Set Up To Fail--Adoption Rehoming

Accounts of adoptees being "rehomed" are cropping up more and more often in the media these days, indication of a disturbing trend in adoption, but many people who see these stories jump to the wrong conclusions.  (Leave aside those egregious cases where adoptees are abused by psychotic parents.)  It sounds so awful.  You adopt a child, then when he turns out not to be what you expected, you dump him on someone else.  Birth mothers are praised for doing the selfless thing, the noble thing, by giving up their babies, but adoptive parents who are unable to provide adequately for their psychologically damaged children are excoriated.

I am a birth mother and have written about my experience elsewhere.  I am also an adoptive mother, and I've wanted to write about that for the longest time but haven't been able to find the words.  This is another attempt to try to understand what happened in my family and explain just how difficult adopting any child, but especially a foreign-born child, can be.  The difficulty is not for the parents alone.  Any adopted child will face issues of identity and abandonment, but a culturally displaced child has extraordinary obstacles to overcome.

When I was 27 years old, I had already lost a son to adoption and given birth to another, Tanner, a beautiful blond, blue-eyed boy with an easy-going temperament.  Without going into all the intricacies of my emotional state at the time, I'll just say that being a mother was the most important thing in the world to me.  I was bubbling over with maternal instincts.  By the time Tanner was three, I was desperate for another baby.  I was also moved by the plight of Vietnamese orphans and felt America owed those children left behind by our soldiers something pretty substantial.  After all, it was because of the American presence in their country that they even existed.

My husband and I had little money.  He was an artist, and I was teaching high school English in Indiana.  We could barely make ends meet on my salary, but we were both confident that it was only a matter of time before Bob achieved success as a painter, if not fame.  He had dreams of being on the cover of Art News, and I had dreams of a house filled with children--well, three or four at least.  Infertility was not our problem, but I began to feel that my arms were empty without a baby in them.  All I had to do was see the photo of a baby available for adoption in the Indianapolis newspaper and my pulse quickened.  I remember one such picture of a black infant, "Mr. Curtis."  He was so tiny, and my heart went out to him.  We should adopt a black baby.  I knew black and mixed-race children were the hardest to place, and I believed that integrated families would lead the way to an integrated society.  We began our quest to find a child.

If you are paying attention, you will see that there are already plenty of red flags waving.  My husband was unemployed (being a struggling artist with no income is essentially unemployment).  We barely had enough money to support a family of three, even if Bob stayed home to look after the kids.  Contrary to what many black social workers were saying at the time, we saw nothing wrong with placing a black child in a white family, in a white community, in a not-so-covertly racist state.  This tiny baby, or one like him, would not be a cute infant forever.  He would grow into a teenager with attitude, a black male with no one to teach him how to get along in an often hostile world.  All I could imagine was holding a baby in a rocking chair, reading him bedtime stories, and filling my own emptiness.  I didn't bother to think about what I'd need to do to raise a black, male child.

Ultimately, we signed on with Holt International, the first adoption agency in America to place Korean children with American families.  Eventually Holt would bring children from all over the world, including, for a time, children from Vietnam.  The war was a horror any way you look at it, but all I could see were those babies abandoned and orphaned and in desperate need.  I admit it; I wanted to do something big.  I wanted to redeem myself for giving up my own son.  I'd given in to external pressures to relinquish him, and I had nothing left to lose.  I didn't care about what people thought any longer.  I knew what I believed, and having set aside my own instincts once, I wasn't about to do it again.  Let people stare.  Let people say, "I could never do what you've done."  Let black social workers argue that race does matter in forming a child's identity.  Perhaps I wanted to punish my mother, with her southern roots, for her role in the loss of my son.  I didn't think this consciously, but subconsciously I was screaming, "I can't have my own baby?  Well, then, how do you like this black one?"  I feel a pain in my gut as I write that.  Never until this moment have I allowed myself to face up to my own selfish motives, my own need for some kind of revenge.  I would take my revenge and force my very conservative mother to accept a black grandchild, and as I did I would be praised by all the good liberal Christians who underwrote the whole thing.

In the early 'seventies there were no pre-pacement services, nothing to advise us about what to expect when you adopt a baby from half a world away.  We were getting a baby, and that's all that mattered.  He was half black and a boy, the hardest to place, and we felt lucky to have been chosen to be his parents.  I knew enough to understand that the first year in a child's life is critical, but I didn't realize just how critical.  No baby is a blank slate, and a nine-month old baby from a war zone has suffered more trauma than you can imagine.  There were scars on his ankles where he'd been fed intravenously because of starvation.  He screamed if put down and clung to Bob and me like a terrified monkey.  His rage was overwhelming, and in frustration he would bang on his chin with his fist until I wondered if he were autistic.  He suffered from chronic diarrhea that lasted for years.  I didn't know that Asians are often lactose intolerant, and I kept pumping milk into him as fast as he kept splurting it out.

My son was intelligent and a survivor.  Described by the orphanage he came from as a "relatively crying baby," he was obviously not one of those passive, listless infants often found in orphanages.  This kid was going to get attention if he had to yell the place down.  I can never know what went on in his mind because much of his trauma occurred before he had speech, so his memories, though undoubtedly vivid, were not accessible to him.  He came to us a desperate, outraged child, and so he remained.  As he grew older, his behavior followed a consistent path of defiance, acting out, theft, and lying.  As a young child, he suffered from night terrors, when he would scream and flail and not be able to wake up.  If all this sounds as if I'm blaming him, I'm not.  

We did everything we could: had him evaluated by a psychologist, sought out family and individual counselling, and spent countless hours in conferences with his teachers.  By age twelve, he was out of control, stealing cars, staying out late, and finally getting in trouble with the police.  Thus began years of reform school, group homes, more counselling, and my marriage ended in divorce.  Bob's alcoholism had not made our family situation any better, and, though I was unsure how I would manage with Dabbs and my two other children (by now I had a daughter) on my own, it had to be better than managing the three-ring circus my life had become.  Never, at any point, did any counsellor or therapist address the issue of Dabbs's adoption.  A couple of the "family-systems therapists" we saw insisted upon getting Dabbs to identify with members of our extended family, even those who were deceased.  How on earth could a hyper-active, angry Black/Vietnamese boy identify with anyone in a family of middle-class white people? We were expected to adapt to the paradigm, no matter how ridiculous the fit.

Who or what is to blame for all this turmoil?  I am, first of all.  For whatever reasons, I took on a challenge that was beyond me.  I like to think I did my best, but I'm too aware of my failures to let myself off the hook.  But there are others who are answerable too, or should be.  The social workers who did our home study were as naive as Bob and I were.  We presented as a nice, educated couple, good parents to our little boy, so why wouldn't we be suitable adoptive parents?  The red flags I mentioned earlier did not get their attention.  In fact, the entire social-services enterprise was not yet ready to address the needs of adoptive families with foreign-born children, so it was a systemic failure.  When a system is at fault, who can be held accountable?

Now we read accounts of disturbed children whose adoptive parents can't cope.  I understand their desperation.  I understand that they love their children but cannot allow their families to be torn apart.  When parents have to lock their bedroom door, hide all the knives and hammers in the house, and sleep with one eye open, they might be forced to take steps that seem to others uncaring.  I tried to get help for my son and me, and it was all thin gruel.  As a teenager, Dabbs lived in five other places than with me: with his dad, in reform school (court ordered), two separate group homes (also court ordered), and with an earnest young couple who had befriended him during his stay at one of the homes.  Many kind and dedicated people tried to help Dabbs, including a black counsellor at a group home who had been a soldier in Vietnam.  Like so many others, this man took Dabbs under his wing, and like so many others he was ultimately let down.  Those defenses and survival instincts Dabbs developed as an abandoned infant morphed into a pattern of behavior that persisted as he grew older and, for all I know, persist to this day.  Every success was followed by a catastrophic event of Dabbs's own making.  I've always believed that Dabbs can't tolerate success, and when things are going too well, he self-sabotages.  
  
I don't want to rake over the past, but I have a few suggestions for social workers, adoption agencies, and prospective adoptive parents: Recognize that international adoption does not bring you a child who is a blank slate.  Every child, no matter how young, who is adopted comes from circumstances of trauma and will be affected by them.  When Dabbs was three years old, he told me he remembered soldiers coming into his house and killing his mother.  He couldn't have been more than a couple of months old when he made it to the orphanage, so how could he possibly remember such a thing?  Maybe he did, and maybe he didn't, but he believed he'd seen his mother murdered.  How could such thoughts not have a profound effect on his concept of self?

Be aware that it takes a great deal of knowledge and a lot of patience to parent a hurting child.  Professional training would not be amiss.  People who might make perfectly marvelous moms and dads under normal circumstances may find themselves overwhelmed by the challenges their adopted child presents.  The child should not be blamed but helped, and the parents shouldn't be blamed either.  In many cases a different living situation is what all parties need.  I am dismayed by comments like, "Well, you adopted him.  Now you have to make the best of it."  Each child has unique needs, adopted or not.  Most parents of biological children have an intuitive understanding of each of their children, but the parents of adopted kids don't have that intuitive connection, which is at its root a physical matter of cells and genes.  To blame desperate parents who can't cope with a traumatized child is as cruel as telling someone suffering from depression to snap out of it.

 Americans think of poor little orphans and want to scoop them up, take them home, tuck them in bed at night, and keep them safe, but international adoptees come with baggage they often don't understand themselves and may try to hide.  The best place for any baby is with his own mother, and every effort should be made to keep her there.  Now adult adoptees, many of them Asian, are writing blogs, forming support groups, and challenging our notions of what child-rescue ought to mean.   We need to heed their words and amend our ways. The best way to help children is to help families, as Jane Jeong Trenka, a Korean adoptee who has returned to her homeland to advocate for single mothers and their children, is doing.

The entire adoption paradigm must be re-examined.  No mother should be told to give up her baby; she should be asked what she needs in order to parent.  Cultures in crisis should not be mined for their children so that American parents can satisfy their desires.  Too often what passes for altruism is actually self-serving idealism.  I know this not because I have seen it but because I am guilty of it.  I don't blame adoptive families who already have children.  They did the best they knew how.  But we must wake up to our mistaken assumptions about what children, babies especially, need.  Youth and poverty are not necessarily permanent conditions and should not be reasons for relinquishment.  Temporary safe havens can see children through the crises of war and famine until better times arrive.   

Adoption is not simple or straightforward, and my attempts to cover all bases are admittedly insufficient.  Friends tell me that Dabbs is better off living in America than he would have been if he'd remained in Vietnam.  I don't doubt the truth of  that, so why am I now arguing against international adoption?  I find this hard to answer.  It would be unthinkable to send a Korean-American or an Ethiopian-American kid back to where he came from.  Dabbs is thoroughly American and would be no more at home on the streets of Saigon than I would.  But we should look at things the other way around, from the child's point of view.  Imagine yourself as an infant, put on an airplane with strangers, looking for whichever caretaker you had last lived with and not finding her.  Then imagine the magnitude of an American airport with strange-looking people who want to hold you and speak to you in bizarre accents.  Imagine being given strange foods that make you sick.  Imagine being a stranger in a strange land with no idea what's happening to you or why and no words to say what you need or to form memories you'll be able to access later.  You world has become a nightmare of gigantic proportions that  is terrifying but that you can't wake up from, so you cry yourself into exhaustion.  You feel abandoned when left in a crib but not comforted when held by someone you don't recognize.  You are a baby who is designed to feel and believe he is physically part of his mother, and this strange woman who keeps picking you up is not she, so you feel disconnected and adrift.  This is a feeling that will never leave you, even after you acquire language and coping strategies.  That dislocated, abandoned child is yours to keep forever.  That child is you.

Adoption is ALWAYS about loss.  To see it in any other way is to be emotionally and psychologically blind.

It's time to end the adoption fairy tale

After my son's birth, I closed down, lost myself, and entered a prolonged state of numb denial.   I suffered a terrible grief I was never allowed to express and felt split in two.  I felt alone in the universe and have suffered from depression  for most of my adult life.  There are many other birth mothers like me, with experiences very similar to mine, and we understand each other like no one else can.  At least a million and a half of us from the BSE (Baby Scoop Era--1940s to1972) were told we could not keep our babies because we were (take your pick): too young, too poorly educated, too poor, and, biggest of all, too unmarried.  We wanted desperately to mother our children but were convinced by people we trusted--parents, social workers, doctors--that if we loved our babies we would give them to strangers to raise.  We went against our deepest instincts because we trusted "the authorities" more than our own hearts, and we have paid a bitter price for that trust.

I was assured that my son would go to a "good family," with educated parents and financial stability.  And he did.  His adoptive father was a surgeon, his adoptive mother a nurse (in the very hospital where my baby was born!), and my son grew up with all the material advantages you can imagine.  But he was missing one important ingredient for a happy childhood: me.  He longed for me his whole life, and he has suffered from depression, addiction, and PTSD as a result of adoption trauma.  He endured, was a good student, and started two successful businesses but was never happy or at peace.  He lived his childhood in a state of dread and his adulthood in a state of resignation.  That all changed  when I found him.  Both of our lives were transformed, and we've spent the past two and a half years facing the truth and rebuilding what had been broken for so very long. 

Today my son  is sober.  He has a happy marriage with a supportive wife and is starting a new business.   We have a close and loving relationship, for which I am beyond grateful.  I have found purpose and  passion in my work as an adoption-reform activist.  We are each making progress, but we're nowhere near the end of this journey.  As reunions go, ours is still very new.  My son gets support from AA and his church; I see a therapist.  And we are both coming along, which is all good.

It's been very difficult for me to deal with my anger, especially anger toward my mother.  I could give chapter and verse about the reasons why, but suffice it to say, the primary reason I relinquished my son was for her sake.  I didn't want to hurt her.  I thought I could bear any amount of pain better than she could, so I cut my heart out and went on with my life.  No one ever asked me how I felt or what I wanted to do.  No one offered any support or alternatives.   Like so many of her generation, my mother chose social respectability over her own child and grandchild.  I understand it, but I'm having a devil of a time forgiving it.  The most important thing that ever happened to me, and no one in my family so much as mentioned it ever again--except finally for my brother, when he congratulated me for not having an abortion.

I want to say to anyone who questions the wisdom of reunion that unless you have experienced the loss of a child to adoption, you have no idea about the depth of grief and the lasting harm done to a birth mother.  Unless you are an adoptee, you have no idea what it's like to feel that part of your very self is missing.  I have other children whom I love beyond words, but no child can be a substitute for another.  Many, perhaps most, adoptees love their adoptive parents, but that does not obviate the loss of their biological families.  With ancestry.com the popular website that it is, it should be no surprise that genetics do matter, feeling connected does matter, seeing yourself in your relatives does matter.  Babies belong with their mothers.  If you are considering adopting a newborn, remember what I have said here.  There are those who claim to be "adoption experts" who will tell you that adoption is a beautiful way to build a family.  Do not believe them.  If you are  faced with a crisis pregnancy, do not assume that placing your baby with different, "better" parents will solve your problem.  Sure, in some rare cases adoption is the best option for a child, but, absent those exceptional circumstances, the best person to care for a baby is his mother, and everything should be done to make that possible. America prides itself on its family values.  Surely family preservation should be our first consideration.

 

To Be or Not To Be...in denial? That is the question.

What does it mean to be in denial?  We hear a lot about denial these day, as an explanation and as an accusation, but what is it really?   Obviously, anyone who is in it doesn't know it, but how can we know who is and who isn't when we can't peer into another person's mind?  When a birth mother says she's happy with her decision to relinquish her baby, is she being responsible or is she in denial?  When an adoptee proclaims her delight at being adopted, is she truly grateful or is she in denial?

I know I risk being accused of projection or putting words in other people's mouths, but I'm going to chance it anyway, because I know what being in denial feels like.  I've been there.

When you're in denial, you aren't lying to yourself; you actually believe that what you think is true.  It's easy to lie to yourself--my marriage IS a good one, I'm NOT jealous of my best friend, getting fired IS the best thing that ever happened to me--but deep down, you know the truth.  Being in denial is different.

Relinquishing my son for adoption in 1968, when he was three weeks old, was the hardest thing I've ever done, the hardest thing I will ever do.  In many ways, losing a child to adoption is worse than if your child died.  I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it.  Death is an ending that can be mourned.  There are rituals that surround it to ease the pain, and sympathy pours in.  The sympathy may be awkwardly expressed, but it is at least expected.  Death can't be undone, so the loss is permanent and must be dealt with on those terms.  They say time heals all wounds, because the mind can't tolerate the rending of loss forever.  Either you recover and heal, or you go mad or die yourself.

Adoption is not a death; it is a parting.  Most of us have the experience of parting from friends, from lovers, even from spouses, and we eventually recover and move on.  But there is one parting from which recovery isn't possible: the loss of a child to adoption.  The mother-infant bond is the strongest bond in nature (unless you're a reptile, and even some of them demonstrate maternal behavior).  Our very survival as a species depends on it.  When that bond is severed, the damage to mother and baby in incalculable and, I suggest, permanent.  Because of the intractability of this specific kind of grief, the only way to try to integrate it is to go into denial, to shut that mental door and make sure it never opens.  The experts call this "ambiguous loss."  The parents of missing children experience it, as do the families of soldiers missing in action.  We all know this.  Yet as a society we remain in denial when it comes to adoption.

For years and years I was a believer in and supporter of adoption.  I BELIEVED in adoption and adopted a baby from Vietnam myself in 1974.  I subscribed to the Holt Adoption Agency's newsletter for many years, read many books that praised adoption, especially transracial adoption, and joined parent groups for families with adopted, foreign-born children.  Whenever I saw another family with a child of a different race, I wanted to go up to them and say, "I am one of you."  I believed I was "paying it forward" when I adopted my Vietnamese son.  Someone had given my first son a home; now I was in a sense returning the favor.

It took a long time for me to recognize that I was in denial, and it didn't occur with a sudden epiphany, but if I try to isolate the moment when the light began to dawn it would have to be when I interviewed for a job at Guilford College many years ago.  My interviewer was an English professor, probably about my age, and during our conversation he mentioned that he was adopted and had recently met his birth mother and seven siblings for the first time. He told me his mother was thrilled to meet him and had "suffered the tortures of the damned" ever since giving him up.  I remember at that point getting up and closing his office door.  I was about to confess something, and I didn't want anyone else to hear it.  I told him I had given up a son for adoption myself.  I confided that I had never stopped thinking about my son and that he, Prof. X, was one of the very few people I had even told about him.  I only shared my  story because he had shared his, and I wanted to assure him that his mother had indeed thought about him for all those years.  "The tortures of the damned" kept running through my head after I left the interview.  I didn't think I had experienced anything like that.  I was OK, wasn't I?  I remembered my son's birthdays, sure, but I didn't come unglued.  I had three children whom I loved.  I was divorced but felt emotionally fulfilled by my kids.  Anything having to do with adoption always caught my eye, but I wasn't obsessed or anything.

Looking back now, I can see plainly enough just how deep in denial I was.  I couldn't have survived otherwise, but the choices I made, including adopting myself, and the depression I endured indicate just how disturbed I really was.
It was my third husband who made it possible for me to finally come to terms with the most crucial event in my life, so after finding security and stability in our marriage, I was able to entertain the idea that it might be possible to find my son.  When I asked him what he thought about my searching, he said, "Go for it."  Having never told my raised children they had a brother, I knew my next step had to be to tell them, which I did right after Christmas in 2011.  I won't try to summarize their reactions, but they were unanimously supportive.  It only took a few weeks, and on January 26, 2012, I spoke with my son David for the first time.

I think the denial ended when I asked my husband what he thought about my searching.  He tells me now that that was the first time I had even mentioned I'd given up a child.  I was shocked when he said that.  How could I not have told him?  I must have, surely.  He says I didn't, and I conclude that my denial was so deep I didn't even dredge up the truth for a man I loved and had committed the rest of my life to.

Coming out of the adoption fog is not easy.  I may be stretching an analogy here, but it's rather like struggling not to drown.  You're gulping for air and treading water like a maniac, which takes all your strength and focus, but you're managing to keep your head above water.  Then you finally make it to shore, and the first deep gasps of pure air are like the elixir of life itself.  You can't get enough, as you lie there panting, then the aftermath sets in.  You begin to shake all over, you wet yourself and worse, you realize with horror that you nearly drowned and can't stop thinking about it.  You have nightmares for weeks afterward.  Would you say to that nearly drowned woman that she'd have been better off just to slip beneath the waves and let go?  Or would you say that the shock and terror of being saved were worth it?

Denial is a way to cope with the unbearable.  It is a blessed escape when no other escape is possible, but when the danger is past, it can become as debilitating as the event that caused it.  When I hear a birth mother say she's happy with her decision and her child's life without her, I hear a mother in denial.  When I hear an adoptee who, for whatever reasons, says he isn't interested in finding his birth mother or knowing his real family, I hear an individual in denial.  I don't blame either the mother or the child.  Denial is the best they can do at the moment.  But I pray (or would, if I were the praying kind) that a day will come when they'll come out of  the fog and realize how much better life can be when it's lived in openness and truth.

Don't Let Go

I've thought a lot about "letting go" recently.  If you love someone, you have to let them go.  If they love you, they'll return.  Toddlers have to learn to let go in order to become independent.  Teenagers have to let go in order to leave home and establish a life of their own.  Parents have to let go or risk crippling their children.  We all have to let go when we die.  Then there's the song from "Frozen."

It's such a paradox that the best way to show love is by letting go, but it occurs to me that there is a natural rhythm to the process, and it's important to move with the beat.

I stumbled across a blog the other day, called "Birthmothers 4 Adoption."  I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the title, and when I read further and discovered that it's by two birthmothers who celebrate  letting go of their babies I got the sinking feeling you get when something dreadful catches you unawares.  These women are young yet, and I suppose that when I was in my twenties, thirties, perhaps even into my forties, I might have been able to join them on a panel to discuss adoption.  I'm 68 now, and I know a few more things than I did, and the thought of presenting my birthmother's perspective to potential adoptive parents, as if taking another woman's baby were a loving thing to do, is literally sickening.

My brother used to tell me I had done the right thing: I hadn't had an abortion, had chosen adoption instead.  Every time he said this, something inside me shifted uncomfortably.  Now that I have reunited with my son, I realize why that was.

Feeling I had no choice and having no support from my son's father or my own family, I did what thousands of unwed mothers in the Baby Scoop Era did.  Committing an unnatural act of such magnitude required the suppression of every instinct and emotion that attended the birth of my baby.  I exhibited more strength at barely 22 than I could ever have imagined, and I admit I took pride in that strength.  I let my son go because I loved him more than I valued my own life, certainly more than my own happiness.  I desperately wanted to be a good mother and was convinced by my kindly social worker that giving my baby up to a "good" family was the most loving thing I could do.  At a crucial moment, I trusted not myself but others who were, in fact, virtual strangers to me.

 Even now, young unmarried women are told their lives will be ruined if they "aren't ready to parent."  Their education will be compromised, perhaps curtailed entirely.  They are likely to struggle in poverty and miss out on things their friends will be taking for granted.  They are told a childless couple will be able to experience the joy of parenthood.  Won't that be a beautiful gift to bestow upon someone?  What they are not told is what I am going to say here.

When you give birth, all the hormones that nature has given you will explode and sweep you away to places you never imagined.  You will be slightly deranged, almost as if you were having an out-of-body experience, because you will feel things that are so new you have no context for them.  You will be on the high of a lifetime, and you will feel as vulnerable as a kitten in a thunderstorm.  You will be exhausted and sore, and your body will feel different and actually be different from what it was.  In every way imaginable, you will feel transformed and connected to the universe.  The river of life will have flowed through you into a new generation, connecting you to humanity in a cosmic way.   

This is the time when you will focus on your baby with the intensity of a laser.  You'll feel compelled to examine his fingers and toes, to notice the shape of his ears, and to become intoxicated with his smell.  You will want to touch him, breathe him in, feed him, and keep him close.  But if you have made "an adoption plan" you will have to throttle these impulses.  Rather than bonding with your baby, you will know that with every hour that passes you are that much closer to letting him go forever.  Even if you planned an open adoption, this child will belong to someone else.  If you are lucky you may get to watch from the sidelines for a few years, but an adoption that remains happily open is rare.  It's too hard for the adoptive parents to share their child, and it will be agony for you.  With open adoption, you keep the wound open, so you may decide a closed adoption is best.  Let go once and for all and stuff your feelings into a tightly locked chest and shove it under the bed and leave it there.  You'll always know it's there, but you won't have to look at it every day, and you will know better than to look for the dust bunnies that will gather year by year.

The problem is that you have interrupted the rhythm of life.  You will have spun off in the wrong direction, and you will lose the beat and your balance.  To keep going, you will have to dance faster or sink to the floor.  Everything that happens to you from  here on out will be influenced by your loss.  Perhaps you will find a new love and have other children, but you will never forget.  Perhaps you will never risk experiencing such upheaval again and will withdraw from intimacy.  You may go for years without realizing what's going on inside you.  You'll confide in a friend, and she will tell you you did the right thing, and you will try to believe her.  You may be afraid to tell a new lover about your past, and that will always stand between you.  If you have other children, you will either lie to them by what you don't say or make them question your commitment to them if they know.  You will be unable to grieve, and your grief will become a stone that grows heavier with each passing year.

If you are a pregnant girl reading this, or if you are a birthmother who has relinquished her child, you may say, But this doesn't apply to me.  I don't feel this way.  I'm happy with my decision.  You might even feel that God wants you to  give your baby to the nice couple with the golden retriever and the swing set in the back yard.  What you are not thinking about is how you'll feel when you're my age and can no longer deny the loss, when you finally acknowledge all that you've missed and realize that nothing on earth can ever bring it back.  And you're not thinking about how your baby will feel without you, for he will miss you as much as you miss him, probably more.  His very survival depends on you, and his little infant brain is programmed to cling onto you.  When he loses you, he will lose his whole world, and no matter how happy he may be in his new family, he will always wonder who you are and why you left him.

I know what it's like to be in denial, and my son knows too.  Any birth mother who feels good about letting her baby go is in denial.  Any adoptee who has no questions and feels whole is in denial.  And denial is a kind of death.

Whenever I try to discuss this with folks who have no connection with adoption, I always hear, But what about....what about the mother who really doesn't want her baby?  What about the mother who is  a drug addict or a danger to her child?  What about a baby whose mother dies, and there are no other relatives?  These are the extreme cases, and for these babies adoption can be a wonderful rescue, but a girl or young woman who is healthy and finds herself inconveniently pregnant will find letting her baby go wrenching.  Read the accounts of birth mothers (I dislike the term "birth mother."  It takes something--a mother--and transforms it into a function.  No one thinks that an incubator can substitute for a mother; it's an intervention.  These days the value of "kangaroo care" is recognized as the best way to make sure babies, even premature babies, get all they need.  A baby has only one mother; the adoptive mother is the one who provides the function.)  The accounts of birth mothers I have read don't leave out the difficulty of relinquishment or the sadness that follows, but these apologists for adoption assure us they have recovered, and everything is fine now.  I know they are lying--to themselves, if not to us.  It takes a lot of energy to maintain a lie of that magnitude for a lifetime.

Letting go is a necessary part of life, and timing is everything.  Even when the time is right--your five-year old is ready to go off to kindergarten, your 18-year old is ready to go off to college, your daughter is ready to get married--it's difficult to let go.  These are the moments when tears are shed that are expected and natural.  These are the transitions, often bittersweet, that follow the normal rhythm of life.  But letting a baby go at birth is not natural and it's not bittersweet.  For the baby, losing his mother is a global loss and nothing less than a tragedy.  For the mother, it is a heartbreak like none other.

The "experts" of yesterday were wrong.  Not evil perhaps, but wrong.  To perpetuate that wrong, as the adoption industry and too many legislators, judges, and lawyers are doing today, is evil, because we now know the damage infant adoption causes.  We know how difficult it is for society to come to grips with past errors; no sufficient apology has ever been offered to Native Americans or African-Americans or gays.  Only Australia has formally apologized to birthmothers and adoptees for the forced adoptions of the BSE, and even there pro-adoption forces are trying to undo the progress Australia has made.

I hope I live to see the day when adoption agencies are as archaic as "colored only" water fountains, when no adoptee ever has to wonder who his people are, when mothers and their adult children are no longer kept apart by a paternalistic system that purports, without or despite all evidence, to know what is best for them.   BSE birth mothers like me are getting old now, and we're no longer the frightened, tractable young girls of yesterday.  Our children are children no longer but adults capable of directing their own course through life.  Absent physical danger, none of us needs "protection,"  certainly not when 97% of birth mothers would welcome contact and most adoptees hunger for information about their family of origin.

When I surrendered my son for adoption, and when I adopted a baby myself, I didn't know about attachment theory and infant development as we now understand them.  I have lived with the consequences of adoption for 46 years.  I am no longer in denial or the adoption fog, and I am grateful that I've been able to restore my life and live in truth.  But I cannot remain silent so long as women are still talked out of keeping their babies and adoption records remain sealed.  What's even worse than making mistakes in the first place is refusing to admit them and do better.  It's time for our laws to catch up with our understanding. 

Step One

I believe there is an arc to reunion, perhaps different for each mother and child, but with predictable stages.  It's easy to generalize, and I don't pretend that my experience is universal; I do, however, believe it has a trajectory other reunited birth mothers will recognize.  (I know some in adoption-land object to the term "birth mother," but to me it's a necessary short hand for what I am.  I could as easily be called a "natural mother" or a "first mother," but I prefer "birth" for the emphasis it places on the act of giving birth itself.  It is a reminder of the primal experience.  In a better world only one word would be needed: Mother.)

It has become fashionable to film adoptee-birth mother reunions, usually at an airport or in front of someone's house, often with other family members hovering about as if to encourage a pair of cocks sizing each other up.  There is a sense of expectancy.  Will the meeting go well?  Will there be tears?  Will the earth move?  I dislike intensely these filmed meetings that seem to me prurient intrusions into what should be a private, not to say sacred, moment.

Adoption "experts" and social workers, ever vigilant to preserve their professional role in the process of reunion, much as obstetricians have traditionally "owned" childbirth, advise having an intermediary, and some states (those few that permit "legal" reunions) even mandate it.  My own take on this is that the mother and her child should meet each other for the first time without the encumbrance of bystanders, no matter how well-intentioned or supportive.

Reunion is a highly emotional experience, preceded by anxious anticipation, perhaps even fear, and some mothers and adoptees feel the need for moral support, someone to hold their hand as they leap off this high cliff.  Many pregnant women likewise want support, and they should have it.  But the moment of birth itself is something no mother can share with anyone but her child.  In the delivery room the rest of the world falls away.  How many fathers have been dismayed to be shooed away by a laboring wife, when just moments before those same fathers were ordered to bring ice chips or rub a back?

When I descended the escalator at Logan Airport in Boston to meet my son for the first time in over 44 years, I was nervous as a cat and focused like a laser on one thing and one thing only: my son.  When I saw him for the first time, beheld all 6'4" of him, his eyes like mine, his mouth, nose, and hair like mine, I had no room for anything or anyone else.  I understand why David brought his fiance with him.  The first thing I saw coming down that escalator was their two clasped hands.  I understand David's need for a hand to hold at that unpredictable, unfathomable moment, and I instantly recognized that he was not mine alone.  He was not a tiny baby, and I was not his entire world.  I would always have to share him, though I would always yearn for the union that was far in the past.

We hugged as naturally as two streams flowing together.  Everything about him seemed familiar--the way he felt, the way he smelled, the way he looked at me.  For those first few minutes we transcended the moment and joined as mother and son.  He held my hand as we walked through the airport to the parking deck, and all the fluttering feathers in my stomach settled like breath into a sigh.  I had wanted to go alone to meet my son and turned down offers by others to accompany me.  I was nervous, but I was not afraid.  Knowing David as I do now, I realize that he might well have been afraid, and I don't begrudge him his bringing reinforcements, but I was so hoping for time alone with him. 

The weekend went well.  We spent it mostly out on the deck of Judie's house, talking, laughing, crying at times.  It was apparent from the beginning that David was emotionally fragile, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, emotionally sensitive.  For a manly former hockey player who preferred jeans and boots, he was gentle and as vulnerable as a kitten, and Judie watched him like a mother cat.

A month later I returned to Boston with my husband and Tanner and Saskia, David's half brother and sister, to attend David and Judie's wedding.  I admit I was surprised that David wanted us there and was fully prepared to stay away, assuming he would want his adoptive family to be present.  I couldn't imagine anything more awkward than two sets of parents, strangers to each other but with so much shared baggage, negotiating the perilous terrain of a wedding in such an unusual context.  But David insisted that we were his family, and he wanted me to be there on this happiest of days.

Massachusetts is supposed to be pleasant in the summer, but it was a blistering August day, and the Revolutionary War era church wasn't air conditioned.  David stood at the front, waiting for his bride, and the sweat poured off him.  When he saw Judie standing at the back of the church, silhouetted against the open door that faced onto the Lexington common, he gasped a little and his tears spilled over.  He was awash.  Judie walked alone down the aisle, her eyes never leaving David's, and once she reached his side she surreptitiously passed him a Kleenex.

Those were the first tears of the day but they were by no means the last.  I am not one of those who cries at weddings.  Grinning like the Cheshire cat is more my style, and I was so happy and especially touched when I was presented with a corsage as the mother of the groom.  The reception luncheon was delightful; the fellowship hall buzzed with the murmurs of contented guests and the popping of champagne corks.  When things began to wind down, and all the toasts had been delivered, David and Judie stood to thank their guests for making their day so special.  Everything went off without a hitch, but there was a surprise coming.

Judie said a few words, then David began to speak.

"Some of you here today know that I was adopted, but what you may not know is that my birth mother found me, and she's here today."  He introduced me, Tanner, and his "beautiful sister Saskia," and made a joke about my husband that brought a chuckle. 

David proceeded to tell the story of our reunion, the Facebook exchange, the first phone call, all of it.  I had that wrong end of the telescope feeling again as the room seemed to rush away, leaving David the only person in clear focus, which is amazing because now I was awash in tears.  When he finished speaking, I rose from my chair and crossed the room to meet him.  We hugged, and both of us were sobbing with the wonder and joy of it all.  I could feel a roomful of eyes upon us, and I didn't care, but I said at last, "We'd better stop.  We're making a spectacle of ourselves."    

And that was how the first year of reunion went.  At first it seemed so simple.  I had my son, and my son had his mother.  Two people who had dreamed about each other and longed for each other were finally together, and the way forward seemed smooth.  If there were storm clouds gathering, I couldn't see them.  All I knew was that I was deliriously in love with my son, the way a mother is with her newborn.  David wasn't a tiny baby, but he was my baby, and my feelings of protectiveness were as fierce as those of a mother tiger.  I could not stop thinking about him.  It almost felt as if I were split in two, with my mind and heart in Massachusetts, while the rest of me was stuck in North Carolina.

It's painful and life-changing when a woman gives birth, when what had been one becomes two.  Finding David took me back to that bifurcation, only the pain this time was emotional, not physical.  It takes only a few weeks to recover from giving birth.  My separation from David lasted forty-four years, and the recovery from that will take much, much longer.

 

Two Husbands, Not Enough

“I had felt it coming for days: I had been crouching inside the walls of my consciousness terrified to move too far or too violently in case they collapsed and left me looking at the wild beasts.  In the pre-crisis days I feel like someone living in a paper house surrounded by predatory creatures.  They believe the house is solid so they don't attack, but if I were to move they would see the walls flutter and collapse and they would be on to me in no time.”  Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage

                                                        ****

The house was made of cement blocks, painted dingy white, and there was plastic covering all the windows.  Behind the house was a sagging chicken house, surrounded by giant azalea bushes and woods with branches tangled with wisteria vines.  I first went there on a beautiful fall day, the sunlight dropping through the dusty air and settling on the  wild flowers and weeds that had taken over the back yard.  The house was in the city, and the woods backed onto a major artery clogged with strip malls, but there was a remnant of the country feel from what had been a farm before urban sprawl swallowed it up.  The neighborhood was iffy.  Some of the houses were substantial enough but there were lots of tacky little cracker boxes that had been squeezed into the bare spaces between them.  The house next door was the original farmhouse, and on the other side another small wood separated us from a quaint little cottage.  I looked for every glimmer of beauty I could find and tried to forget the adult bookstore we had passed just a couple of blocks away.  

My children ran around, getting burrs stuck on their clothes; “ beggars' lice” is what we called them when I was a kid.  Bob wanted the house for the chicken coop.  It had no water or electricity, but it was a large empty space, and he could  make it into a studio.  The house was a filthy mess inside, and I made the kids keep their shoes on and not touch anything in the kitchen, where the red linoleum counter was black with ancient grease and worn bare in places.  That would be the first thing to go—after all the plastic that covered the windows for insulation.  Every room was painted the same horrid green, the floors were linoleum over concrete, and the only heat source was an old oil burner in what became Bob's and my bedroom.  The boys shared a room, and Saskia had her own room at the front of the house, where it was always cold.  I spent the first weeks and months making the place habitable.  Bob went off to teach and I painted, scrubbed, laid a new kitchen floor, put up wallpaper in all the bedrooms, and gradually added pieces of furniture found at flea markets and consignment shops.  

Graduate school proved to be my salvation and the proximate cause of  my divorce from Bob.  The first year in Greensboro was not too bad.  We joined the Unitarian Universalist church where we made friends and I became less lonely.  It was good to feel a sense of belonging and to see my children making friends.  There was no dogma to reject, no demands for any particular belief, and the company of intelligent people who were mostly, like me, refugees from more traditional religion was immensely comforting.  But what had seemed so promising came to an abrupt end when Bob lost his job at G.C.  Yet again, he had alienated his colleagues with his superior attitude and contempt for students he deemed unserious.  

It was a stunning setback, and Bob's drinking increased as our financial situation became more precarious.  I had taught high school for two years back in Greencastle before we moved to Canada, and I still had nightmares about it.  I simply couldn't face the prospect of going back to that, and I was determined not to take on anything that would keep me away from the children for long hours.  I was not about to put Saskia into one of the daycare centers that seemed to occupy every other block.  These centers looked to me like prisons with their sun-baked playgrounds and regimentation.  We applied to the pre-school at UNCG and were accepted, probably because we provided diversity with our mixed-race family.  I applied to graduate school at the same time and began the long slog toward what would eventually result in a PhD in English.

                                                           ***

I was excited but scared too.  The course was contemporary American literature, something I was interested in and felt some competence in already.  I had done well on the GRE and been awarded an assistantship; it wasn't a lot of money, but it would at least keep my family fed while Bob tried to sell his paintings.   I sat in the middle of the front row, as I figured that's where eager students sit, and I was more than eager, especially when our professor entered the room and introduced the class.  C. was about my age and gorgeous, tall, lanky, and bearded.  I'd heard he'd been a basketball coach before getting a PhD and getting into college teaching, and he certainly didn't project the image of the typical effete English professor.  Instead, he was a Hemingway character come to life, athletic, manly,  and brilliant.  I was gobsmacked, as the Irish like to say.  

By the end of the first class I had a massive headache.  When I learned everything we would have to do--write a 20-page term paper, give a 45 -minute oral presentation, take a mid-term and a comprehensive final—I thought, No way can I do all that.  How can I possibly say anything new when there's a whole library filled with literary studies by other people far more learned and experienced than I?  And yet, that's what we were told we would have to do.  And how on earth would I ever be able to manage a 45-minute presentation on anything whatsoever?  When I got home from that first night class, Bob was waiting at the door.  I told him about the class, and he said, “Well, if it's going to make you sick, you should just quit.”  

Ever since returning from France, I'd suffered from migraines, especially when under stress.  The day I took the GRE I had a memorable one.  In fact, many of my memories are anchored by those headaches.  I remember them the way I remember the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger explosion, with every surrounding detail crystal clear.  I would not quit.  I was afraid, but I knew I wanted to do this.  I'd missed out on graduate school when David was born.  Now I was older and ready to get serious in a way I hadn't been in my early twenties.  It was a relief to go to school and think only about that, not whether I was going to have a date that weekend or all the distractions of undergrad life.  Now I could focus and learn.  I'd never dreamed I'd go to grad school, despite my father's constant urging.  I liked being at home with the kids and writing short stories.  I liked being free to read what I liked when I liked, not according to someone else's agenda, but I also wanted to know more, and I knew grad school was the place to find what I was looking for.

After that first class, I moved out of the front row.  I needed a little distance from C’s intensity.  He was as passionate about literature as I was and talked about it with the fervor of a Baptist preacher touched with fire.  His classes were like a religious experience for me, and I would take more courses with him, be his teaching assistant for a semester, and have him on my dissertation committee, but that was still years away.  I was nervous about getting back the first mid-term.  I had written a lot and felt good about it, but I had no idea what to expect.  When C stopped by my desk, my heart jumped.  “Do you mind if I read your exam to the class?” he asked.  And he did.

That evening changed everything for me.  I'd done well.  I'd done really well, and no one was more surprised than I was.  Maybe I'd found something I could do with some competence after all.  I hadn't been enthusiastic about being a copy editor, and I'd found teaching high school exhausting and frustrating, but I loved writing.  That first A was like a shot of vitamin B12 to my intellectual system.  I had succeeded on my own, not as my parents' daughter or my husband's wife or my children's mother but as myself.  I was known for the work I did, my ideas, my writing, and best of all I was rewarded for those things.  It was astounding.

I had always been able to compartmentalize my life.  The fact that I was David's mother was the most salient fact about me, but I kept it completely separate.  When I taught high school, I was one person at school, quite another at home with Bob and Tanner.  I felt the strain of living a double life, but I'd done it for so long I didn't have to think much about it.  I had my life at school, studying, getting to know my professors, absorbing knowledge that enlarged my soul, and I had my life at home, which was becoming more and more difficult.  Money was tight, but that wasn't the worst of it.  

 I had class two nights a week and got home around 10:00.  I was taking a writing workshop, and the class had a tradition of going to a local bar for a beer and conversation afterwards, but I couldn't go.  Not once in two years of taking those workshops did I ever get to join that group of ambitious young writers.  I felt left out and resentful, because it was Bob who prevented me from going.  Every time I returned home, there he was, standing in the doorway, and if I was five minutes late he'd ask where I'd been.  School became my escape, the place where I could be myself and be free for the hours I spent there.   Bob sat in the dark in the bedroom, drinking one beer after another in an endless succession of pops every time he opened another can.  The more pops, the more tricky I knew the night would be.  If I was lucky, Bob would be asleep by the time I got to bed after tucking the children in; if he was still awake there was a 50-50 chance he would start an argument and I'd lose a night's sleep to silent tears and the anguish of being called a slut, a whore, an unsupportive and unloving wife.  His words washed over me like scalding water, and how could I defend myself? It was all true; I had slept with someone else (albeit before I met Bob); I had given birth to a child that wasn't his.  And he hated me for it.  We read Theodore Dreiser's  Sister Carrie  one semester, and I saw myself in this bleak novel about the reverse rise and fall of a poor girl and her protector.  As her fortunes improve, his decline into ruin.  Who says literature is not life?

                                                           ***     

I bought a swing and set it up in the back yard, facing the chicken coop and the woods.  If I hadn't been able to hear the traffic over on High Point Road I might have been lost in nature.  In the spring the wisteria dropped heavy purple blooms from the trees and scented the air.  The overgrown azaleas blazed against the weathered boards of the coop, and a gnarled crab apple tree sported pink and white blossoms.  Spring and fall were the best times to sit in the swing, rocking and thinking, looking for peace that was too often elusive.  I've always loved an early summer evening, when the day hovers near its end, the wind drops into stillness, and the birds settle down for the night.   Dinner was over, the kids were inside watching TV, and I sat alone in the gathering dusk and tried to assess my life as a single mother with next to no money.    Exhaustion and fear were my two companions, but for a few peaceful moments I could suspend myself in time.  I'd borrowed enough money to get us through the summer.  I knew I'd have to pay it back eventually, but for now I had the security of a fridge full of food and the promise of teaching in the fall.  My children were safe, or so I believed, I had friends, I loved my work, but the future was a total blank.

I had once found a refuge in a small private high school in Ithaca, and now I had found another in this mid-sized southern university.  I basked in my professors' regard and found my feet as a teacher.  Teaching college students was so different from teaching younger kids.  At first I was still young enough to feel closer to my students than  to their parents, and being a parent myself made me more tolerant of their immaturity.  Being a mother made me a better teacher, and in later years, when I was old enough to be my students' mother and then grandmother, I found an outlet for my maternal impulses in the classroom.  My mother, consummate teacher that she was, always said you couldn't be a good teacher if you didn't love the kids.  I didn't love my eighth-graders, but I came to love many of my college students and took a maternal pride in their achievements.  Children never fully realize how much their parents love them, and students never understand just how much they mean to their teachers.  The best student-teacher relationship is based on love, certainly not on fear.

Having a baby opens you up like nothing else.  We now know that a mother and her fetus exchange cells during pregnancy, cells that replicate and form a literal physical connection.  When you have a baby, part of your physical being goes with him, and the emotional connection is equally real.  When I was pregnant with each of my children, they created a space in me that no one but they could fill.  I've lost both parents; I've divorced two husbands; I've parted from close friends and while I miss them all, I am no less whole because of their absence.  Losing David made me less whole and left a space that nothing else and no one else could ever fill, though I would try repeatedly in my relationships with men.  Tanner and Saskia created new, unique spaces in me that fit only them, but the emptiness where David should have been persisted.  I thought, though at an unconscious level, that adopting Dabbs would fill that space, but Dabbs came to me, not from me.  I loved him with the same muscles with which  I loved my husbands, lovers, or friends, but not with the same muscles I exercised with Tanner and Saskia.  I was so hungry for love.  

My second husband was initially my professor, my dissertation director, in fact.  Here was the quintessential English professor with the beard and leather patches on the sleeves.  All he needed was a pipe to complete the look.  A marvelous lecturer, a charming dinner companion, and a lover of women, M  had his  own demons in the form of a difficult wife and two sons who tested their parents' every nerve.  M’s mother died of tuberculosis very soon after he was born prematurely.  It's doubtful she ever even saw him.  He was raised by his father and aunt until his father remarried and had two more sons.  When he was 14 his father died, and his stepmother soon decided to ship him off to elderly relatives in the North Carolina mountains.  So M grew up without a mother, never really wanted, an inconvenience to be passed along to whoever would be willing to take him.  He was a needy, weak man who masked his deficiencies beneath a mask of bonhomie and brilliance.  His appeal was to a certain kind of woman who was intelligent, romantic, and motherly, and he was notorious for having affairs.  He preferred married women, because, as he put it, there was less likelihood of complications.  

Once the word spread in the English department that I was separated, he invited me to lunch.  I was flattered and told him that wasn't necessary, but he insisted.  He knew me as a student, now he made an effort to know me in other ways.  He was fifteen years older than I, and I was more than a little in awe of him.  When he lectured, he sounded not unlike Morgan Freeman, with a drawl that was more aristocratic than southern.  The lunch was pleasant.  He asked me to address him by his first name and invited me to have dinner with him the next week, as his wife would be out of town.  As I drove to meet him that night, I knew I was going to begin an affair with him.  It was a deliberate decision, not a surge of desire.  I was so fucking lonely, so scared, so tired of coping that an affair with a distinguished older man seemed an escape of a kind.  I didn't want to introduce a step-father into my children's lives.  Dabbs was a challenge I couldn't expect any man to take on, and a very private relationship met my needs of the moment. 

It began with the appearance of innocence.  We went in my car to a park near my house, where we shared a picnic lunch.  I wanted to get out and sit on the grass, but M wanted to stay in the car, so we did.  He had brought along a small book of poetry, Philip Larkin, I believe it was, and he read me some of his favorite poems.  Larkin is a favorite of mine; I love his despairing realism.   He writes beautiful poems about sorrowful things, making the tragedies of life, large and small, into something bearable.  Being in M’s company, I felt alive in ways I had all but forgotten, as if a film I'd been watching had suddenly shifted into 3-D.  In the beginning, the effervescence lasted from one meeting to the next, but it wasn't long before the weight of absence began to outweigh the delirium of his presence.  The two cancelled each other out, so that I only felt alive and whole when I was with him.  I no longer inhabited my own life and mind and instead needed him, it seemed, even to breathe.  This, I thought, is true love.  It was passion, for sure, but as for love?  I'm no longer sure.  Surely real love grows with time and makes a place where breath comes easy and trust replaces anxiety.  

I had six wonderful years with M  before he left his wife.  We'd go out to dinner and go away for the weekend when his wife was away.  We even managed a trip to England once.  He was solicitous, a brilliant conversationalist, and I learned so much from him.  I'd  had a pretty decent education in art history from Bob, and now I had my own personal resource for my passion, English literature.  Once again, I was in the position of adoring acolyte, the younger woman absorbed in her man and his interests, only this time his interests were the same as mine.  M didn't know as much about art as I did, but he knew more about music and literature, and I soaked up everything he could teach me.

I tried to keep my affair secret, especially from my children, but I failed miserably.  In no time at all Dabbs and Saskia figured out what was up, and I assume Tanner did as well.  Still, we all persisted as if nothing were going on at all.  My entire life was a lie.  I had a child and my children had a brother, and no one knew.  I was in love with a man who wasn't free, who was in fact off limits in all sorts of ways.  It was a continuation of the duplicity I'd been living with since I was pregnant with David.  I was steeped in subterfuge.  I hated it, but I could see no other way.  

M’s wife often went to France for several weeks in the summer, and one summer M and I took a week to fly out to Missouri to revisit his aunt's farm and the small town where he'd grown up  and his father had owned a sawmill.  It was a bleak little place with a main street that might have been prosperous in the 1930s but was now run-down and empty.  It was obvious that the Burger King and McDonald's on the edge of town was where the action was.  M was in his sixties when we made this trip, and now that I am approaching seventy, I understand his need to revisit the past, to reorient himself in relation to the boy he'd been, to solidify his sense of himself.  I became his audience, his witness.  Here was where the old sawmill stood and here the house his father built, the biggest in town for many years.  There was his aunt's farm, the house missing the front porch he remembered but the old barn still standing.

We visited the old swimming hole, now a fish hatchery, and while we were there M  stumbled and fell on the gravel path.  He  hurt his arm badly and was sure it was broken, so I drove him in our rental car to the local hospital emergency room.  M was quite shaken and insisted I stay with him while  he had his arm X-rayed.  He seemed that day not like the robust bon vivant I'd fallen in love with but like a little lost boy.  If I had truly loved him, I would have been happy to gather him up and soothe him with attention.  I was kind enough, but his weakness frightened me.  I would realize later than this weakness was more than a passing wobble; it lay at the core of his character, and it would be the ruin of us.  A few years later, after we were married, I had to have cataract surgery.  He drove me to the surgical center but refused to come in with me.  A nurse assured me my husband was welcome to remain with me during the preliminaries, but he stayed outside in the parking lot, and I made his excuses.  His neurotic fear of doctors was stronger than his concern for me, and I never really forgave him for it.

 

That day in the park, I had felt poised at the  edge of a great adventure.  I believed fulfilment was to be mine after all, and I would possess something rare and precious, something lesser spirits could never know.  And so began the years of delusion.  I had my life of children, work, house, visits with family, anxiety about money and uncertainty about the future.  That was real.  And I had brief spurts of passion on hot summer afternoons when my kids were at the pool or chance weekends out of town, where a motel bed could seem to contain everything I could ever want.  I lived in an unreal place, and like a drug addict who knows he's destroying himself and those he loves, I couldn't bear my own existential solitude.  I couldn't sit alone, peacefully, with my own thoughts.  I had no peace, only the emotional high of attraction that, if not more real than the bulk of my days, gave me at least the illusion of meaningful connection.

Sometimes I tormented myself by imagining that I'd found a job in another city and had to move away.  How could I ever bring myself to get in my car with my belongings in a U-Haul truck and my children in the back seat and pull out of my driveway for the last time?  I knew I couldn't do it.  I wanted a true home, with my love and my life in the same abode, and so after six years of stolen weekends and a secret trip to England, I told M I was going to marry another man, an Israeli stockbroker I'd been seeing who wanted to marry me and rescue me from poverty, insecurity, and loneliness.  He was a nice man, and I really thought I would marry him.  I was so unhappy and desperate that marriage to a man I didn't love seemed a reasonable solution.  It was very doubtful that M would ever leave his wife.   I decided to jump ship and make for shore, not believing for a moment that he would make any effort to follow me.  But he did.

After 30 years of an unhappy marriage, punctuated by horrific fights that dismayed their neighbors and no doubt scarred their sons, M left his wife and his big house and his place in his social world to move in with me and my fifteen-year old daughter.  Two weeks later, I knew I had made a terrible mistake, but it would take me six more years to rectify it.  

M had told me about a Spanish dish that was baked with an egg on top of each serving.  Everything was supposed to cook through, but the yolk of the egg was meant to remain runny.  I carefully followed the recipe, threw together a green salad, opened a bottle of wine and called everyone to the table.  M sat at the head with Saskia on his right and me  on his left.  He lifted his fork and stuck it into the steaming dish.  The yolk was hard.  He slammed the fork down and pounded his two fists on the table, making the cutlery jump.  Saskia and I stared at each other in silence.  M  told me his wife had said he preferred things to people, and now I believed her.  

Life for M was a series of performances, and he demanded a particular backdrop.  It required his worn leather couch and chair, a library full of books, reproductions of dark English landscapes, and a rack of pipes on his over-sized desk.  M knew all about the accoutrements of a gracious life; what he lacked was the capacity to inhabit his own soul without the scaffolding of a strong woman to hold him up.  He was a wonderful man to have an affair with, but as a husband he was a cipher.

Between us we managed to transform my house into something that more closely resembled the aesthetic retreat M required.  We built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in what had been the garage, put in carpet over the oil-stained cement, and replaced the broken garage door with  a wall and a French door.  We did the work ourselves, taking a year and a half of weekends and holidays to accomplish it.  When I had threatened to marry my stockbroker—with every intention of following through—M promised me a whole list of life-changing things, including a new house in a better neighborhood.  Perhaps if we had moved, and I had not felt imprisoned with no chance of reprieve in that house of Bob's choosing, we might have managed to stay together.  He might not have spent his last years alone in that dreadful house or suffered a chill, when the power went out in a winter storm, that hastened his death.  I feel responsible for that.  I can't help identifying with Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (incidentally M’s favorite character in all literature) and her escape from Casaubon.  My identification with literary heroines,  Hester Prynne being another, is probably what led me to think life could be a dramatic plot and my pursuit of the seminal event, the fatal moment, the intensity of what can only be fleeting, a genuine modus vivendi.

As it turned out, M didn't have the comfortable income his former life in his old neighborhood had indicated.  He was, in fact, far more deeply in debt than I ever knew until after our divorce and his death.  There would be no new house, no trips abroad, no money for my daughter's education.  He could put a complete set of Wedgewood china, a new couch, materials for the study, and a bust of Verdi on a credit card, but I continued paying the mortgage and the utilities and bought our food.  Mac was always very generous with the extras; it was with the basics where he fell short.

If I had truly loved my first two husbands, I believe I would have accepted the alcoholism and the congenital weakness as a burden to be shared.  As it was, I withdrew into a self-protective shell.  I could go through the motions; I was adept at that.  But once I admitted the truth to myself, that these men were not who they claimed to be, that like the Great Oz they hid behind a curtain of pretense, I could no longer admire and therefore could no longer love.  Even Bob had recognized that admiration has to precede  love, and when I lost respect for my second husband, I once again had to amend my life. 

What does it mean to act selfishly?  How can we be sure our actions are justified?  Is making excuses to ourselves the best we can do?  I tried to act unselfishly when I relinquished David, a decision I have always bitterly regretted.  Had I been more selfish would our lives have been better, less damaged?  I acted selfishly when I took M away from his family.  I told myself at the time that I was rescuing him from decades of unhappiness and a shrewish wife, whom he stayed with because he was too weak to leave.  I think he didn't want to die with her, which would be to die essentially alone.  He was getting older, prematurely older, and he wasn't confident of finding another woman to console him.  That had been so easy for him in his youth.  Now here I was, the last of a long line of adoring women who tried to love him enough to fill his emptiness, to prop up his weakness.  He told me he wanted to die in my arms, and I felt as if he were trying to pull me into the grave with him.  I had to get away while there was still time, before he had a stroke or heart attack and I was stuck for years nursing a man who had lied to me, spent money  frivolously on things we couldn't afford—the marble bust of Verdi from Italy being one example—and failed to get me out of a house I hated.  Now, after five years of marriage, I was about to leave him to his own devices.  I had acted selfishly when I took up with him and I acted selfishly when I left him.  In both cases I felt close to spiritual death, so I saved myself.  I couldn't save Bob, and I couldn't save M, but should marriage be a matter of rescue?  Perhaps what frightened me about these two men was recognition, not of their weakness but of my own.