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.
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