Silence and Shut Down

 

 Bob picked me up at the hospital and took me to Hamilton, where I would spend a few weeks with my brother and sister-in-law.  I never knew whether he peeked in the nursery to see my baby or not, but he told me that day that he “couldn't do that,” nodding in the direction of the nursery.  Some birth mothers have no memory of the birth or the days immediately before and after.  One response to trauma is to "dissociate," to check out, go numb, freeze over, become emotionally paralyzed, and that's exactly what happened to me.  I was in the world but not of it.  I do remember the birth and the days in the hospital, and I now realize what incredible effort it took for me to take my feelings of panic, grief, and loss and set them aside.  It was like holding my breath and still managing to breathe at the same time.  I felt the numbness in my stomach, which is an oxymoron but true nevertheless.  My veins seemed full of ginger ale and my head full of cotton.  I was on auto-pilot, trying with all my strength not to crash.  

I pulled it off.  After three weeks, Bob returned to Hamilton and drove me down to Ithaca to sign the adoption papers.  Here my memory becomes hazy.  Some moments are as vivid as crystals, the rest are gone.  I remember a small room with a tiny crib.  In it was my son.  Mrs. P. told me I could pick him up, and I held him against my shoulder, his soft hair against my cheek.  I was dead inside, and the part of me that died that day will never come back.  I lost not only my son; I lost part of my soul.  I went down a swirling drain, and the years that followed circled that drain and held me in a repetitive pattern I couldn't break.  I was taken to another office, where the papers awaited my signature.  I sat down.  I signed.  I walked out of the building, and I remember nothing after that.

Bob lived in a single room in a rundown building that housed dance studios and other artist's work spaces.  It wasn't a residential building, though a few old impoverished dancers lived on the top floor.  It was no place for a baby.  Bob had no job, having left Colgate to pursue a career as a painter full time.  It had taken everything I had to leave my son.  I had stopped thinking rationally and moving in with Bob took no effort at all.  All the emotion I was choking down got transmuted into an unreflective connection to him.  The pipeline to my baby was closed off, and the love that should have gone to him went to Bob instead.  

I moved to New York on Valentine's day.  This is where my memory returns.  The city was bitterly cold and dark came early.  The noise, the lights, the looming buildings all pressed in on me, and I clung to Bob's arm whenever we went out.  He had furnished his studio with two cots and an armoir he'd picked up off the sidewalk.  The table was a huge wooden  spool that had once held telephone wire.  There was a single unit in the corner containing a small fridge, a two-ring hotplate, and a small sink.  We used the sink for bathing, and since the only bathroom was down the hall on the other side of the building, we even used it as a toilet, flushing it with boiling water.   

It wasn't long before my brother called me to implore me to call my parents.  I didn't.  Later, once Tanner was born and things returned to the "new normal," I picked up with my parents and went on with life, but those first several weeks after David's birth I simply couldn't do one single more thing that would require any sort of emotion.  My feelings about my parents were so bound up with my loss of my baby that it was impossible for me to talk with them, so I left them to their own anguish.  I'm sure they needed help, but it couldn't come from me.

 

The secrecy began almost immediately.  Bob explained that he wasn't about to marry anyone.  “I wouldn't marry the Queen of Sheba,” he said.  I never knew the name of his first wife, and anytime I mentioned his getting his divorce finalized, he'd get angry and refuse to discuss it.  He needed $400, he said, for the divorce to go through, and he didn't have the money.  Neither did I, and it was over three years before he filed the required papers to complete the business.  By that time my  son Tanner was born, just two and a half years after I had lost David.   I learned quickly never to mention the baby I had given up, because if I did I'd get a tongue lashing from Bob.  My parents didn't drink, and I had no idea what an alcoholic was like, so I didn't recognize the signs that Bob was out of control.  He'd get drunk and turn nasty, heaping contempt on me for “being a whore,” for hurting him.  When I'd gotten pregnant with David, I hadn't even met Bob.  How could what I had done have anything to do with him?  

When he wasn't drinking, Bob was kind and loving towards me, but when he drank too  much  he could turn vicious.  This usually happened at night, and he would keep me awake, berating and belittling me, impervious to my tears.  The first time this happened, I was so shocked I froze.  No one had ever spoken to me as he did, and I had no idea how to respond.  A more worldly young woman might have given as good as she got and put an end to the ugliness right there, but I simply couldn't believe that someone who professed to love me could behave in such a fashion.  I had already taken a vow of silence regarding my son; it seemed natural at this point to do the same with Bob's rages.  Sylvia Plath wrote that dying was an art she did exceptionally well.  I had the same attitude about suffering.  If life rained blows upon me, I would absorb them and go on.  I had already shown how much I could endure.  I would wait for Bob to wake up to what he was doing.  Perhaps at some unconscious level I felt I deserved the punishment.  After all,  I had shamed my parents, and, according to my family, ruined my life.  I couldn't go back to Indiana, my brother's wife was now expecting another baby herself, and I had no money to fall back on.  At least with Bob I didn't have to face my predicament alone. 

 Living in New York was exciting.  In the late 'sixties abstract expressionism was at its height, and the art scene was an exhilarating thing to be part of.  We attended gallery openings and met some of the greatest artists of the day--Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell.  It was all a bit overwhelming for a girl from the midwest, but I felt as if I had moved to the center of the world.  Yes, it was exhausting, and the city was a dangerous place.  That was the year of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, there was a fear of riots, and crime was rampant, but I felt I was living where history was being made.   Bob got some teaching at Hunter College, painted and sold a few paintings.  I got a job as an editorial assistant at Good Housekeeping magazine that gave us a small, steady income.  We still could barely make rent, but we managed by living in our single room in a bad neighborhood.  

Among our friends were an older Indian painter and his American girlfriend.  He had a wife and children back in India, and he and his lady weren't married either.  In fact, most of our friends were living together without the shelter of a marriage license, so Bob and I were in no way unusual.  One evening after a gallery opening, we went out to dinner with this couple and a group of artists, art dealers, and their various wives and girlfriends.  I was seated next to our Indian friend, who had known me during the last months of my pregnancy.  This was soon after David's birth, and he was being solicitous when he asked me how I was doing.  “You're going to stay in touch with him, right?” he asked.  Bob was seated on my other side and heard what our friend said.  I could feel him stiffen and my face burned.  I said, No, I wouldn't be seeing the baby again.  If I could have sunk into the floor at that moment, I would have been grateful.  I knew the evening would not end well, and I was right.  Bob got drunk and as soon as we got back to his studio he lit into me.    

“How could you do it?  How could you?  You bitch.  You're nothing but a whore, and you're killing me.”  The insults seemed to go on for hours.  Even after I went to bed and pretended to be asleep, he kept muttering accusations.       

I had many years of similar nights to get through before I would be free.

A major family embarrassment

“Maybe you'll just have a miscarriage,” said my mother when I didn't agree  to go to Sweden for an abortion.

 

“This is almost worse than if you'd died,” my brother  told me.

"I was afraid you might try to kill yourself," said my sister-in-law.

The family gathered at my brother's house.  From England I had written my parents with my “tragic” news, something I later regretted, and now they were trying to devise a plan that would keep my situation a secret from the world, which included most emphatically my relatives, my friends, and the townspeople of Greencastle.  Worse than an unplanned pregnancy was exposure, and my parents were determined to go to any lengths to keep me hidden and quiet while I waited for my baby to be born.  When I failed to get David to marry me, I wilted and without consciously deciding to, I let my family take over.  I'd had enough gumption to finagle a trip to London, make my way through the dead of night to a place that literally seemed like the end of the world, and promised everything I could think of to get David to marry me.  My gumption had run out, and now all I could do was humiliate myself with my endless tears.

The biggest question was, Where would I live?  Ithaca seemed like a good bet; it was only an hour or so from Hamilton.  Cornell was there, and it was large enough for me to blend into the woodwork.  Dad contacted a Methodist minister, who recommended a family that might be willing to take me in.  He was a high school music teacher, and she was a stay-at-home mom with two young children.  I thought it sounded perfect, and in many ways it was.  I rented a large bedroom that had been carved out of their basement, and I had my own small bathroom.   The couple were graduates of Oberlin College, music majors and fans of Wagner.  I thought we'd have a lot in common.

The Mrs. recommended her doctor, and he referred me to the headmaster of a small, private school across the gorge from Cornell.  Mr. Kendall interviewed me, having already been apprised of my condition.  He said, “I'm going to be the best friend you ever had,” and hired me to teach English.  Cascadilla School was actually a large Victorian house that had been converted, the bedrooms upstairs becoming classrooms with dusty chalkboards and creaking hardwood floors.  My largest class had fifteen students, which meant I got to know my students quite well.  One  was a man in his fifties who had been in a terrible automobile accident that cost him his sight.  He was working to complete his high school education before going on to vocational training.  He brought in photographs of the car he'd been in when he'd been smashed to pieces, a tangled mass of metal and broken glass.  “At least I was able to walk out of the hospital, which is more than a lot of my fellow patients were able to do,” he said.  He was grateful to be alive.  

Another student was a girl who'd been kicked out of the public high school for getting pregnant.  I've thought about that girl over the years.  Did she go on to college?  To marriage and a family?  Does she still remember that year with the same vertiginous sense of loss that I do? The school was, in fact, a sort of refuge for kids who hadn't been able to make it in high school for one reason or another.  They were an assorted lot but generally intelligent and good-natured.  I also taught a class of Asian boys who were polishing up their English in preparation for going on to Cornell.  My days were full, my students liked me and believed I had a husband fighting in Vietnam, a plausible lie.

Living in Ithaca means living with snow, lots of snow.  Dad  had bought me a red VW bug that I drove to school each morning overy icy roads, and I became an intrepid motorist.  There is something dislocating or distancing about snow.  It seemed to separate me from the earth and made me feel as if I moved through an artificial or a temporary world.  I was  living a parenthetical life, as alone as St. Exupery's Little Prince, completely disconnected from my past and unable to see beyond January, when my baby was due.  All I knew was, I couldn't stay  in Ithaca.  I would leave everything behind and lose the most important part of my own history, a loss I would hide  for forty-four years.

 

The First Heartbreak

Perhaps the story begins with falling in love, that madness the ancients warn  against, poets celebrate, and teenage girls dream of.  I met David my senior year in college.  He was from England, doing a post-bac year at  my university, and the thing I fell for first was his accent.  It was all very casual and friendly at first.  David told me about his fiance, a school teacher back in England, and I told him about the disastrous break up with my former boyfriend.

 When we began dating, my plan was still to go to graduate school the next year.  I figured I'd have a bittersweet romance before going on to other things.  I'd be sad to part from David, sure, but I'd had break ups before and always recovered pretty quickly.  This time was different.

In September, when the whole school year stretched out ahead of us, it seemed we had plenty of time.  By Christmas, however, I was deeply in love with this lanky Englishman with the Beatles haircut.  David was studying economics

 and was interested in politics, but we never discussed those topics at any length.  We talked about whether to have sex, something David knew way more about than I did, and I was eager to learn.  I'd been kissing boys since junior high and enjoying it too, but I'd never actually been to bed with anyone.  Of course, with hindsight everything is clearer.  David could have obtained condoms, even if there was no way I could get contraceptives.  We were in school in my home town.  My father was on the faculty, and my doctor had known my family since I was in elementary school.  There was no way I could ask him for a diaphragm, even if I'd had a clear idea of what one was.  We weren't entirely gormless; we decided to use the rhythm method and time our lovemaking with as much precision as we could muster and plenty of advance planning.      

It was the mid-sixties and interesting things were happening around the country: the Civil Rights movement, anti-war protests, youth rebellion and pot-smoking.  But my small-town,  idyllic little university wouldn't be swept up in the mayhem until after I graduated.  My life was still anchored by life in my sorority, curfews, and in loco parentis rules.  One of my sorority sisters got married before she graduated, and she was forced to move out into an apartment in town, even though her husband was still in school at a different campus.  It was thought unsuitable for a married student to live side-by-side with (presumed) virgins.

My son   was conceived a few days before David was set to return to England.  We had gone to a party at the apartment of some married friends who were graduating with me but were already married with a baby.  David had arranged for us to spend the night there and after everyone else went home that is what we did but not before having the single fight we ever had.  I was in a mood.  David was already packing to leave, and I could sense he was already half way to England in his head.  He had decided  to go home early, perhaps because he was missing Judy and growing anxious about leaving me.  At first he was going to make me a tape of his voice so I'd be able to hear him tell me he loved me even after he was gone, but he decided not to after all.  I loved him desperately, and I was trying to make the most of the time we had left together, but I also felt free.  I loved him yet  didn't feel permanently attached to him.  How could I?  When other guys asked me to dance, I was only too happy to join them and flirt a little.  David went ballistic.  He was furious, and we went outside to sit in my car and thrash it out.    

“I saw your face,” he snarled.  “I saw your bloody face!”  Clearly, I'd been having far too good a time.

I was shocked and devastated that things would end between us like this.  Through gulping sobs I apologized over and over.  When he said he couldn't spend the night with me after all, I was desperate to turn things around.  I must have been persuasive, because David relented at last, we smoothed things over and went back inside.  That  was  the night my son was conceived.  The next few days were filled with the old tenderness, but we decided there would be no point to staying in touch.  Better to make a clean break and each of us get on with our lives.  And so he was gone.

After graduation I moved home, and it  wasn't long before I began throwing up.  Suddenly cigarettes tasted foul, and I knew things were different with me.  This was 1967, a time when "girls like me  didn't have sex,” and if we did, we certainly didn't talk about it, even with our best friends.  Perhaps some girls had confidantes, but I didn't know anyone I could tell about my fear that I might be pregnant.   I went with my mother to secure an apartment in Miami,Ohio, where I'd been accepted into a graduate program, and thought about what courses I would presumably take in the fall.  I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do.

I had always wanted to go to England and had even toyed with the idea of going to university there, knowing  my mother would never agree to it.  I found out about a study abroad program with Indiana University, the perfect excuse to spend the summer in London, the opportunity I needed to reconnect with David, and I begged my parents to send me.  I could write a paper on Thomas Hardy and earn some credit for grad. school.  I'm sure it was my dad who persuaded my mother to let me go.  She'd been less than thrilled when I spent five weeks one summer at the University of Colorado, my consolation prize for not being allowed to study abroad my junior year.

In many ways that summer was glorious.  I was still slim, and though I vomited from time to time, I otherwise felt terrific.  London in the swinging 'sixties was a grand place to be, and to this day whenever I smell bus fumes I am transported back to its streets.  I joined up with three other young women in our group and we found lodging with an MP and his wife and two small sons in Hampstead. It was easy for four young women to meet people, and we went out most nights.  Our host  took us to the Inns of Court and to a trial at the Old Bailey, which was great fun for us if not for the fellow being tried for espionage.  We went to Kenwood House for an outdoor concert and visited the Tate and Corcoran art museums.  A day trip took us to Summerhill School, the experimental school where the kids made their own rules and did whatever they wanted to.  A.S. Neill, the guru of avant garde educational theory, lived in a charming brick house on the grounds.  With American gumption, we knocked on his door, which he opened himself.  My friend Bert told him she was doing research on the school and wondered if he could talk to us.  He patted her on the head, told her to read his books, and closed the door.  It had been worth a try.

 All I knew about Gordonstoun School was that Prince Charles went there and it was where David was teaching.  I also learned it was at the uppermost tip of  Scotland it took an all-night train ride to get to Inverness, from whence I would have to take a bus.  I was getting used to making solitary trips under fraught circumstances, and though I am normally a reluctant traveler I believe I would have hiked the length and breadth of the country to reach David.  

I'll never forget the train conductor who patrolled the cars and seemed very official in his uniform.  He didn't speak to me when he took my ticket, but an hour or so later he returned and asked me to follow him, which I did without question.  God must indeed look out for fools, for that summer I did any number of what seem now like very foolish things.  I should have had at least some misgivings, but I followed this stranger as if I were a friendly puppy.  He took me to a private car where tea was laid out on a small table, invited me to sit down and offered me a biscuit.  I felt as if I were two people, one doing and one watching, and I remember wondering just what this gentleman had in mind for me.  I had the feeling I should be alarmed or at least wary, but I sipped my tea and politely answered his few questions about my destination.  At length, he rose to leave, but before he went, he told me I was welcome to spend the night in this sleeping car.  It wasn't what I had paid for, but he wanted me to have it.  I  thought he might have nefarious designs on me, but I accepted gratefully and fell asleep.  He left, and I never saw him again.

                                                             ***

The landscape around Gordonstoun was harsh,  bleak, and seemed all one color, a monotonous light brown.  That far north the sun barely set at all, but I remember grey skies and brisk breezes.    I got off the bus, hoisted my suitcase, and made my way down the High Street  to the pub David had directed me to, where I would rent a room upstairs from the bar.  I can only imagine what the villagers must have thought of me, a strange American girl, showing up for no apparent reason  with eyes red from weeping.  David met me in the pub and bought me a whisky, something I'd never had before.  It burned my throat and seemed entirely appropriate for the occasion.  He seemed tense, not unhappy to see me but obviously uncomfortable.  At length we went upstairs and were at last alone.  I had been crying steadily for some time, and I sat on his lap and wept into his shoulder.  I told him that if he married me, we could get divorced after a year, but that way I'd be able to keep the baby.  I knew already what my parents' reaction would be.   

When I was still in high school, an old friend of my dad's had written to tell him that his adopted daughter had gotten herself pregnant at the age of 16.  She was going to marry the father, but my dad's friend, a minister, had offered to resign his position in his church, such was his chagrin.  My parents showed me the letter, and I knew they intended it as a warning.   These were good people,   and I knew from this experience how devastated my own parents would be if I were, God forbid, ever in a comparable situation.  At least my old friend was going to marry her child's father.  I figured that if David married me, I'd be able to keep my baby with less fuss.  I was, after all, already out of college and ostensibly grown up.

David and I talked, I cried, and it seemed when we got into bed that he was trying to rekindle what we'd had back in Indiana.  I was happy to be with David, happy to have sex with him, but my paramount concern was for the baby.  “Don't hurt him, don't hurt him,” I said over and over.  

It was games day at the school, and David had to help oversee the activities, so I went along to the playing fields where boys of various ages were put through their paces.  I have always found English schoolboys appealing, with their floppy hair, shorts, and chapped knees.  In those days Gordonstoun had a reputation for being Spartan and “character-building,” and it was clear that these games were serious business.  There was one boy, who looked about eleven or twelve, who had a grossly misshapen face.  His lower jaw was greatly enlarged, giving him a painfully elongated appearance.  He had a face you couldn't help but notice but felt obliged to make the effort not to stare at.  One of the masters barked an order at this kid, telling him to get in line or move along or some such thing, and David immediately jumped in and said, “It's OK.  He's with me.”  

                                

The worst hours were the ones I spent alone in David's room in the house of another school master.  David had gone off to meet with his mother and his  girlfriend, who had come up from London to see David and figure out what to do.  I was to wait for him to return, at which point he would give me his decision about whether to marry me or not.  The previous day we had walked along the North Sea and lain together in the long sea grass, like two nestlings huddling together for warmth.  It was a moment of peace with nothing but sea and sky and  wind.  The rest of the world seemed very far away.  David  said, “I love Judy, but I'm going to marry you.”  If we divorced a year later, I told him, I would be fine with that, but I needed to be married in order to keep my baby.  That was all I was concerned with.  I   loved David, but I could let him go.  I wanted my baby.  That was all that mattered.  We went to a jewelry store and bought a ring, intending to get married  the next day, Monday, but first David was going to meet with his mother.

Since David's mother had borne him out-of-wedlock herself and raised him alone, it would be interesting to know what she said to him.  While he was gone I violated one of the rules of conduct I hold sacrosanct:

 I read all the letters from Judy that I found in his desk.   The bond between them was obvious, as was David's conflict about what to do with me.   Time slowed to a standstill.  I lay on the bed, waiting as I had that day when

my brother had promised to return and play with me, and cried until I was exhausted. When he returned, I knew that my hours of waiting had been in vain.  There was to be no wedding, but I kept the ring—until I lost it a few years later.

The last time I saw David was at the small airport where I caught the  plane back to London.  I couldn't face another long train ride; wherever I was going, I needed to get there quickly.  I stood at the edge of the tarmac, feeling as grey and cold as the sky.  “It's a good thing I'm so exhausted,” I told David, “or I'd be in hysterics.”  I hadn't stopped crying for three days.

 

Introduction--Some thoughts on adoption

Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound is crucial to understanding the effects of separation upon mother and most especially upon baby that occur when Nature’s essential dyad is sundered.  We have long known that the experiences of earliest childhood, even though not remembered in later life, do in fact profoundly affect the human adult.  We humans are tangled in our social arrangements and messy in our attempts at order, and throughout history we have failed to listen to what our biological nature tells us.  An essential fact of life is that a mother and her baby are one unit--until birth.  It takes several months for the baby to realize he is a separate being, and he relinquishes his connection to his mother reluctantly.  His wellbeing, his very survival, depends on staying as close to her as possible.  It is as natural for a new mother to suckle her baby immediately at birth as it is for a cat to lick her newly born kittens.  This, then, provides a strong argument from nature for preserving the maternal-infant bond, even in the face of difficult circumstances, such as the youth or poverty of the mother.  

What happens when the bond is broken, whether by adoption, death or illness of the mother, or medical interventions necessary for the baby to survive?  I am not a social scientist nor a statistician, and while a quantitative analysis of the effects of adoption is useful, it is the human angle that is ultimately most persuasive.  The story is all.  I have only my own story to tell, and I’ve revised it many times over the course of my life.  Whether this will be the final version remains to be seen, but, based on my own life experience, this is how I see things.

Americans are great believers in the second--and third and fourth--chance, despite Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American life.  We are a people of possibilities, futurities, not fatalistic acceptance, which is perhaps why it is so difficult for many people to accept and admit the damage caused by adoption.  After all, the mother, who may be young and poor, gets a second chance at getting an education or a stable marriage and her own independence.  The adoptive parents, who are most likely infertile, get a second chance at having a family.  Broaden it out, and you could say that a Chinese baby girl gets a second chance for a successful life when she is adopted by financially comfortable Americans parents.  I adopted my own son from Vietnam with the conviction that I was  saving his life and giving him a future free from destitution and social ostracism.  There can be no counter-factual narrative.  All we can know is what in fact happened, and I think I have a better understanding now of what transpired between Dabbs and rest of our family.  

When you have a baby, your body and mind prepare with the release of chemicals and hormones that facilitate bonding between mother and baby.  A father who spends time with the pregnant mother of his child also experiences hormonal changes.  Men become less aggressive, more nurturing,  less interested in sex and more interested in other kinds of touch.  When a baby is adopted, these physical triggers are lacking.  The adopted infant experiences the loss of his whole world and is confused by the strangeness he encounters.  The smells, the sounds, and the heartbeat of his mother vanish, to be replaced by an alien being.  The current thinking among many pro-adoption advocates is that the earlier the baby is placed with the adoptive mother, the better for both the baby and the adoptive parent.  This is a bait and switch that cuts no ice with the infant, because mother and baby are already bonded AT BIRTH.  Every adoption, no matter how young the infant, is a traumatic loss for the baby, as well as for the natural mother, who at least, unlike her baby, knows what is happening.

David was three weeks old when he was moved from a foster home to his adoptive parents.  Dabbs was apparently abandoned (details are lacking), then taken to an orphanage at two months of age.  He was severely malnourished and had to spend weeks in a hospital getting stabilized.  From there he went to a foster home, then at nine months, he came to us.  At the very least, he suffered four major disruptions before he was a year old.  Did that have an effect?  You bet it did.

Picture a Fourth of July, with the whole neighborhood outdoors, kids playing, dads grilling hamburgers, everyone waiting for nightfall and the fireworks that would be visible from the hill where David’s house was located.  Then imagine David, sent to his room for God knows what reason, forbidden even to open the curtains on his window to look out.  He sat alone in that room, listening to the shouts of his brothers and the other kids  and finally the whistle and thunder of the fireworks that bloomed and fell in his imagination.  Such utter loneliness for a child.  I don’t want to tell David’s story.  He can and should tell it himself, but I can offer my response, my own version of what I believe happened to him, based on what he’s told me.  My judgments may be predicated on untruths or semi-truths or the skewed memories of a miserable boy, but the pain I have witnessed  David go through is true enough, real enough, reason enough to search out its roots, causes, and effects.  Since finding David and learning more about the aftermath of adoption, I think I understand my adopted son Dabbs better, why my efforts to be a good mother to him so often fell short, and why he was an angry child.  We are each responsible for who we are and what we become, but we are also shaped by our genes and our experiences.  When I look at David, Tanner and Saskia, I see a genetic mirror.  Dabbs has that with his children, but he can never have it with me.

 

Beginnings

Where does the story begin?  Perhaps it starts with my happy childhood with loving, attentive parents.  Dad was a coach at a small Christian college in western Pennsylvania; Mother stayed home and took care of my older brother and me, sewed clothes for me and my dolls, and  baked the best pies I've ever eaten .  Tolstoy famously said, Happy families are all alike.  I certainly agree with the second part of his observation—every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way—but I'm not sure I agree that happiness is as bland and uniform as his comment suggests.  Even as a child, I recognized that my happiness was not universal, that there were many people all over the world who suffered.  We used to go on shopping trips to the big department stores in Youngstown, Ohio, where we would pass through black neighborhoods.  From the cocoon of my father's car I would peer out the window at people who seemed to inhabit a different world from mine and my heart would lurch with sympathy.  

Yes, I was happy, but there were constraints.  Sunday was the bleakest day of the week because I was made to stay in my church clothes and not allowed to play with my friends because of something called “Blue Laws” that closed the movie theaters and the swimming pool in the park on Sundays.  It was decades before I was able to enjoy a Sunday and not feel the gloom of repression and guilt.  There was no anger in our home; it was simply not permitted.  My dad, the football and basketball coach, was a gentle man, so  I was astonished when I'd see him pacing the sidelines at  games, shouting at the referees or scowling at

 his players.    

 “Why do you get so mad?” I asked him once.  “It gets the players fired up,” was his answer.  

Anger, then, was not something natural or inevitable, it was a tool to be applied for a purpose when nothing else was working.  I learned from my parents that expressing anger was a  failure, a regrettable lapse, almost always inappropriate.  I knew this because my mother never got angry.  Never in my entire life did I ever hear her raise her voice, not even to call the dog.  If I misbehaved, she went coldly silent.  Her look of disappointment was more potent than any spanking.   

I loved my parents and when they went out for the evening I couldn't fall asleep until they were safely home.  I adored my big brother and craved his attention.  I must have been about five when Jim once told me he was going out and would be back in an hour to play with me.  I sat on a kitchen chair and stared at the clock on the wall for a solid hour, watching the minutes tick by, waiting.  As much as I loved my parents, I perhaps loved my brother even more.  He was eleven years older than I, so he always seemed to me to belong to a different generation, not quite my parents' but not mine either.  His age, even when he was still a teenager, seemed to confer wisdom and worldliness,

so when he teased me I took his attentions as compliments.  The day his draft card arrived in the mail—this was in those long-ago days of a military draft—I was sure it meant he was about to go off to war and be killed , and I was too frightened to mention it to anyone.  Later, when we were both older, he became my confidant, the person I'd turn to first if I had a

problem.  By the time I found myself pregnant with David, I had a long history of looking to my brother as a kind of hero, as someone who would help me without judging.

I'm baaaaack.

A lot has happened to me since I last posted on this blog, but I have not been idle.  In fact, I have been writing about the dramatic turn in my life that occurred on January 26, 2012, and the events that followed.  I want to share my story because for 46 years I have needed to tell it and because I hope it will shed light on a very serious subject: adoption.

“Secrecy is the wellspring of fear.”  Laurie White

“...the present rearranges the past.  We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”  Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Harper's Magazine Feb, 2014

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, studying for an MFA in creative writing,  I wrote a story with the line, "It's possible to live with half your heart and no one will ever know."    For years I had  lived with a hidden vein of grief and loss and at that point had told only one other person about the most important event in my emotional history.   The first person I told about losing my son was Cherry, another young mother whom  I had  met at a neighborhood park near our homes in Guelph, Ontario.  Her daughter was about the same age as my adopted son Dabbs, and as young mothers will do, we began chatting.  Cherry asked me about my baby, and when I told her about having adopted him from Vietnam, she wanted to know more.  We began getting together a couple of times a week for tea, either at her house or at mine.  One afternoon we were   at my house, and she began nursing her baby.  I was so envious, because I had tried and failed to breastfeed my older son, and I shared my disappointment.  

Intimate details of one's life are the currency of female friendship, and Cherry and I were on our way to becoming best friends.  Both our husbands taught at Guelph University, we both loved to read, and she introduced me to Canadian fiction, which became a life-long interest.  She told me about her struggles with mental illness and the four years she had spent in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager.  That she was now a trained nurse, married with a child, seemed nothing short of miraculous.  She seemed, in fact, incredibly grounded and was a wonderful mother.

  

I thought if anyone would understand my story she would, so I told her about giving up my infant son for adoption six years earlier.  I felt as if I had handed her a chunk of my heart, and  for   a moment my burden seemed just a bit lighter.

                                                       ****



When I retired from teaching to care for my youngest grandson, I left a fulfilling career at a university I had come to love.  I was finally in a happy marriage, my third, and after many years of struggle, it seemed like smooth sailing ahead, but something was missing, something that had been missing for virtually my entire adult life.   I've thought of my life as a series of chapters, and I felt there was another chapter waiting.  I just didn't know what it would be.

"The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is part of a triumvirate of writers that includes, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.  Wallace is the fair-haired boy of the literary world at the moment, whose writing is dazzling, hilarious, and profound.  Sadly, he committed suicide not long ago.  Eugenides was working on "The Marriage Plot" when Wallace died.  Franzen won notoriety when he declined to be Oprah's book of the month after she dubbed "The Corrections" a good read, as indeed it is.  He later thought better of his petulance, but he wanted to make it clear that his novel was "literary," not "popular."  Eugnides' "Middlesex" won the Pulitzer Prize, but he hadn't published a novel in about ten years.  "The Marriage Plot" is his new novel, and it is wonderful.

I'm sorry to be so vague, but I neglected to note the author of an article in the NYRB or the TLS or wherever I read it, so I will have to paraphrase what I remember.  The basic argument was that these "new realists" do not produce serious literature because they eschew the theoretical "advances" (my word) of contemporary literary criticism, ie., deconstruction, queer theory, post-modernism, gender theory, Marxism, and so on.  That these young(ish) writers still take seriously such 19th c. elements as plot, realistic description and character development, and the historical context of the action is seen to be a failure of imagination as well as style.

Another British writer from an older generation, A.S. Byatt, is also condemned for the same "crimes."  Too much realism, too much history, too many "real" characters, too much plot.  For the record, I believe Byatt's "The Children's Book" to be perhaps the best novel in English since "Middlemarch."  I couldn't believe my eyes when I read in the aforementioned article that Byatt's writing is execrable.  Byatt is nothing less than brilliant, and "The Children's Book" is the product of a lifetime of learning and deep reflection.  I don't see how she could follow it with anything near the same level of accomplishment.  We shall see.

I bring Byatt into the discussion because of the comparison drawn between her and these young American writers, whose work may have different historical and social roots but whose approach to writing is similar.  Of course, I am expressing my own preference for realism, but I believe realism in fiction to be more than a personal quirk.  I believe a defense of realism can be made that recognizes its philosophical and moral seriousness, its humanity, and its repudiation of faddish literary trends that are smug in their difficulty, exclusive in their audience, and dissociated from ordinary life.

"The Marriage Plot" tells the story of three friends, students at Brown in the 1980s.  Madeleine is the daughter of an upper-middle-class family, with intellectual parents and a sophisticated lifestyle.  Leonard is essentially David Foster Wallace.  He is brilliant but troubled, a scientist not in control of his own mind, who cannot love without doing damage.  Mitchell is Eugenides, the "good boyfriend" that Madeleine's parents wish she would marry.  He majors in Religious Studies and searches the world for enlightenment, just as Eugenides did.  Madeleine eventually marries Leonard, with disastrous consequences, just like a willful but loveable Trollopian heroine.  These are broad strokes; none of these characters is as simple as I have described them.

Is marriage still a viable plot device in the 21st century?  Now that divorce is easy and acceptable, do decisions about whom to marry not matter enough to warrant a whole novel?  Eugenides suggests that, yes, they do matter--profoundly.  He also recognizes that love is not rational nor even necessarily in one's best interests.  His plot may echo those of the great 19th c. novels, whose plots were almost always about marriage and money, but he brings it up to date with his very recognizable 20th c. characters.  They are definitely of their time; they are also emblematic of an elemental aspect of human life: relationship.  Whether it's marriage or a love affair or a friendship, the way people relate to each other is important and often problematic.  It is the stuff of life, and Eugenides makes no apologies for that.

He also explicitly rejects the whole post-modernist, deconstructionist, New Critical approach to literature.  His satire of Madeleine's and Leonard's English professor is a treat.

"Zipperstein was in a lively mood.  He'd just returned from a conference in New York, dressed differently than usual.  Listening to him talk about the paper he'd given at the New School, Madeleine suddenly understood.  Semiotics was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken.  Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his classes.  Instead of leaving his wife, Zipperstein had left the English department.  Instead of buying a sports car, he'd bought deconstruction." (48)

Here is Mitchell's description of Madeleine: "In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before.  It was the stupidity of all normal people.  It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable." (77)  But Mitchell is wrong about Madeleine, at least at this point in the novel.  He is in love with her, but he underrates her.  She is an English major because she loves to read.  The list of books she has devoured and relished is impressive for one so young, and her ambition is to go to Yale graduate school.  She ends up at Princeton.  She sees things for what they are (mostly) and believes a book should be harder for the author to write than for the reader to read.  "They [the Zippersteins of the world] wanted to demote the author.  They wanted a *book*, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a *text*, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions.  They wanted the reader to be the main thing.  Because *they* were readers." (42)  Whoever it was who wrote the article I'm responding to (if I were a better person, I'd make an effort to find it) will have none of this.  He fumes and sputters and attempts to appear a wise judge, but his criticisms ring shrill to my ear.

I believe that literature is a source of wisdom and comfort; it provides, at its best, a guide to life.  Good writing and good thinking go together, and being deliberately obscure is not only insulting to the ordinary intelligent reader, it is the expression of introverted, solipsistic thought.  The academy is not the natural home of the writer--or the reader.  The imposition of a scientistic framework upon an art is truckling to the economics of institutions.  Physics is difficult, so, by gum, literature has to be difficult too.  Chaucer's, Shakespeare's, Tolstoy's, George Eliot's works were not written to befuddle but to shed light, to show the deepest truths of life to actual people who want to live it fully.  Madeleine knows this, even as she is led astray by romantic idealism a la Dorothea Brooke.  She may be at times misguided, just as Dorothea is--the reader wants to shout out to them, "Don't do it!"--but like Dorothea she is intelligent, well-intentioned, and capable of deep feeling and self-sacrifice.  She is "ordinary," but she is fully human and mentally healthy--not such a bad thing to be.

"The Marriage Plot" is a good read; I found it a real page-turner.  But if that makes it sound superficial, you misunderstand me.  Great literature--to me--is what pulls you in and holds you rapt, while delivering more than you expected and expanding your mind and heart.