strength to face whatever is in front of me and be whoever I am.

As many touches, as many words, as many hugs, it will be worth it. I am involved in one of the most creative acts possible on Earth.  I am growing myself up to be the most loving momma I can be.   Falling short is part of what I do.  I come to places I can’t bear.  Sometimes I turn away to find a safe place to breathe and rest and come to know the terror and pain can’t last.  They don’t endure.  I do.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love.         Whoever lives in love lives in God, and god in him. [1 John 4:16]

Prayer of Purpose

Michael’s  song of unconditional loving

Will You Be There lyrics

Hold Me Like The River Jordan
And I Will Then Say To Thee You Are My Friend

Carry Me Like You Are My Brother
Love Me Like A Mother Would You Be There?

Weary Tell Me Will You Hold Me
When Wrong, Will You Scold Me When Lost Will You Find Me?

But They Told Me A Man Should Be Faithful
And Walk When Not Able And Fight Till The End
But I’m Only Human

Everyone’s Taking Control Of Me Seems That The World’s Got A Role For Me I’m So Confused Will You Show To Me You’ll Be There For Me And Care Enough To Bear Me

(Hold Me) show me (Lay Your Head Lowly) told me
(Softly Then Boldly) (Carry Me There)
I’m Only Human

(Lead Me) hold me (Love Me And Feed Me) ye yeah
(Kiss Me And Free Me) yeah (I Will Feel Blessed) I’m Only Human

(Carry) Carry  (Carry Me Boldly) Carry me (Lift Me Up Slowly) yeah
(Carry Me There) I’m Only Human

(Save Me) need me (Heal Me And Bathe Me)
lift me up lift me up (Softly You Say To Me)
(I Will Be There) I Will Be There

(Lift Me) i’m gonna care(Lift Me Up Slowly) (Carry Me Boldly) yeah
(Show Me You Care) Show Me You Care

(Hold Me) whoooo (Lay Your Head Lowly) I get lonley some times
(Softly Then Boldly) I get lonely (Carry Me There) yeah yeah carry me there yeah yeah yeah

In Our Darkest Hour In My Deepest Despair Will You Still Care?Will You Be There?

In My Trials And My Tribulations Through Our Doubts And Frustrations
In My Violence In My Turbulence Through My Fear And My Confessions
In My Anguish And My Pain Through My Joy And My Sorrow In The Promise Of Another Tomorrow
I’ll Never Let You Part For You’re Always In My Heart.

First Contact

I’ve botched  answering my daughter’s questions in the past.  It is harder than asking and has greater responsibility.    I’d like to start at the beginning, but I’m not sure where it is.  That  could be several posts.

Birthing Joy was the highest point of my teenage life.  It seemed like the room filled with  delicately pulsing gold and white light.  It was transcendent.  The lowest point in my life was relinquishing her.  No question.  Nothing has impacted me like that.  I learned that emotional devastation isn’t going to kill me by itself.  I’m not going to waste away in a quiet room waiting to die.  I  get up and take another step.  I took a lot of missteps and wrong turns.  I tried sex drugs and rockandroll. They didn’t replace anything.  I came back to me.  Alone.

Searching to make sense of living I made lots of choices.  Some choices  strengthened me and provided a loving feeling.  I didn’t bounce back from losing my firstborn the way it had been predicted.  I crawled.

Twelve years later I gave birth to my son.  It was not a magical experience like hers had been.  This time the magic was that I got to take him home.  His father changed his first diaper while I watched with my head in the pillows.  Three weeks later, when I left the house for the first time, my baby was strapped to me.  The longest I left him for the first year was two hours — in the next room.

I only wanted to be a good enough mother.  Everything I did was trying to be that or to prove that I was.

We lived in sunny So Cal.   only a few miles from Joy.  A third baby, a little sister was born, who worshipped her older brother.

Then we  moved 2000 miles away, two weeks before Joy’s son was born.

My idyllic domestic bubble was popped by the move.  For the first time I had to leave my youngest, at four years old, in daycare.  I went back to teaching school, started getting to know the kids new friends parents, find new sources for the special foods to prevent the ear infections and learn how to live in the snow and ice.

In the middle of my first Midwestern winter, in the evening, my husband brought me the phone. Joy had the info on me for a while.  I think new motherhood was her impetus to use it.

I wish I had a recording of that first phone call.  I was shaken physically as well as emotionally.  Lying on the bed I grabbed a pen and started writing on the back of some paper.  Her name.  The town she grew up in.  She told me she left home and got married when she was 15!  Trying to imagine how that could have  occurred in the conservative and upright adoptive family I assumed she had been raised in I asked her how her parents handled  an elopement to Mexico.  My guess was they would have had it annulled.  She said they threw a very nice wedding reception for her and her 16 year old husband .  She assured me they were very nice people.  There were a couple other life stories that felt like bombs dropped into my ignorant fantasy, which I wrote down without commenting.

She told me she was put into a special program in elementary school because of her gift of creativity.  She is very creative.

I was confused, feeling chided for hinting disapproval of her aparents, like a ball of confusion exploded with thoughts and feelings flying.

Later I learned  she perceived my lack of questioning her as lack of interest.  The irony was I thrilled with every bit of contact we had.  I perceived her as uncomfortable with questions.  My efforts to be sensitive and grateful for what I got were read as lack of interest.

We were both in the midst of more upheaval than we acknowledged — aside from reunion.  I knew she was a new mom.  I didn’t know she needed a place to live.   I was supposed to be “together”, the mom, the adult — which I was, to an extent.  I thought I was a good mother to my two raised children.   I was also stressed emotionally and financially while my husband started a PhD program.

Buried emotions from the most painful experience of my life erupted along with the sense that no one would, could or should help me.  I wasn’t deserving of assistance when she was born.  Unfortunately,  I still didn’t believe I deserved assistance.  It was as if I was cheating the system to have contact with the daughter that I had let go. If I wanted  reunion  I had better handle it on my own, as an adult, in addition to being a good wife and mother.  I was desperately trying to prove I was worthwhile and didn’t dare ask for help.

She told me she wasn’t angry which barely scared me into realizing she might have reason to be angry.

I was unwavering in my commitment to  communicating with Joy.  I craved the sound of her voice as though she had awakened me, brought me out of a cave of denial.  I had a firstborn daughter.

She told me she was a grown woman (teen mother)  herself — out of her parents’ home for years.  She was independent and didn’t need me.  She didn’t want me to be a mother.

I was anxious to be whatever she did want me to be.

Sometimes I still flounder in a dilemma of not living up to expectations. She is always in my mind.  Sometimes more in the background than now.  But always, whatever I am doing, and wherever I am, I carry her around with me.

I was revisiting the traumas of our reunion recently and my deodorant wasn’t working.  Life goes on and people put up with my stink. Everyone that gets near me will appreciate it when I get through this.

Big Bang Theory

I feel like I’m getting ready to say goodbye.  Most likely it’s just a transition approaching.  I was thinking of starting at the beginning and the Do re mi song from The Sound of Music played “a very good place to start” in my head.  But then where is the beginning?  The beginning of creation?  How did the great mystery start? So many explanations tire me.  And I recalled a favorite upliftment technique, listening to Paul Thorn’s Mission Temple Fireworks.  I’d like to spread some fun around.

One beginning was my first blog post as Being Me at 3:51 PM on Aug 13, 2006. One beginning was when Joy was placed on my belly for a moment right after her birth.  Or do I start with how her father and I got together?  Or with how I came to be receptive to her father’s attentions?  Or how I came to be born and my own family or origin…  The Big Bang Theory leads me to the big bang of the start of our reunion.

POW!

I need to listen to that song again.

Commitment

I’ve heard that Marriage, in order to be successful, requires 100 percent commitment to loving.  I know I don’t fulfill that.  But it keeps me in the game.  I keep it as a reference, a possibility.  If I could do that 100% that would be awesome.

We sometimes exhibit less-than-loving behavior.

Rachel and Lori over at DNA Diaries have been examining what makes reunion work.  Commitment was one of the touchstones.    That one touched me.  I thought of Joy’s ambivalence towards our relationship.  She used to pull away at times, to protect herself, which used to wreak havoc with a fear I had of losing her again.  For a long time I thought life would be better if she and I could settle into a safe and sane relationship.  It was some kind of dream/goal where we would be relaxed and comfortable and accepting and interact like happy familiars.  Someday.  In the Future.  But the Past is always Present in our relationship.

I tried to make it up to her by beating myself up for never being good enough, loving enough, devoted enough.   Then this reference to “being in it for the long haul” or committing to the relationship took hold in my thinking.  I may not have done it right, but I definitely demonstrated commitment to continuing.

I’d seen Joy’s ambivalence as “my challenge”.  But it’s really just a reflection of my ambivalence to myself.

When I see myself getting defensive or hurt about something Joy does or says, I can choose to focus on something else.  She is not the decider of my happiness.  I am. My happiness requires commitment and inner discipline, to be here for myself.  I am  committing to find out if I can really be loving in this relationship, no matter what.

It depends on my willingness to participate in my own life, to really  go for 100 percent loving.

I know there is no static perfection, but I’m still going for it.  I expect continually changing excellence through  committing and  dedicating my loyalty to loving.  It means looking at things I’ve done that hurt me and others, and loving me and others anyway.  And it means protecting myself.

Nothing  is more worthwhile than loving.  Not shame or vanity or hurt feelings.  Nothing.

When you are in contraction, you can begin to move into a state of expansion by coming back to the question, “Where does love lead me right now?” Love always leads you into living from the inside out. It allows you to stay within yourself and realize that:

Who you are is enough. Regardless of what anybody else thinks, you can love yourself. You can love your mistakes as much as you love your successes.

As you hold on to these truths, you will start attracting people to you who will support your inner process. Try it and see. Make a commitment that, just for today, you’ll let love lead.

- John-Roger with Paul Kaye
(From: Momentum, Letting Love Lead – Simple Practices for Spiritual Living, p. 22)

When I am exercising my commitment, it cuts out alternatives because my focus and attention is on what I have begun.  I have begun to love.   I have just begun. It is going to produce change.  I don’t always get my first choice in things, unless my first choice is to love.

By making loving most important I get to rest in the arms of the angels. I can whine and complain, or I can  go on to the growth, getting on with what works and loving as if there was no tomorrow and have Heaven right here on earth.

Celebrating Mothers Day

The word Joy uses to describe our family is weird.  Maybe.  People who overheard me describe myself as conservative have been quick to correct me.  Perhaps my conservatism is to the extreme that ends up on the other side.

I think  she meant unconventional.  I tend to pick and choose my conventions.  Mothers Day is one that I didn’t pick up on very readily.  My mom didn’t receive much after the elementary school craft projects were complete.  I was inconsiderate like that.  I was the oldest child following my dad’s pattern of ignoring holidays.

The flurry of angst about mothers day in the adoption blogs aroused me this year.  Though my own mother is dead and gone, she is still the most powerful figure in Mother’s Day to me.  My dead mother is more important than what others think about my motherhood.

I officially terminated my parental rights a few days before Mother’s Day.  I don’t have the record.  If a copy was intended for me it would have been given to my mother.  She was there, behind me.  She might have received something.  If she did she destroyed it.  I went through all the files before selling their house in 1997.   No evidence.

Breathe.

Just like I was supposed to obliterate my memory of birthing a daughter, I was oblivious to Mother’s Day that year.  I was in my room, in my parents’ home, crying.  No connection.

I would’ve guessed my mother went to church that day.  But maybe not.  They would have been focused on reminders of what day it was.  Special recognition given to mothers that she was not getting from me.  I wasn’t even angry. A few months after losing my daughter I moved in with a man who treated me like a cross between a daughter and a lover.  Then drifted through years of circumstances that made it easy to forget about Mother’s Day.

What was my little brother doing? He was the Golden Boy.  The good son.  GB told me later that our dad had instructed him that sex could result in pregnancy which would result in a lifetime commitment to his girlfriend.  The message was powerful enough for him to quit having sex with his girlfriend and stay away from girls entirely for a few more years until they were old enough to get birth control.  Preventing Mothers Days.

I like to think that watching me navigate post maternity taught my parents something.  I know watching me navigate early reunion was confounding to them.  All the denial and all the burial couldn’t put it all behind me, ever.  My teen pregnancy surfaced.  It is and always will be part of my motherhood.

The little crafty projects of my raised kids are  mementos of their growth and development much more than commemorations of my motherhood.  When they were little I learned to send cards to my own mother and grandmother.  This year the notion of celebrating mothers is adjusting.  The sappiness is ebbing.

There is so much I didn’t share with my mother.  So much hurt and anger we had to put aside in order to share some good times, to see each other’s soft and tender caring.

Losing Joy was so devastating to me I had no thought of how anyone else felt.  Joy’s loss overwhelmed me when I heard it from her lips.

My mother never whispered a word to me about her own feelings.

My grandson is not going to be a teenager much longer.  My perspective on motherhood continues to shift.  This year I love my mother a little more.  And I receive that love to myself.

Though brunch is absolutely my favorite meal, I have no desire to face the crowds on Mother’s Day.  Perhaps I’ll be tending my garden.

another step

Over at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum they’ve been talking about “coming out of the closet”.  That has been a lot of what blogging has been about for me the past few years, airing my thoughts and feelings.

The first year after Joy was born I talked about losing her all the time.  Everyone  got to hear my story.  I was looking for someone to help me figure out how to go on after the most traumatic event of my lifetime.  I don’t remember much response at all, from the wandering crowd I met.  Almost exactly a year later, a young man looked at me and said “You should never have left your daughter.  She needs you.”  That slammed me back on my heels.

I started being more circumspect about who I told my story to.  It was still the major event of my life and more important than anyone or anything else.  So if you were going to be a friend of mine, you heard it.  As time went by it moved to the background behind years of new events.  When most of my new contacts were moms in my raised kid’s playgroups, sharing my history of giving up my firstborn was no longer an intro.  Only those that got close to me knew about Joy.  But yeah, I always included her birth in my answers to medical personnel.

A couple years ago an old acquaintance of my husband’s came to visit.  DH suggested that I’d have a lot to share with this guy because he is an adoption worker.  He travels all over placing children for adoption.  This was the first time I was really dumbstruck.  I could not speak of my loss to this stranger.  I was hosting the enemy for dinner but I wasn’t going to let him know.  I just watched him.  He effectively ran the conversation that evening and kept it on their childhood memories.  So I really don’t know exactly what he does.  Maybe he is working with older children in foster care?  IDK.

I don’t plan to invite him back to find out.  But he is on the fringe of family events.  If I do run across him in the future, I feel more prepared to find out what he’s doing.

Perhaps that’s the good news in my response to the movie Juno and the Kitchen commercial Nicole blogged about, and most of all being able to read and write here in the blogosphere.    In the ’60s and earlier, adoption was a secret, shameful thing.  In this new presentation it’s an option, like whether to drive a minivan or an SUV, a style preference.  There’s no shame.  It’s just whether you like red socks or blue socks.

Talking to a friend about open records legislation she was puzzled as to who would oppose it and why.  I told her imo adoptive parents feel as though they’ve paid good money for their adopted child and don’t want their title questioned.  She took that in with little surprise.  It wasn’t until later that I realized I had put it in terms of human trafficking.

I’m still unpacking the language and the standards and the inconsistencies of my experience of surrendering my own child to adoption.  My inner wolves are still fighting.

My Mistakes

I’ve been inspired by several people lately asking questions about what makes reunions work vs what doesn’t.  The idea that is strongest for me is for the mother in a closed adoption to get help BEFORE reunion, to anticipate and prepare for the resurfacing emotions.  Learning about real adoptee issues ahead of time seems like it would be invaluable.  Living in denial doesn’t pay off well at all.

I was in half denial.  I never accepted that adoption was best for me.  There was no blocking out that it hurt like hell and interfered with everything I thought about myself and everything I did.  But I comforted myself with the notion that it was best for my daughter.  She was supposed to be getting the good life without me.  A part of me didn’t really believe it.  But I didn’t know how else to go on, so I played along with that scenario.

Reunion started out with a continual series of missteps.  We were both shaken out of our ideas of who and what we were.  And we both tried to fake it, to pretend that we were just fine.  Part of the BS that returned to me was the belief that I didn’t deserve any help.  The conditions of  losing her in the first place were that I didn’t deserve help from anyone.  So I figured if I was going to reclaim her it would have to be on my own, without asking anyone for anything.

That was dumb.  That was a big mistake and I made it.

I made another big mistake.

I tried waiting until things evened out with me and my daughter before getting to know her son, my grandson.  So much self doubt that I didn’t want to risk initiating a relationship with him,  in case she rejected me.

That was DUMB.

I might have avoided that one if I had enough self respect to ask for what I wanted -  to ask for help reintegrating my daughter into my life.

I told myself that he might get hurt by the pain his mother and I fought our way through.  And that I should try to keep him out of it.  That was a mistake.  I thought he should have the opportunity to contact me when he was old enough to do it himself (!?!)  That thought should not have been allowed residence in my mind.  It certainly wasn’t my own.  But I let it hang out in my head.

So just in case anybody is wondering, I’d say those are the two biggest mistakes I made in reunion.

I suggest get help.

Ask for what you want.

Be sure to let little kids know you love and care for them, not matter what goes on in other relationships.  Little kids deserve to know all the love they can.

Justice?

Well AB 372 is wending its way through the judiciary committee and humbling all that come into contact with it. What a sorry mess.  I hope we are all soon celebrating its demise.

Hmmmm… Call me lazy. But I just read something(http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/may-it-please-the-court/) more interesting than anything I have time to say today.  I would love to make beautiful words and pictures to go with them and be eloquent about making and using the law.  Enjoy.

Another Mother’s Story

Phillipa shared this on the AAFC forum and it really touched me.  I’d like everyone to see it, for people to know her story.  It’s in two parts, each about 6 minutes from a  TV interview of her and her husband.

Part One:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY8unxfo6LE

Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC8wEvSixo0&feature=related

I am also kind of astonished at the new TV show Lie to Me.  They keep featuring stories about adoption that are subtly in your face.  The name of the show is so appropriate for the secrets and lies of the adoption game.