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The
Spectrum Issue: Summer 2001 **************************************** An Honest Atheist I'm colorblind and my socks often fail to match. I can only sort my socks in direct sunlight, by matching their weave as well as color. Mismatched dark socks may keep my feet warm, but I feel unconfident and awkward. Monsignor Francis Xavier, my paternal great-uncle, expedited my processing through New England Catholic Charities to conceal his nephew's Protestant bastard and placed me with "good Catholics." I was of an entirely different nature from my adoptive parents. Impulsive and shortsighted, my parents labeled their introspective, contemplative child "Old Man" when he was only six, and I felt mocked and misunderstood. I only realized decades later that each time I changed schools, in first, fourth and seventh grades, my classmates beat me because they were following nature's demand to assert the pecking order. My parents never understood what was happening, and told me to 'just ignore' such events. I felt I disappointed them. The strictures and hypocrisy of my parents' religion became apparent as I grew. I was questioning Catholic dogma by the time I was ten and was an atheist by thirteen. But true to my nature, I doubted myself -- was my atheism merely adolescent contrariness? At seventeen I graduated and moved out on my own. Despite a full Catholic marriage I remained an atheist, converting eventually to Unitarian/Universalism, but still full of self-doubt. My twelve-year search succeeded at age 30 with the assistance of Jeff Hartung's legendary Adoptees' Internet Mailing List. Reunion has been great, and I maintain good relationships with my birth families. One of the most important connections I made was with my maternal half-brother. He's introspective. He's contemplative. He, too, was the one most picked-on in school. Like me he's a computer programmer, and like me, he's an atheist. His discovery was tremendously validating. My atheism isn't merely adolescent rebellion, but springs from a common nature that we share. And now I'm a
father, fascinated and delighted by my son's analytical and The colorblindness of closed-records adoption systems, like Catholic Charities, is rarely discussed or understood, but the mismatches that result can be profoundly painful. I understand my parents' limitations now, but only after a solitary childhood of self-doubt, fear and unanswerable schoolyard brutality. Others of course have much, much worse experiences. Until the full sunlight of open records is directed upon all adoptions the system remains blind to the mismatches of adoptive parent and child. Closed records condemn too many adoptees to unconfident and awkward childhoods with parents who, while they may love them warmly, cannot identify with or understand their children. Open records now for all. Robert Alberti ************************************************************* I am nearly sixty years old and still feel isolated, lonely and insecure. Even though I was four years old when my younger brother and I were taken away from our parental home and placed as Wards of the Court, I still feel love for my natural parents and resentment for the policemen who separated us. I was adopted, and remained sad throughout my childhood. My brother was raised in the County Children's Home. I have not yet found my brother nor any other family member. I have not had any contact with my adoptive mother, who is still living, for approximately twenty-five years. I never felt love from that part of my life. After all of these years I still remain just as sad and just as lonely as I was as a child, in spite of my successes and my loving husband. The pain never disappears; however, as we get older we get more melancholy. Somehow we just learn to survive in spite of it all and learn to cover up the pain in the most experienced way. These days I live on a beautiful forty-acre ranch in the foothills of the mountains in NW Arizona. My husband of twenty-one years and I have a very successful business in Mackinaw City, Michigan from which we are semi-retired, leaving our youngest daughter and her new husband in charge. Here in Arizona we have four quarter horses and a young mule. Our four Arctic wolf hybrids are our dear companions. They live in our big brand new house, and each has a single-size bed in our master bedroom. Life is great, but the emptiness is still front and center. Anne Hayden ************************************************************* One Saturday morning a year ago I was reading my email. There was a message to the Volunteer Search Network Eastern Region from a searcher stating that she was looking for a male born in the mid 1940's who probably grew up around Greenfield, Massachusetts and whose birth mother was born in Bath, Maine. The next line read that this would probably be a difficult search as she had been searching for over a year with no results. By the time I had read the message three times my palms were sweaty and my stomach was in a knot. I responded that it might not be such a difficult search because I thought the person she was looking for was me. That evening I was talking on the telephone with my birth father. For those who denigrate the importance of reunion and an adoptee's need to know, in the words of Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story. My birth father told me he is the first male in three generations to live past age sixty. All of the others died of a combination of diabetes and heart disease brought on by complications from diabetes. I was fifty-seven when my birth father found me and his words had a profound impact on me. I couldn't help wondering if I only had three years or less to live. I immediately made an appointment with my doctor and it was confirmed that I have Stage II diabetes. With my extra forty pounds, poor diet, lack of exercise, and the effects of diabetes on my body, my doctor told me I was a walking heart attack waiting to happen. Thanks to reunion with my birth father my diabetes is under control, I am on a diet, I go to an aerobics class every morning...and most of all I plan to live to be one hundred! Fr. John W.
Sweeley, D.D. ************************************************************* Once removed. That is how I have felt for most of my life. Standing apart once removed from the stuff of real, human life. Outside once removed looking in, an alien. Exempt from some invisible, inscrutable, core human experience connection that seemed to initiate everyone else into some grand cosmic family to which I was merely a step-child. An adopted child. A surrendered child. Cast in the fire of disconnection. Unplanned. A mistake. An inconvenience. Carried by a mother who saw me as a "gift" she was making for a nice, infertile couple. My first mother didn't so much reject me as much as simply fail to claim me as a significant part of her own life, even during her pregnancy. I suffered from premature relinquishment, since she let me go once removed without ever really having me. All of my relationships found their blueprint in that foundational indifference, and shaped themselves around the invisible once removed scars on my soul. My adulthood became a stage whereupon I reenacted that first intimate relationship, in which I felt too loosely held, too faintly regarded, too unclaimed. So I would urge my co-star of the moment to claim me for the moment find me good find me fine find me so I can find me too. And they would, for awhile. But a force no less than Destiny herself had deemed me once removed unkeepable. My co-stars always fulfilled the obligations of their role, to not be able to give me what I needed, to agree to part amicably, indifferently, to set up the inevitable scene for me: I find my way back to the void. I have found healing by stepping into that void, by staring down into the endless black of it. My gift in return for that harrowing journey is a life with connection, with a loving husband, a beautiful family. But the knowledge is still there. The truth is still there. Down there deep, where the snake resides, where my body resists going, fighting it with every fiber, every cell, fighting by simply stepping down to an idle so slow that I might simply stall out. Yes, the truth is still there, coiled up and waiting: the primary, shaping reality of my life is disconnection. It is where I still revert in times of stress or trauma, because that is how my brain and my psyche are wired. I was cast in the fire of separation, and despite all my years of tender and compassionate tending of that wound, despite all the years of carefully constructing a life that includes intimate connections, my body knows that at the core of me still squalls that once removed baby in the void... insignificant... alone. And yet, just as true is that the years unspool, and Destiny reveals a sliver of the Big Picture at a time... We reunite. We struggle, we ache, we thrill, we drink in echoes of our selves reflected in the other. We dabble in the folly of trying to recoup the lost years. We reenact the severed connection in our poignant and feeble human attempt to create a different outcome, to somehow make it right. But it cannot be made right. It just is. And when we can hold that brutal truth, we are no longer once removed disconnected, from each other, from ourselves, from humanity, from God. Marcy Wineman
Axness ********************************************************** I was adopted
at the age of nine from Frankfurt, Germany. My adoption was As a child I lived in an orphanage, mostly, but would spend time with an older couple who knew my mother. Meetings to adopt me were held at the older couple's home. I actually found my birthmom in Albuquerque, New Mexico about five years ago, and she still does not want anything to do with me. An ironic note to finding my birthmom was that she lived fifteen minutes from an individual in New Mexico who was helping me with my search. Steve Swanson ************************************************************* My father's flat chest and big schnoz…my mother's fair skin and freckles. Yep. I can see from whom I get my physical features. Why should I think any differently, even though the clues are right in front of my face the whole time? My blue eyes; their brown eyes. Their O and AB negative blood types, mine A positive. The biggest clue should be the lack of story surrounding my mother's pregnancy and my birth. But why should I even suspect something is amiss? Or should I say a SECRET?! For thirty-five years and ten days of my life, I am the product of Dan and Joan, no doubt in my mind, no siree! Sure, when I am angry I tell them I wish I was adopted (little do I know), but it is simply the ranting and raving of a spoiled only child. Not in my wildest dreams would I wish that upon myself! The blindfold is firmly in place, but it is about to come off. Mom died Dec 7, 1986. If she had planned on having "the talk" with me, she missed her opportunity. Guess dad doesn't feel it is his place. Everyone knows the deep, dark, family secret but it takes family medical problems (thankfully nothing I will inherit!) to shed some light on the little, above-mentioned, and rarely thought-of, life mysteries. YOU'RE ADOPTED! I will never forget the look on my cousin's face, nor the way those two words came pouring forth from her mouth. Instant reaction--yeah, okay, what's the punch line? No punch line will come. The only punches coming my way are of the legal kind. Within two days I discover the Internet is more than a place to blindly surf around. I quickly find others who are searching for their roots. Foolishly I believe I am exceptional, and that I will know in no time who these biological people who created me are. They can run, but they can't hide! Through sheer luck (hindsight, you know), I am steered to the LDA list where I find people who are experiencing the same things I am. I am no longer dwelling amongst those who perceive my circumstances as a curiosity. I don't feel so alone anymore in being fooled all my life. Around the same time, I am also put in touch with a CI in Florida (No comments, please). As I am finding out quickly, I have no right to any information pertaining to anything about me. Boy, am I pissed! How dare these people treat me like this! Just who do they think they are? I'll show them! Through the goodness of an "adoptee-sympathetic" judge in Florida, I am granted access to my OBC, through the CI. But lo and behold, Jeanine Myrick, (names will not be changed to protect the evil) senior attorney at Vital Statistics in Tallahassee, just can't bring herself to let this happen. Thus, the punches begin to fly. It is around this time that I am put in touch with Bastard Nation. In reading what BN is all about, I finally begin to understand why the things that are legally happening to me are happening…and that just makes me even more perturbed than I already am! The wicked Myrick persists in her quest to protect my birth family's privacy and deny me my own civil rights. Shame on her, because once again, luck will prevail! After she files a seventy-plus page brief in her case against me, I hire an attorney…one recommended, on the sly, by the aforementioned judge. Though they primarily deal with the adoption process, they are fascinated by what is happening to me. They take on my case, don their boxing gloves, and step into the ring for me. It is a nasty fight, one that lasts thirteen months. Steve and Rick sharply counter every argument Myrick throws our way. Victory is bestowed upon us February 8, 2000. Being the venomous snake she is, she tries to pull a last minute stunt after it is clear she has lost but…. Sadly, I will never be able to talk the attorneys into fighting for adoptee civil rights in Florida. Guess they got more than a good taste of the nasty debate this would entail. You win some and you lose some but, they have done well by me and I'm thankful for that. In March 2000, I was reunited with both my birth parents, within two weeks of each other. It's a whole new journey for me, but sometimes I long for the simpler days, when the lies were intact and life didn't have so many complications. You can't fix the past; you can't change the path in life you have already walked down. The only thing left to do is make it better…and by God, if I can contribute to that, even in some small way, then let it be! Yep, I got my father's flat chest and big schnoz and my mother's fair skin and freckles. Which father and mother, you may ask? Does it really matter? Sheila Ford ************************************************************* Honk If You're Sad My joining the adoptee and birthparent community a year ago has been the first time in my life I have hung out with self-declared victims, and the first time I have pondered the feeling of being a victim. We hold discussion sessions titled "Adoption and Loss," and we all nod morosely at meetings, by way of showing our solidarity in sorrow. Our pride. If I were to propose a discussion on the equally intriguing topic "Adoption and Gain," it would be dismissed as too positive. # # # Oh my, the quest for Esther Johnson -- the philosophical quest and the practical search for she who conceived and bore me, is a story-and-a-half. I have a bulging file of material, two years' worth, countless e-mail files, and endless details stored in my head. Like doing a thesis. That may never get completed. The funny part is that I can speak intelligently about adoption, write about it, and even pursue the searching, without grasping what all this means to my psyche. Perhaps in abstraction there is safety. But beneath is a sneaking sense that for some decades I have been impersonating me. Or him. Peter Kristian
Mose (This feature appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.) Copyright 2001
Bastard Nation
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