Ever since I read Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound, I've relied on it to make sense of what happened to my son and me when I relinquished him for adoption in 1968. Reading the book for the first time was a revelation, and suddenly my feelings of over forty years made sense. There are those who say the primal wound is a myth, that it's not scientific and can't be proved. I don't know, but I suspect those who dismiss the primal wound are "birth" mothers and adoptees who are at least satisfied with their lives. Some older "birth" mothers may have found peace and laid their grief to rest, while younger ones may feel justified, relieved, even proud.
I've been reading literature all my life, and it's given me a lot more wisdom than even my long lifetime of experience could have provided. It's given me a way of interpreting the world, other people, even myself. I believe that each of us constructs a narrative of our own life. As David Copperfield implies in the first sentence of Dickens' novel-- "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show"-- every person's life is a story with, if not a hero, a central protagonist--him/herself. Literature follows Hamlet's precept to "hold up a mirror to nature." You might ask if Hamlet is true. Or the Iliad. Or Oedipus Rex. Did the events described in these great works actually happen? Are they real? They did not happen as depicted historically, but they are true nonetheless. You don't bring a scientist in when you analyze a text, because some truths are not quantifiable or measurable. When it comes to human experience, you need a heart as well as a mind to try to understand it. If a work speaks to you, what it says is true. If your experience evokes feelings in you, those feelings are real, whether anyone else responds the way you do or not. There is Truth (measurable, quantifiable, replicable) and there is truth that is uniquely personal.
The primal wound is my truth. It explains my own experience and, I believe, that of my son. Someone with a cold sneezes on you and on me, but only I become sick. Should you then assume cold viruses aren't real? There is no need to argue about this, as some have done. If you relinquished a baby and feel no less intact than you did before, then either you have been unaffected by the primal wound or it has yet to open. But if you lost your child to adoption and never recovered, then the primal would is as real as love or delight or sorrow or any of the myriad emotions no one would dare dispute. Of course, the primal wound is real. I have felt it and known it my entire adult life, and all I can ask is that others respect my own understanding of what happened to me.
Perhaps it's akin to religion. I'm not religious, so I suppose in some ways I'm like those who pooh-pooh the idea of the primal wound. But I know people for whom religious belief is as real as the sunrise. I respect that, and while I don't understand it, I would be ungracious to argue against it. I'm not equating the physiological and psychological trauma of mother/baby separation with religious faith, but I suggest that they may be in some ways analogous. The Bibe is constructed out of stories that many Christians take at face value. My life is the story I tell myself, just as history is the story human beings tell about their culture and collective experience. When we look for guides to living, we look to stories, not to the stars or the test tube. Science tells us what is; stories tell us what it all means. The primal wound is my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Beginning in the Middle
"I have been forced to sit in the audience of my son's life, watching
a fictional story being played out in front of my eyes. The reality
being that strangers are living my life as my child's mother and
grandmother."--Lily Arthur in Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists
I've been reading a lot online in recent days about National Adoption Month and Orphan Sunday, and I am flooded with reactions and emotions, most of them none too pleasant. November has been celebrated as National Adoption Month for about a decade and was initially begun as a way to find homes for the thousands of children languishing in foster care, a notoriously unsatisfactory place for a child to grow up. It was about children and their needs, not advocacy for those wishing to adopt infants and toddlers, but that has changed. These days "adoption" is all-inclusive and seldom makes a distinction among the various kinds of adoption.
November is also the month when we celebrate our veterans, acknowledge their sacrifice, and honor their service to our country. We honor our soldiers, but we do not celebrate the wars they fought. I see parallels between adoption and war. Perhaps reflecting on a few similarities will help me understand both a bit better.
War is hell. No one disputes this. War always involves suffering, violence, chaos, and loss. When evil becomes too overwhelming to be ignored, then responsible people step up to combat it, even though they know what it will cost. In other words, sometimes war is
necessary. The same can be said of adoption.
For some, adoption is hell as well, but it's a hell that is not acknowledged or fully understood. Every adoption is grounded in tragedy. There is no adoption without adoption loss. A mother loses her child. A father is dismissed as irrelevant. A child loses his identity and his heritage. The only winners are the adoptive parents and those children whose fates would have been dangerously compromised had they remained with their original parents. But those children suffer too. Whatever the circumstances of a child's adoption, there is pain preceding it, and the pain doesn't end the day the child goes to his new home.
I keep thinking that if I can find the right words to describe adoption loss, the trauma of separation experienced by both mother and baby, and the near-impossibility of ever being rid of the unique pain felt by adoptees and their mothers, I will be able to convert what is inchoate into something clear and manageable, but that's not happening. Is it pessimistic to believe that life is one long string of hurts, strung along between good times but always present, the way scars are omnipresent? You can slap makeup on a scar or hide it beneath a shirt, but without serious medical intervention you can't get rid of it, yet we live despite our scars, both emotional and physical. I guess I think of life as "despite..." rather than "thanks to...."
The initiative to "Flip the Script" that some adoptees are urging on Facebook has got me thinking more about adoption from the adoptee's point of view. I've always tried to do this with my adopted son, though I now realize with how little success. I no more understand what it's like to be adopted than I can imagine crouching behind a bomb-blasted wall. In the presence of those who do know those things, the rest of us should probably maintain a respectful silence, but a sense of shared humanity leads me to try.
Something that many adoptees have commented upon is the difficulty of truly fitting in with either the adoptive family or the biological one after reunion. It makes me think of Sandra Bullock drifting off into space in that movie, no longer tethered to earth but an alien in the hostile environment of the vast unknown. When I was very young, I was invited to spend the night with a friend I didn't know all that well. Our parents were friends, and I suppose that's what led to the invitation. I remember having dinner at their house, then going to bed in a strange bedroom and longing to be back in my own house, in my own bed, with my own parents in the next room. What if I'd had to stay in that strange house indefinitely? What if I'd never seen my parents again? My friend's parents were kind to me, but I felt no connection to them whatsoever. Is that how an adoptee feels, amplified a hundred or a thousand times?
As a "birth" mother in reunion with my first son, and as the adoptive mother of another son, I am trying to see the world from their perspectives. I know that being a "birth" mother is like being an emotional amputee. A part of my very self was missing for over 40 years. I didn't feel like an alien in my own life, but I did feel I was breathing with one lung. Did my sons look around them, searching for something that was undeniably their own and never finding it? I've had jobs that twisted me into someone I didn't want to be, and I remember feeling I was in the wrong place where nothing fit. I worked in offices that enclosed my spirit like a straight-jacket, and I taught in schools that felt populated by hostile forces that I had to control by being a very different person from what I normally am. Until I settled into teaching at a congenial university, I never felt I fit in anywhere. Most people undoubtedly share those feelings at one time or another, but not fitting in at work and not fitting into your family are not comparable. As Robert Frost wrote, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But "home" for an adoptee is always provisional. Ties of blood are indissoluble, no matter how disrupted the relationship might be. But adoption is a contract, and everyone knows deep down that contracts can be broken. Love is not enough to ensure permanence, as any divorced person can attest.
Is it possible for a family to reconstitute itself, for a mother and child long separated to reconstruct Home? I want to believe it is, but I know now how difficult that will be. Beginning a mother-child relationship when the child is an adult is rather like building the second floor of a house first. Until the substructure is strong enough, you have to keep it aloft by sheer will, a will comprised not of bricks and beams but of love. Somehow I believe love will prove sufficient to the task, that despite lacking blueprints, the new structure will endure.
I've been reading a lot online in recent days about National Adoption Month and Orphan Sunday, and I am flooded with reactions and emotions, most of them none too pleasant. November has been celebrated as National Adoption Month for about a decade and was initially begun as a way to find homes for the thousands of children languishing in foster care, a notoriously unsatisfactory place for a child to grow up. It was about children and their needs, not advocacy for those wishing to adopt infants and toddlers, but that has changed. These days "adoption" is all-inclusive and seldom makes a distinction among the various kinds of adoption.
November is also the month when we celebrate our veterans, acknowledge their sacrifice, and honor their service to our country. We honor our soldiers, but we do not celebrate the wars they fought. I see parallels between adoption and war. Perhaps reflecting on a few similarities will help me understand both a bit better.
War is hell. No one disputes this. War always involves suffering, violence, chaos, and loss. When evil becomes too overwhelming to be ignored, then responsible people step up to combat it, even though they know what it will cost. In other words, sometimes war is
necessary. The same can be said of adoption.
For some, adoption is hell as well, but it's a hell that is not acknowledged or fully understood. Every adoption is grounded in tragedy. There is no adoption without adoption loss. A mother loses her child. A father is dismissed as irrelevant. A child loses his identity and his heritage. The only winners are the adoptive parents and those children whose fates would have been dangerously compromised had they remained with their original parents. But those children suffer too. Whatever the circumstances of a child's adoption, there is pain preceding it, and the pain doesn't end the day the child goes to his new home.
I keep thinking that if I can find the right words to describe adoption loss, the trauma of separation experienced by both mother and baby, and the near-impossibility of ever being rid of the unique pain felt by adoptees and their mothers, I will be able to convert what is inchoate into something clear and manageable, but that's not happening. Is it pessimistic to believe that life is one long string of hurts, strung along between good times but always present, the way scars are omnipresent? You can slap makeup on a scar or hide it beneath a shirt, but without serious medical intervention you can't get rid of it, yet we live despite our scars, both emotional and physical. I guess I think of life as "despite..." rather than "thanks to...."
The initiative to "Flip the Script" that some adoptees are urging on Facebook has got me thinking more about adoption from the adoptee's point of view. I've always tried to do this with my adopted son, though I now realize with how little success. I no more understand what it's like to be adopted than I can imagine crouching behind a bomb-blasted wall. In the presence of those who do know those things, the rest of us should probably maintain a respectful silence, but a sense of shared humanity leads me to try.
Something that many adoptees have commented upon is the difficulty of truly fitting in with either the adoptive family or the biological one after reunion. It makes me think of Sandra Bullock drifting off into space in that movie, no longer tethered to earth but an alien in the hostile environment of the vast unknown. When I was very young, I was invited to spend the night with a friend I didn't know all that well. Our parents were friends, and I suppose that's what led to the invitation. I remember having dinner at their house, then going to bed in a strange bedroom and longing to be back in my own house, in my own bed, with my own parents in the next room. What if I'd had to stay in that strange house indefinitely? What if I'd never seen my parents again? My friend's parents were kind to me, but I felt no connection to them whatsoever. Is that how an adoptee feels, amplified a hundred or a thousand times?
As a "birth" mother in reunion with my first son, and as the adoptive mother of another son, I am trying to see the world from their perspectives. I know that being a "birth" mother is like being an emotional amputee. A part of my very self was missing for over 40 years. I didn't feel like an alien in my own life, but I did feel I was breathing with one lung. Did my sons look around them, searching for something that was undeniably their own and never finding it? I've had jobs that twisted me into someone I didn't want to be, and I remember feeling I was in the wrong place where nothing fit. I worked in offices that enclosed my spirit like a straight-jacket, and I taught in schools that felt populated by hostile forces that I had to control by being a very different person from what I normally am. Until I settled into teaching at a congenial university, I never felt I fit in anywhere. Most people undoubtedly share those feelings at one time or another, but not fitting in at work and not fitting into your family are not comparable. As Robert Frost wrote, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But "home" for an adoptee is always provisional. Ties of blood are indissoluble, no matter how disrupted the relationship might be. But adoption is a contract, and everyone knows deep down that contracts can be broken. Love is not enough to ensure permanence, as any divorced person can attest.
Is it possible for a family to reconstitute itself, for a mother and child long separated to reconstruct Home? I want to believe it is, but I know now how difficult that will be. Beginning a mother-child relationship when the child is an adult is rather like building the second floor of a house first. Until the substructure is strong enough, you have to keep it aloft by sheer will, a will comprised not of bricks and beams but of love. Somehow I believe love will prove sufficient to the task, that despite lacking blueprints, the new structure will endure.
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