Missing

For the last few days, I’ve been reading a fantastic book: The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.  It’s hitting me with a powerful emotional punch, one that seems to knock out my air every time I set the book down.  I’ve cried several times reading it.  I think it’s because I sympathize too much.

I’m not adopted.  My mother was not adopted.  No one in my family has surrendered a child for adoption.  But, still, I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of it.  As a small child, I learned that I was briefly in foster care.  My mom told me about it, but since she’s been gone for 21 years, I can’t verify anything with her.  And I don’t talk to my father.  But after I learned that I was in foster care, I always wondered what the family that had for me for a time thought.  Did they love me?  Were they sad to see me go?  When they took in this baby, were they aware that it was temporary?  From what I understand, this occurred before my parents’ divorce, when they were trying to work on their marriage.  I was two when they divorced.  (Dad was a real winner and left on my older sister’s fifth birthday.)  I was also briefly taken in by my Uncle Jim and Aunt Rita during my first year.  I don’t think that these fosterings were the same event.  Rita and my cousin always felt a close bond with me due to the time I spent with them.  I’ve never known what Jim thought—he was not a nice man.

Always, in the back of my mind, I’ve known that I was taken in by outsiders (as in outside of the nuclear family) for a time.

I’ve already said that I don’t have a relationship with my father.  After the divorce, he remarried three times.  (This last one is a keeper—he’s been with her 20+ years; his next longest marriage was to my mother for seven years.)  In the first three years after the divorce, he was married twice.  I know this because he had children with his third wife, and my brother is five years younger than me.

I found out about my brother shortly after he was born, when I was in kindergarten.  I treasured my baby picture of him.  A year or so later, I had another sister, too.  That year, Dad gave us a family picture of his other kids—my brother, my sister, and their older step sister.  (Side note: their older half sister is their mother’s daughter.  She’s the same age as my older full sister, and they have the same first name.  My brother and sister have two half sisters named Karen.  Creepy.)  For a time, when I was in the third and fourth grades, I was pen pals with their sister Karen, but that ended when my dad and their mother divorced.

In that time, I only ever had those two pictures—the solo pic of my brother and the family pic of him and his siblings.

So, while I wasn’t adopted, all of my life I’ve had this knowledge, in the back of my head, that my siblings were out there.  I fantasized about meeting them, about reading my class roster and seeing that my brother was going to be in my class.  It never happened.  To this day, I still haven’t met them.

I use to browse the internet semi-obsessively, searching for their names and the name of their sister.  I’d go years between searches, but then it would hit me again, that I had a brother and sister I didn’t know.  And the searches would restart.  I specifically left a huge footprint on the internet at that time, so that they could find me if they happened to look.  But they didn’t look.  For a long time, they didn’t know they had more family than what they saw at Christmas.  I did find them, though.  I found my brother on Classmates.com, and since the basic info in his profile seemed like a match, I sent him a letter there.  I can only imagine his emotions on reading it; he’d only known about his older siblings for a few years.  When he replied to my email, I was a basket case.  Certifiable.

We chatted on the phone for hours, and he gave my sister’s info, too.  She and I chatted for hours as well.  It’s been a few years since I found them, and I haven’t met them yet.  Part of the reason for that is the simple fact that they live a two day’s drive away from me.  Also, I’m afraid.  They are a stable family unit, and they spent their lives without me in the picture.  I’m afraid to upset their balance, to ask more of them than they’re willing to give.  (There’s a reason I haven’t used their names here.)  I’m their blood, but I can never be their sister, not in the same way that their half sister Karen is.  She shared a childhood with them, saw them grow, and undoubtedly comforted them when they were in pain.  I don’t have that bond.  All I have is an aching sense of yearning, a dream that we’ll see one another and it’ll be great.

I do have pictures of them now.  If you put us in the same room, it’d be obvious that we’re family.  We have the same chin and overall facial structure.  My brother and I share our laughing eyes.  I look at his picture, and I see my joy in life and outgoing personality.  Our sister is more like my older sister—hesitant, unwilling to reach out in case she’s going to get hurt.  We’re family, and I love them.  Even without having met them, I know they’re out there.  I know they’re real, and a part of my heart is constantly reaching for them.

So, the book.

While I haven’t been adopted, I understand some of the yearning these mothers and their children feel.  My isolation from my siblings (and all of my father’s family) wasn’t my choice.  My mother chose to cut them off, to isolate us from them.  Throughout my childhood, my maternal family kept telling me about the importance of family—yet, they saw only themselves when they thought of my family.  They could never understand my yearning for my sibs—never understand that I’d learned their lesson more deeply than they’d intended.

I don’t think I can be objective about this book.  The aching and yearning these women feel is too real to me.  Often, they, too, had choices made for them.  Their children were taken from them, and no one ever offered them the choice of keeping their babies.  Several of them did reach out and find their children later—usually only if the child was searching for them, too.   Others have had to accept that they will never know their child’s fate.

I’m glad I found my siblings.  I want to meet them, but I don’t push too much.  They didn’t choose to make me part of their lives; when I contacted my brother, I pushed my way in.  Right now, I have to be satisfied with the fact that they’re alive, healthy, and they haven’t rejected me.  For now, it’s enough.

 

Technorati Tags: Family

Losses

Where were you? 

That’s the question that so many people ask about 9-11.  We can’t seem to avoid sharing that information ourselves—we always have to tell everyone else where we were when it all happened, when it all changed.

I was teaching at the Scott Park campus of the University of Toledo that day.  I had morning classes, so I used to leave very early to avoid traffic.  At the time, I was living in Adrian, Michigan, so I had a 45 minute commute on a good day.  It’s so long ago, now, that I can’t even remember what time my classes met.  I think the first one may have met at 9:30. 

There were no other classes in the room before mine, and since I didn’t have an office at that campus, I used to arrive early and sit in the room until the start of class.  I’d often read a book or plan my class.  Either way, I was early, and I was cut off from the rest of the world.  This was the era before smart phones, before all of the classrooms were equipped with wifi and computer stations.

When my first student walked into the room, he asked me if I’d heard what had happened.  No, I told him.  A plane flew into the World Trade Center, he said.  Another student confirmed this and said that a second plane had also hit the other tower.

With no way to monitor events from in our classroom, and no real understanding of what this event would mean for my life, I went ahead and taught class that day.

It seems silly to say that.  I was teaching a freshman comp class, holding onto the last vestiges of normal, as the rest of the country was glued to a TV set, crying.

My next class started five minutes after the first, and in a different room.  It also started much the same way.  Have you heard what happened , a male student asked me.  Something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, I replied.  And then the tower fell, he added.  Another student mentioned the Pentagon.

Clearly, my students were more aware of the horror than I was.  I still didn’t know what to think, but now I knew that it was real.

A few minutes later, one of the building secretaries went to all of the classes and dismissed them.  The University was closed for the day, she told us.  I kept her in my room after the students left.  What happened, I asked.  She told me, and it was only as I listened to her—to another adult—that the horror of the situation started to sink in.

I went to my car and tried to leave the campus in order to go home.  Scott Park campus is miniscule compared to the main campus at UT, but since all of the students were dismissed at once, the parking lot was jammed with cars trying to leave.  I can’t recall how long it took me to even exit the parking lot.  I was listening to 92.5, Kiss FM, as I sat in the parking lot in my blue Topaz.  The excitement and horror of the DJs told me that this was, indeed, a major event.  Still, I had to laugh when I heard that Mayor Carty Finkbeiner had evacuated the government offices in Toledo.  Like Toledo would ever be a target.  Thinking that this was the Pearl Harbor of my lifetime, I called my grandpa on my cell phone.  (This was many years after he’d hurt me, and I’d forgiven him, and a few years before he hurt someone else, for which I could not forgive him.)  It was terrible, he said, what one human could do to another.  Terrible.

It was hours later by the time I got to Adrian.  My husband, upon seeing what was going on, had immediately left our apartment and gone to his mother’s house.  We met up there and began our long saga of watching CNN.  George had to work that night—he was on second shift at the time.  His factory refused to shut down, and his boss told him that they’d deploy anti-aircraft missiles to keep the factory safe if necessary.

I missed all of the TV coverage of the events as they happened.  All I’ve seen is replays.  This means that, unlike George, I never saw the Jumpers fall from the buildings.  I never saw the buildings themselves fall in real time.

When I went back to teaching on Thursday, my students and I were still in shock.  Instead of holding anything resembling a normal class, we spent the hours talking about the Towers, about our response to what happened.  In my memory, this went on for weeks.  I know that I was teaching at Jackson Community College at the same time—my schedule there was probably Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  For some reason, I can’t recall much of what those classes were like afterward—just glimpses of students sharing their connections to the horror.

As it became clear that the Taliban was somehow involved in what happened, I couldn’t help but remember some news from March of that year.  I was (and am) a news junkie, and I read online how the Taliban government chose to destroy the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan despite international condemnation.  I told my students about the event that day, I was horrified to learn that they didn’t know about the Taliban or what was going on in Afghanistan.   I gave them a short lecture, and I wondered what they wound up thinking on 9-11.  Did they remember what I’d told them about the Taliban?  Did it somehow help them to have some sort of context?  Even back in March, I’d seen the destruction of the Buddhas as a dangerous thing—it seemed like the Taliban was deliberately thumbing their noses at world opinion.  I had no idea how deeply their hatred ran—that it would be so deep that they would shelter a world-renowned terrorist organization like al Qaeda.  But, as the demolition of the statues made clear, they didn’t care about world opinion.

Just as I managed to get my head in order again after 9-11, my friend Jean Flath died on September 25, 2001.  Jean was abroad, living in Italy for a month while her sister was a runway model in Milan.  I got the call telling me of Jean’s death that night.  Kavita, a mutual friend, was the one that let me know.  At the time she called, I was on another call with a mutual friend, but I could hear the tears in Kavita’s voice, and I knew this was an emergency.

Kavita asked me to call our mutual friend, Carrie.  Well, Carrie was a mutual friend of Jean & I—she and Kavita had had a falling out.  I’ll always regret that call.  When Carrie answered, I asked her if she were sitting down.  No, she said.  You need to sit down, I told her.  You have bad news, she asked.  Yes, I replied.  Is it Wayne, she asked.  Wayne was her husband at the time.  No, I said.  Are you sitting down?  Yes, I am, she answered.  Jeanie won’t be coming home from Italy, I told her.  What do you mean, Nancy, what do you mean, Carrie cried.  Jeanie passed away.  We cried together, until the end of our phone conversation. 

Jean was 28, and died of an enlarged heart.  I remember telling my grandpa (yes, that same grandpa) about her death.  Was she on drugs, he asked.  No, Grandpa, I told him.  Jeanie was a good girl.  A Catholic.  She was even in her church’s choir.  Ah, it’s always them, he replied. 

And he was right.  It was always them.  Jeanie, as I learned, was a classic example of a good person taken too soon.  Would we still be friends, today, if she were still alive?  I don’t know.  I do know that I’ve glorified her a bit in my memory.  I learned at her funeral service how little of her life that I was actually a part of—and I mourned both the woman I knew and the woman I didn’t know.

Because Jean died overseas, the timing of her funeral was greatly delayed.  Her family was unable to hold a visitation until Friday, October 5th, ten days after her death.  The casket was open at the funeral home.  I’ll never forget how she looked there—the funeral home had applied too much makeup in an attempt to make her look like something other than a corpse.  Lipstick was cracking on her lips.  Her hands were visible, holding a rosary, and her skin was collapsing.  I went to the funeral home alone—George  had to work that night.  While there, I was completely dysfunctional.  I tried to speak to Jean’s sisters to tell them that I was sorry, but I couldn’t talk for the tears dripping down my face.  I think they understood.  Kavita, Amy, and I went out to eat at one point—going to Jean’s favorite Japanese restaurant.  While I was eating—and even managing to laugh with Jean’s friends—Carrie and Wayne arrived.  They left before I returned, and I was once again unable to comfort my friend.

George was with me at the funeral service the next day.  We stood in the church’s vestibule together with my friends.  Jean was a friend from school—we’d done our Master’s work together—and our fellow classmates surrounded me.  George looked around, a little lost.  Just then, they brought in Jean’s casket, and he started crying.  I’d had ten days to get used to the fact that Jean was gone.  However, since I’d been calling her Jeannie, George hadn’t realized that Jean and Jeannie were the same woman.  He told me later that he’d been about to ask me where Jean was when they brought in the casket, and he made the connection.  It was horrible for him.

I was months in recovering from Jean’s death.  The horrors of 9-11 and the horror of losing Jean became one in my mind, and I was unable to deal with it.  I can never remember 9-11 without remembering Jean.  Her loss was completely unrelated to any sort of terrorist attack.  She died because her heart was too large.  It was, sadly, the most ironic sort of death imaginable, because she had a metaphorically large heart as well.  Losing Jean took something precious and irreplaceable out of the world for me, just as we all lost our complacency from the pre-9-11 days.

So, on this tenth anniversary of 9-11, what I’m posting is not just a story of where I was that day.  Instead, I wanted to tell you all about loss.  I don’t think this rambling blog entry was fully capable to saying what I needed to say, but it’s all that I’ve got.

I miss you, Jean Louise Flath.

Review: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads program.

As I'm sure you can understand, I was thrilled to receive a free book. However, upon it's arrival, I saw how thick it was (608 pages). I was entirely unfamiliar with the historical period outside of high school history class. (I haven't even watched The Tudors despite a long-standing crush on Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.) Those facts, combined, caused me to shelve the book for a year.

I deeply regret that I waited so long to read it.

Mantel has done a wonderful job here creating the mind of a very influential man. By the end of the novel, I felt that I understood Thomas Cromwell, and at the same time, that his motives were more a mystery to me than ever. The cover copy hints at the relationship between Cromwell and his king, asking what will be the price of Cromwell's victory in helping Henry to marry his second wife. In many ways, I don't think that's the ultimate question of the novel. Instead, I think this is more a meditation on the one man that no one saw coming. Born of peasant stock, educated by his own hard work and through his relationship with his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell rose to prominence so quickly and in such a way that the nobility and power brokers were utterly unable to anticipate him. A number of narratives emerge throughout this book. It could be read as: 1. The relationship between Cromwell and Thomas More--Cromwell knew More as a child, and one could read this as the story of their relationship. 2. Cromwell's revenge on those that harmed Wolsey. Throughout Cromwell's rise, he was able to bring down, or rejoice in the fall, of those that had attacked his patron. 3. The story of a nation in flux, as education and literacy combine to cast doubt on faith.

No matter how you read this book, I think it is a delicate and precise story, written by a master. Mantel does not overload the book with detail, but at the same time, the setting of the book is truly present. One doesn't need to have a great knowledge of the Tudor period in order to enjoy this book. All you need is interest.

(After having read the book, I did look up Henry VIII on Wikipedia. I was shocked to learn that scholars no longer think that Henry had syphilis--I guess that may go down as a lie my teacher taught me.)



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