We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

Today the sky was a vicious blue, and the air was still. Nothing moved for a moment as I stood at an icy corner, waiting. A pause in a season, to catch it’s sense of self perhaps, shake March a little, like a snowglobe. Winter and spring fighting for their places.

It’s that blue that breaks the tempo after a long winter-the blue that reminds you that all things change, all things come around, nothing, ever, lasts forever.

“…developed a cancer growth in the large intestinal track. The doctor successfully removed a piece of the intestine that had the growth, so all should be well soon.”

In the mail, a letter from my sorta step-grandmother-the woman married to my blood grandfather. The letter came inside a birthday card for Rosalyn, attached to a check. “Don’t worry” it says.

My adoptive mother died of cancer.

My biological grandmother died of cancer.

My biological grandfather has cancer.

Yeah, I’m not worried. Not one bit. Not me, who muttered “well, at least I’m probably in HIS will.”

I’d slap myself for being so crass if it would make a difference.

Thing is, I don’t know how to feel. This man is my family-his blood runs in my veins, my face, briefly, resembles his, the shy smile, the height. I’m his granddaughter-his first born granddaughter, and I can smell the guilt from him a mile away. I’d like to believe it’s not guilt, but love, or at least like. But I’d also like to believe I’ll have a pony and a beach house someday.

He and my grandmother were truly the only people in my biological family who seemed to truly care, who unlike my birth mother, didn’t just throw money in my face to try and fix some perceived slight, 20 years old. My grandparents were the only ones who seemed to truly want to help, to know me. They were the only ones I cared to know, the only two in a large family seemingly disinterested in material’s or money in the bank. The only two who didn’t seem wrapped up in themselves.

My grandmother died, fast, of cancer rocketing through her body. I was 7 months pregnant with Vivian the last time I spoke to her, excited to be carrying their first grandchild, excited to give them that. She told me about everyone else’s problems, told me how proud she was of my half-sister.

She left out the part about the cancer eating her from the inside. She lived 3 weeks past the day Vivian was born. She never knew her name. They told me later that she didn’t want to upset me.

I didn’t cry-what was there to cry for? A body that is technically like mine, DNA I could mimic, follow home? But nothing beyond that point-nothing to say, nothing in common, our lives so very different for only being 40 minutes apart while I grew up.

40 minutes. That’s all that separates a life from another.

My grandmother was one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. But I didn’t know her, and I didn’t feel entitled to grief.

I was not included on the death announcement, still just another hidden secret to be ashamed of.

So to see, on paper, the words that could likely turn into him dying, I just wish I had never looked. I unfriended my half-sister on Facebook since the last time I spoke to her she was, frankly, a bit of a bitch, and how do you explain anything to a 21 year old with a single vision? You don’t.

This man is the last link I have to a family that never wanted me, and has never even tried to fill in the blanks for me, never tried to be there. My birth mother has come and gone at will, rejecting me, pushing away. Occasionally an aunt sends a gift, a letter, then nothing. I sit here wondering if this is what family feels like, and if it is, why anyone bothers? I have more family in my father than I have in that entire group of people.

If my grandfather dies, when he dies, It will bring home how close I am to being an orphan, a story I could avoid telling myself for years. I thought finding my birth family would help me close the holes in my heart, help me move on with life.

It’s done nothing but wound me slowly since the day it happened. The farther I get away from it, the more I wish I had never, ever looked.

All I ever wanted was a family to love me, a normal family that wasn’t broken or strained or lying to itself. Meeting these people at 19 was a lesson well learned, one that continues even now.

Carry Me

Did she hold me now? Three hours ago? 12? Did they leave me in her room, snuffling, comatose little child beside her as colostrum poured from her breasts? Did she look out the window, perhaps at the rain, as they wheeled me away from her 17 year old unfinished hands, clutching at her elbows as she suddenly felt emptier than ever? Was I alone, screaming in a room, my echoes covered by those of a multitude of other lives I’d never touch again, their mothers waiting in their rooms, warmed by the slow engorging of their breasts, the blissed tiredness of their labours?

Did I know she had left me? Did my small trembling fists know what had happened, that she had signed a paper releasing me from her, just another cord to slice through? Did I feel the gulf then, as I do now, wavering and shimmering, a golden forest of time, of pressure, of regret between us.

Does she think of me today, now? Does she drink the beer she drank for years, not knowing, or is she at peace, knowing I survived, knowing that I have grown strong and tall, if not a little knicked and torn in place?

Did she love me, ever?

**************************************

Do you love your mother
The way I love mine
Expecting nothing of her
’cause she was changing all the time
I couldn’t take my mother
And I’ll never hate my home
But I learned to rock myself child
And get on

Do you feel your mother
The way I feel mine
I tried to change the nature
But now I like it ’cause it’s mine
And I let you love me up
And I let you bring me home
And I could go away
But I don’t wanna

I don’t wanna be too smart
I don’t wanna talk too fast
I don’t wanna look too precious
First impressions never last
There’s always complications
Weird vibrations
Frustrations
Have patience

Do you love your mother
’cause God I love mine
In a dream she let me love her
Gotta hand it to my mind
In case you never meet her
I’ll tell you what it is
She was lonely like a woman
But she was just a kid

Oh mama
What are ya doin’
Yeah yeah yeah
Ooohhh
Shit
Carry me

**************************

Today I turned 31 at around 2:15am. And it hit me, mid afternoon, that I’ve never known when my mother said good-bye to me, when the finality of all she had done and decided had hit, when she last touched me, held my fingers. I’ve never known, and when I met my biological mother, I was too young to think of these things, to young to understand the heartbreak of saying goodbye to your first born.

All my life, I have felt lonely on my birthday. I have always craved as much fuss and bother as I could get, and rarely, if ever, have had it. I figured this had much more to do with losing my adoptive mother than with being adopted. But what if? What if a body retains that initial abandonment, what if it remembers that hand leaving, tears trailing, months of unwillingness swirling in the womb. What if the body remembers what the brain dare not?

I don’t much like my biological mother. Or much of my biological family for that matter. Blood isn’t thicker than water in my case. But when I met her, I wanted, more than anything, to find a mother, my mother. I wanted to be embraced, welcomed. I wasn’t, not as I needed, and perhaps finding her at 18 wasn’t the best of ideas, but there was something poetic about meeting her around the age of when she lost me. I couldn’t grasp the enormity of it-bearing life at that age!

I’m sure it hardened her. She told me that for years, she would get stinking drunk on my birthday, wondering where I was, how I was, and that the year she found me, that was the first time she didn’t have to drink herself to sleep, wondering. Turns out I was 40 minutes down the road after all, blissfully ignorant in the arms of two parents who loved me more than I could wish. But she never told me how it all felt, how long her labour was, how scared she had been, if she saw me, or if they took me before she could.

My narrative is incomplete. I feel the echoes of that part of my life, my beginning on every birthday. It no longer hurts, I don’t know if it ever did. But it was a space yearning to be filled, a place that will likely never know fullness. A place to honor what she gave, the arms she left barren, the people who she gave such joy to.

Happy Birth Day to you Mother. I hope your womb has healed.

“Age is opportunity no less,than youth itself, though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away, the sky is filled by the stars invisible by the day.”

A perfect day Elise: PJ Harvey

I’ve always loved this song. The tension, the pacing of the story, the vividness of the setting despite so few words. It would play itself out so clearly in my head.

To imagine that it’s 10 years old-meaning I’m ten years older. That it still has the same kind of hold on me…

I think a lot about aging, on how I still feel 17 inside, where it counts, but my knee kills when I jog and I can’t eat raw broccoli anymore. I think of it as spaces, bubbles that intersect, co-mingle, but never truly merge. We float into each age, effortlessly in some cases, kicking and screaming in others. Are some of us old souls, unfazed by the passage of years, knowing that they are ultimately meaningless, while others are young, too young, and are angered by responsibility and necessity? Do our stories ever merge?

I spend a lot of my time in public staring at other people. I always have. There’s something fascinating in the little tidbits people let slip. How they adjust their underthings when they believe no one is watching. How they drink their coffee. How they smoke a cigarette. If the person with them is a lover. Who they are, who they’ve been. A story in each individual spark, waiting to be told. A life lived. A baby suckled. A child held, and released. A teenager who danced, or lied to join the war. A young adult, faced with marriage, a job, or the agony of choosing their life work. And old man, staring at his hands and wishing. The loves that danced between, the loves lost, the lives stolen, children snatched.

Artwork that has never seen light. Music never sung. Voices squandered. I imagine every single one of those people a book, covered in rough leather, bound tight to be opened. It’s a mighty cliche, but I see volumes stacked on a shelf in these lives, the moments left to memory that only become real when spoken.

Old age has never scared me. I never imagined that I’d turn into a wrinkled crone, handing apples out to fair maidens. Maybe the image I hold in my head of my mother forms my view on aging-that it means grace, and dignity and wisdom. That it represents coming through and out from the events that tear your life asunder, and arriving at a delicate moth wing of a place where the air is cool with petals and sweet wind and you can breathe and just be, convinced that you are who you should be and that all else matters little. In my mind, my mother is this person-secure and stable in herself, clinging to the mast inside, spine firm and rigid, yet just curved enough to weather the storm.

Of course, she never completed her voyage. She never became a crone in the strictest sense of the word. Her art, her songs, her music died inside her, and has left me searching ever since in the faces of the old for pieces of her, slivers in grey eyes, giggles on blue dresses, a smirk in a corner. My guide in age has left, but has also left me fearless, aware that I walk into the unknown, head high, playing out my own story.

I am roughly the age now that she was when I was adopted. When I was placed in her arms and told “You are her mother now.” When my life became hers, when old age meant my grandchildren surrounding her on a chair listening to her stories about how frightened I was of some silly old Venus Fly Trap and how I couldn’t be trusted to walk home alone, my head in the clouds searching for dreams and leprechauns.  Right now, she would have become a mother to a daughter, and her hopes, her own questions for mortality and aging, for then, and forever and someday would have crystallized into one moment, one song –

I love you.

Age is meaningless. I look into the eyes of my children, and see my mother looking back. Not through blood, but through will and spirit, through the eyes of the older gentleman that seem to say “You’re doing just fine” through the mouths of the old ladies who dote and squeeze and love so unconditionally that I want to run screaming into their arms asking HOW! How did they do this, losing sons, husbands, sisters, friends, until it’s just them, waiting, biding their time and asking where did it all go? In their eyes my mother is 16 and dancing to Elvis, waiting for her true love.

In their eyes, future and past tell their stories to each other, and bubbles burst into the air, showering us with quiet memory. And I wonder where 10 years have gone so quickly.

 

Nineteen

2 days.

I can place myself in my mother’s shoes. Watching the grass spring into place from the picture window in the front of the house from her vantage point on the borrowed hospital bed. The legs of which dig divots into the plush carpet that will take 2 weeks to fully disappear. Her breath won’t remain in the house that long.

I can hardly remember the last two days, merged as they were into the days that came before. The emergency ambulance rides, the hasty packing, me slipped to the side, quiet so no one would notice. I hardly remember our family as a foursome, as a team, together, as we were meant to be. There was a crack in that picture already, a crack dug deep with cancer and hopelessness and dreams.

My memories, like Mad’s, are sparse, but thankfully, I have a few that are golden. The crackling late afternoon light pouring in the side windows as I tried on new clothes at 6 or 7. Chocolate covered fingers in the kitchen, licking the bowl, watching my mother bake and cook and feed the people who would come to feed up, the stereotypical casseroles splayed across our doorstep, cards attached, pieces of tape on the bottom of the cheap ceramics with names, “Brenda”, “Mrs Bishop”. Driving to Kingston in her blue car, holding in the nausea, not wanting the Pepto Bismo that would make it all the more worse.

I remember her hand, and mine it it. A downtown street, a sunny warm summer morning, her soft sandals slapping her feet, her dress swinging. Stopping to talk. Stopping to talk. A warm muffin and ginger ale at the cafeteria in the store my father ran, the laughter of a group of women as they talk above my head.

The warmth of her hand, the strength of it. The softness, the yielding, the smell of her hand creme, the Charlie on her neck.

I don’t remember hugging my mother, or kissing my mother. She wasn’t affectionate that way, not that I can remember. But lord, she was lovely. She was womanly and graceful and strong and sweet, in her way. She was kind.

In the summer, we’d sit on the front step, await the squirrels who would inevitably come to her, who would climb on her shoulders, snatching peanuts from her breast pocket, the breast that would eventually come off and be replaced with a facsimile I would play with. She never worried that they would bite her.

“Sit still and they’ll be gentle” she’d remind me.

And it was true.

She loved to laugh. She loved to prank. From kinking the hose until I’d stand over it so she could let loose the water then, to sitting in the front row at mass, marking the sermon with friends to rapping on the wall, making me believe in witches, she had a devilish sense of humor.

I think of these things instead of the 2 days before. Instead of the cold dampness of the stairs I sat on. Instead of the panic and fear and terror that ran through our house, circled the voices telling me the just go to school, rang through my head when I was pulled out during spelling by one of her Priests, taken to a car to silently watch the highway with my brother as we drove to what we knew was inevitable.

I shall think of none of these things. I shall think of my mother as the woman who loved me, who craved me, who wanted me. The woman who loved her little girl, who taught her that glasses can sing, who taught her that strength isn’t only measured in muscles. I will think of my mother who my first born is named after, in part. I will think of my mother as the vibrant woman introduced me to Hitchcock as a child, yet refused to let me read Frankenstein.

My mother, Dianne Joanne Marie, has been dead 19 years 2 days from now. And I miss her still, as I always will.

“She’s too young to see that as we gather losses, we may also grow in love;as in passion, the body shudders and clutches what it must release.”

Mother I wish…..

I wish many things. I wish you had explained things to me better. I wish I would have known more than that nebulous “I’m sick”, wish I would have truly known what Cancer meant-not in terms of rogue cells and less than functional cures, but in the human cost, in terms of what I was to lose.

Or perhaps it’s better that I didn’t.

Mother, I wish you had told me you loved me. My ears don’t remember hearing those words. I know you did-my core knows that you loved me and wished for me and asked for me and one day I was there for you to love me. But I can’t recall hearing the words pass your lips. I have no notes in your handwriting, no secret messages left encoded in the wallpaper. I have one thing in my possession that crossed your fingers, and I treasure it, even if I can rarely bring myself to touch it.

Mother, I wish you had told me about love, about how it cuts both ways, how it endangers me. I wish you had told me it was worth it, so I wouldn’t have wasted years convincing myself it wasn’t, and that I was unworthy and unready.

Mother, I wish you would have told me how wonderful finding your one true love was.

I wish you would have had “the talk”. You know the one. Instead, I learned from cold books, hidden in a corner of a library where no one would find me. I wish you would have left some warning about cramps and blood and sex so I wouldn’t have felt so bloody alone curled up on a damp bathroom floor crying.

Mother, I wish you would have told me about you, your past, who you were before your family became the second part of your life. I saw drawings, art-were you an artist? What dreams did you have? You had dreams, a farm girl from southern Ontario, I’m sure you wanted to escape. Was my father your escape on Saturday in a Drugstore?

I do so wish you would have told me how much I would come to love my children, how much you loved yours. I wish I had a piece of your love to carry on with me, to share with my children, something more real than my stories. If only you had written something down for me to carry forth.

I wish you had admitted you were dying before it was too late. You had such hateful hope, and this hope prevented you from truly preparing us, for saying those things we needed to say. This hope kept you from preparing for a future you were not in. That hollow fucking place I’m finally out of. I’m so very angry with you for this. You didn’t want to face what was happening. I admire your bravery, but I’m angry at how you left us.

Mother, I wish you would have seen a second doctor when Dad told you to, when you first found that lump. I wish you would have taken it seriously, even if the doctor didn’t. You had such faith in these people! They fucked up your leg as a teenager, and they fucked up your life as an adult. Why did you believe in them so?

Mother, I wish I would have just appreciated you while you were there, instead of being the shitty little kid I was somedays. Dad would tell me to knock it off, and I just didn’t get it. Not really. It hurt, not understanding why we couldn’t go places, why you couldn’t get out of bed. Why you took so many pills and spent your days getting sick.

Mother, I wish I could have shown more compassion, more love. I wish I would have been more loving, but I just didn’t understand. Even I couldn’t yell those words, those “I love you’s!” until the machines were winding down. I was scared that if I said it, you’d die.

I guess I was right.

Mom, more than anything, I wish I had known you. I have fleeting memories of a talented, strong woman, but I never knew you. I’m told that I was always by your side, your constant companion. I’m told that you loved me more than anything, loved your family to distraction.

Mom, I wish I knew these things for sure, and not just in my mind, and sometimes even my heart.

I wish I didn’t miss you.

I wish we had beaten that cancer.

I wish things had been different, and you were still here, making your legendary poppy seed cake instead of me cursing the world that made you never write the bloody recipe down. Cursing a world in which the taste of that cake is as mythical as your voice.

I wish your knew your grand-daughters, their songs, their games, their idiocies.

Mom, sometimes, I just wish…..

 

(Title is a fragment from a fantastic poem by Julia Spicher Kasdorf)

“Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.”

Sorry it took so long to respond but as for the unsigned card, if anything, she was only trying to protect me…she has always been cautious of that since you went away and I think its always going to be in her mind, regardless of what changes. Maybe you werent ready, but neither was I, it happened, and maybe we could have all handled it differently but what happened happened, and we cant change that.Over the years, I have learned that people have to earn my trust, I dont give it easily anymore. I gave you my trust back then and you left…unforunately, trust has to be earned again.Hope the girls are doing well

I found this in my facebook inbox from my half sister last night, in reference to a conversation we had a few months back.

Part of me is really fucking angry. The other half just doesn’t care. Maybe it’s something about being lectured on trust by a 20 year old that’s pissing me off. Maybe it’s the knowledge that she’s had a relatively easy life that’s eating at me.

Maybe it’s recognizing myself in that 11 year old, knowing that feeling of being abandoned and left behind.

I don’t feel like I can explain to her that none of this was done to hurt anyone-that that situation was one that I was in no way really prepared to deal with, especially not in the all or nothing manner my birth mother decided things needed to be. I can’t explain to her-I just can’t explain to her the hurt and the pain I went through with this-the absolute obviousness of standing outside of a family that would never be mine, but was by blood. I can’t explain to her the loss of one mother, and the seeming rejection of another.

I can’t possibly explain the pain of watching her mother hold her, while I stood holding up a wall, staring out a window pretending I didn’t care.

There is a gulf, and I’m not sure I even want to bother crossing it.

*****************************

Sure, she was 10 or 11. But I was 19, and eager to be done with things, eager to move on, away, into my life. She was a kid. She had her mother, and her father, a large extended family who loved and coddled her as the baby she was. I cast a thought behind me, regret perhaps, sadness at a life I wouldn’t have, a sister I truly would never had, and moved on. I never let myself love her. I liked her. But I never opened my heart fully.

I couldn’t. The tenuous heartbreak of watching my mother love her was bad enough. I had my heart, and life broken once before. There was no way-absolutely no way I was opening myself up to that again.

The one Christmas I spent with them, my mother became ill. I stood beside her bed, unsure-hold her hand? Walk away, leave them to be by themselves? As I was thinking, she screamed “Stop staring at me! Get out!”

I fled.

They pulled her out of the house by ambulance as I stood watching, unsure of my place, unsure of what anger or sadness I might be entitled to. My heart pulled the shutters it allowed to open back in, and steeled itself for the worst.

My sister was comforted by her family, and I felt envy for the arms that wrapped around her. I had my future husband, and myself.

***************************

I’m angry with her because in my eyes, she has everything-everyone. Love,  security. She’s never wanted for a thing. She’s never suffered, not from anything I can grasp as suffering. She’s been the darling baby of her family, a pet almost. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m talking to a petulant little child who has never grasped that the world doesn’t revolve around her.

I thought of her constantly. I wanted to reach out to her, but worried her mother, our mother, would prevent it. I wanted a sister, I wanted someone else in my life.

I didn’t want this. I didn’t want someone implying that I’m selfish and that I’ve hurt them on purpose. And it’s this that breaks my heart and is leading me to decide to finally cut contact for once and for all. I’m tired of this half assed “Family” sending me checks based in guilt and the odd Christmas card. What’s there to be guilty of? They owe me nothing.

I owe her nothing. Her heartbreak is as much her mother’s fault as her own, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be pointed to as her little destroyer of worlds.

But why does this still hurt me so much?

“Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life. ”

I think of being an orphan frequently. It fills my thoughts some days, others, I barely feel it.

When my father dies, it will be my brother and I. Two people with a tenuous connection made by law, and little else. Not even blood between us. The rest of our family has flittered off into the distance. You hear vague words, brain tumour, heart attacks.Maybe a Christmas card. Little else.

I’ve built it this way. More distance, less danger. Less danger of becoming entangled, of caring. Their stories aren’t mine anyway. The story of my blood is carried by far more indifferent people.

************************

On a drive to play bingo, I sat in the passenger seat smoking, foot on the dash, hand out the window, watching the trees fly by as we sped down the highway. We sang along to Mr. Mister, as I cringed at the cheese factor. We always sing together in the car-it’s the one nameless thing my brother and I do together. No one mentions it. We just sing.

A song comes on that reminds me of my mother. I flick my cigarette out the window, and question my brother. Did she like me? Did she think I was nuts? Was I the child she wanted? What did she like to do? Inside my head I was screaming to know her, to relate to her on a level other than sheer physical comfort and things.

“Stop asking about her! Why do you have to keep talking about her?!”

He slams the door to the car and walks quickly into the hall as I sit stunned in the car, silently crying. I know why he does this, I know he hurts too.

But I hurt just as much dammit.

*******************************

On my 13th birthday, my brother gave me a card. Inside he wrote about when our parents first brought me home.

You moved into my playroom. I was mad about that. But I was excited to have a baby sister, and I’m excited now to help you grow up!

I had nothing to write in his birthday cards aside from “nah-nah, you’re old!” I felt strangely unhinged from my brother, never quite in tune. Detached. I never have loved him. It’s like I can’t, and I’m not sure why.

Perhaps because after my mother died, we had nothing to even vaguely connect us. I remember little of him from that period. I was far too wrapped up in my own anger and pain to notice anything on my periphery. But you’d think my brother would be there, holding me up, right?

He never was. The only thing that drew us together later was our drunk of a father.

*************************

He didn’t start ofF a drunk. Genetics predisposed him to be one, but my mother kept him in line.

One little death will change all of that.

Night after night after night of 2am wake ups and cursing and swearing and screaming as my father denigrated my brother, called him names, spit at him, disowned him. I got off lightly having only to deal with his sudden need for contact and tears. But my brother-my father nightly destroyed him.

After one terrible night, a long night spent screaming in my bed room, then crying, the three of us, my brother and I stood drinking tea in the kitchen, blurry eyed and exhausted.

He started to cry.

“Why does he hate me? Why?”

I had no answer, save that he didn’t. Not really. He saw in us our mother, his love, the one thing forever lost to him. And he hated us for it. But what to tell a brother at 4am after he’s been called less than dirt, and dead to his father?

We stood in that kitchen for what seemed like hours, trying to come to terms with the fact that our father was just as human and just as broken as we were.

****************************

We have a common lexicon. Things we can casually joke about, politics to talk over, music to make fun of. Bill Cosby to laugh at. Things that, at a glance, make us siblings. But we don’t have that deeper pull to each other, just a gleaming emptiness that threatens us when we talk about “what if’s” What if Dad dies while he’s here with us during the winter. Who gets the house.

We don’t speak of what will happen between us when he dies.

I envy those with bonds that run deep, bonds that cause passionate fights over small figurines and places at the table. Bonds that transcend other people, that build meaningful roads into the future. I have none of these things. I have threads, threads that fan out around me, threads I can barely hold on to anymore.

They fray. How they fray.

On Facebook, nobody hears you cry.

Or at least I hope so.

I have an adopted family (who I consider my “real” family) and my biological family. I was given up for adoption as an infant by a teenage mother.

When I was 18, my biological family found me.

It was a crazy time. I received the call shortly after Christmas, during my last year of high school. At first I was happy-I finally would get to know who I looked like, who I took after, why I have these giant eyebrows.

But with time, came confusion. Resentment. Weirdness. The summer after I graduated from high school, my biomother wanted me to stay with her for a few months. I had just fallen in love, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less. I didn’t fit in with this family. They were all clean cut, sports loving Nike wearing preppy people. I had green hair and army boots. These people who were my people, were not my people.

I didn’t stay the summer. And things only got more and more strained. When I was married the following April, the entire family came for it. And yet acted like it was a huge imposition on them to do so. I appreciated the gesture, but if it was done because it “had” to be done, I would have rather they didn’t do it at all.

Later that year, after sporadic, halting conversations, I received a birthday card, unsigned from my biomother.

After that I gave up. It was obvious to me that contact was not desired.

The worst part of this was that I have a sister, a half sister. A sister who was absolutely thrilled to have a big sister, who obviously adored me. And I kinda liked her. She was a cool kid-curious, bright, smart. Hanging out with her was pretty fun, despite her being only 10.

Not being able to explain to her why I no longer called or wrote bothered me. But I figured my biomother wouldn’t let me communicate with her anyway. From time to time I’d think of her, wonder how she was.

When I was pregnant with Vivian, my brother managed to make contact with my family. He mentioned I was pregnant with their first grandchild. My grandmother called me, and we spoke. She was excited. Everyone was doing well.

3 weeks after Vivian was born, my grandmother died of cancer, cancer which she knew about, and said nothing when I spoke with her.

I again had sporadic contact with my biomother, but she was so absolute in her grief-and I understood this. In a way, she understood me better too. She left her phone number, but I never could call. I just didn’t have it in me. All the hurts, and hopes, all the things I tried to block myself off from. They’d come back on the phone.

So once more, we drifted apart. I hear from my aunts occasionally, and my grandfather sends money for the girls, but other than that, I have no contact.

But then one day on Facebook, I find my half sister. My finger hovered over the “Add as Friend” button for awhile. The worst I figured, was that she’d ignore me, deny me.

She didn’t.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been having a slow moving, cautious conversation. Two people who should know each other, but don’t. Two people with a history that differs on each side.

Today she told me she’s being careful with me because it hurt so much when she was a kid-one day I was there, and then I wasn’t, and I hurt her.

I hurt someone. I hurt my sister.

I can tell her that I’m sorry. I can tell her how fucked up my life was then, how I was only 18, 20 years old, and confused and lost. I can tell her how hard it is to watch someone who is your mother not be your mother, as they cuddle and hug your sister. I can tell her again and again that I’m sorry.

But it won’t remove a hurt I caused almost unwittingly 10 years ago. She was so excited to finally have a sibling-my biomother told me that she was always begging for a sibling, and that I was her wish come true.

I wish that had meant more to me at 20.

I want to make this up to her. I want her to be in her nieces life, to know them. They are part of her. More, I want to know her. I want the relationship that the fucked up mess of whatever with my biomother prevented. She says her mother was protecting her from what went on, and I’m left wondering what she thinks that is.

Sometimes, I think not knowing, and never finding out, is preferable to answering some questions.

Oddly odd and yet familiar

Today I had lunch with my biological Grandfather and his second wife.

How odd. How odd to make conversation with someone who seems to feel oddly beholden to you. How odd to make conversation with someone who seems so familiar, so obviously part of you, and yet not. So distant, so many years past, roads not taken, decisions I cannot change.

We made small talk about relatives I haven’t seen in ten years, people who barely touched me, families I stood on the peripheral of. Things I could not have. Mothers, fathers, siblings living as units, playing out their daily lives. Living.

I feel comfortable with this man. I feel as a granddaughter should. Yet I also feel aloof and alone. I am not part of him, not really. The love for blueberries he has may have been passed to Rosalyn, or she might just like them. I have no birth story with this man, no history. No one waiting outside the delivery room, excited at my arrival. I have the knowledge that I was unwanted, and cast aside.

Rationally I know that I was then given to a family who wanted WANTED a child, a girl to raise as their own, and that means so much more than accidental insemination to me. But that doesn’t stop that hidden, almost primal ache of rejection, as if on some level I remember my mother’s arms not being there, if I remember being set on my own. I wonder if this doesn’t set the stage for my perceived independence and strength.

It’s not real you know-this facade of strength and honor. It’s a crumbling wall, plaster gone to shit, bricks burning. I have never been that strong girl. Recently, someone told me that after my mother died, they thought I was a success! I was so independent and seemed so strong.

How fucking wrong they were. How horribly, terribly wrong. Just when I felt that my every fibre was crying out for help, everyone thought I was ok. I wasn’t. I’m not. Maybe I never was. Maybe having the family you’re born into reject you so early has an imprint on you that you just cannot erase, contributing to feeling isolated and alone, even when sitting at a table with the man who would have loved you to bits had you stayed in his family.

Maybe’s, could have beens and wondering. They make nice sides to a Clubhouse sandwich.

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

I write to void myself of the thoughts I cannot bear to keep.

My mother seizing off her bed on a cool April morning.

Pictures of me, naked as a child on someone’s bedroom wall.

My father, drunk at 2am, pissing on my bedroom door, and the loathing I felt as I swore and screamed at him, my sympathy defeated by my fatigue with life.

Burying my mother. A coffin in the hard ground, my sobbing echoing across the gravestones. The tears I cried at that grave.

Realizing I wasn’t what my biological mother wanted or needed in a daughter.

Watching someone murder kittens, being too young to know how to stop him. Being so desperate for contact, some sort of friendship that I likely wouldn’t have stopped him if I could have.

Realizing a friend was trying to kill herself, listening to her life drip from her mouth on the phone. Getting there just in time. Explaining to a friend’s 3 year old sister why Gisele was in the hospital, and why I was crying.

Crying. So many tears. So much time, lost and wasted. So many years I spent tired and sad, wrapped up in the memories of days I cannot change, people I cannot affect, events I cannot alter. I cannot take my innocence back, I cannot wipe clean those pictures. I cannot erase the hundreds of little ways to grieving, lonely people hurt each other. I cannot take back my stupidity or helplessness. I cannot be strong enough.

Slowly, I begin to realize I never could be.

I write because my life begs to be written. Because my life should serve as something more than a reason for me to be depressed or angry. Because lessons learned should be shared.

Because I cannot stop myself.

Still adopted after all these years.

I received an email from my grandfather’s wife, asking about meeting for lunch when they are down this way.

My biological grandfather. The family I can’t seem to break free of.

Part of me wants to ignore all emails or letters, leave checks uncashed, walk away.

Part of me yells that they owe me this much.

Part of me doesn’t want to deny my daughters the ability to see where they came from, years from now.

I’m just so sick of dealing with all of this. With the sudden surprises of these contacts, but then I also like the thought that they ARE thinking of me. I’m so conflicted it’s not even funny.

What really gets me, is that my grandfather’s wife is always initiating contact. Not him. Not my birth mother. Someone who has never met me, and who had no stake in the decision to give me up for adoption 30 years ago. That hurts. The constant wondering of “is this my only worth” is grating at best as well.

“I’m adopted I feel confused”

Did you just find out? Was it sprung on you suddenly, and now your world is in question?

I’ve always known I was adopted. I don’t remember being told-it was just a plain fact, like having elbows. But I do remember being told that it made me special-that my mother and my father wanted a daughter badly, and waited for me, picked me. It was never anything I was ashamed of, or upset about. My parents picked me! They wanted me!

But there comes a time when you wonder who you are-where you came from, whose hair you have, who to blame for your big feet. You wonder if the all encompassing loneliness that you always feel, the otherness, has anything to do with the fact that you were separated from your mother so early. You wonder if your mother felt betrayed and sad when pregnant with you, explaining your own sadness through your life. You wonder if you’d be happy if you weren’t adopted.

I’ve always believed that holding back the adoption talk until the kid is “older” is wrong, and mean. By 16, you’ve formed your sense of self-you know who you are, or you think you do. It’s like believing you’re white all your life, and then having someone explain to you that actually, you’re asian. I cannot imagine how incensed I would have been to only be told at 16 or 18.

Being adopted isn’t a bad thing. It’s weird sometimes. It can feel isolating in the context of circumstances tailored to biological children.  And yes, it can be confusing-who am I? Where do I come from? These questions take on a new meaning for the adoptee, because they really don’t know.

What’s even more confusing is finding your birth family. The people who gave you away. The people who look like you, but aren’t you. The people you feel a connection to, and yet don’t. You’re out of step with them, almost the same, but not quite.

It’s confusing to see what could have been yours, where you could have been. The life that was denied. Its confusing when they try and make it up to you, try to bring you in, hold you within the family they couldn’t offer before.

It’s confusing when they reject you because you aren’t what they want you to be. It’s confusing when you feel like you should care, and you really don’t.

Dear Mom

I’m hungover today, a sure sign that Dad has gone for the summer. We had a great night, but now? My head hurts. But that’s ok, since both of my daughters are giggling madly.

It’s a dark cold morning. It’s been warm all week, but suddenly, the clouds roll in and the sun hides and I find myself tongue-tied, at a loss for words that mean anything more than what I ate for breakfast (veggie dogs, lemon yogurt and berries, if you’re wondering. I can’t eat eggs, and I crave protein in the morning)

Mom, would you have an opinion on everything I do? My brother does, chastising me for us not having a car, despite me explaining the 500+ we save each month, despite my desire to not exhale crap everyday on the earth because I’m too lazy to walk or take the bus. Would you find it so odd that I can’t eat certain foods, and have to make up for it somewhere else? That my inability to digest things leads me to eat safe, crappy food? That your daughter is digustingly fat, and feeling increasingly sullen and lost about it? The weight piles on without effort, seemingly spun from the air. Counting calories makes my head hurt. Mom, I’m just so fucking lost with it all.

Should I stop taking my pills? I don’t think they’re helping. I don’t feel like I can get the help I need unless I take all my pills, all at once. I’ve been feeling this lately, increasingly, as I notice my life is almost worse than it was before. I’m failing at everything I touch, and I’m losing the words to put it into perspective.

Mom, I dreampt of zombies last night, again. It’s always fucking zombies, and me running, trying to avoid becoming swept into a world that I rise against, that I refuse to become part of. The mindless gibbering masses, blindly spending money to fit in, however that is. (And hell, the stuff I did at 16 to NOT fit in people do now to FIT in. How in the HELL can someone rebel now? Eat a dog raw?) I woke up scared and wanting to escape. Trapped in a corner, I could not escape being devoured by something simpler and yet stronger than I. Something worse.

I thought I was happy-I thought I had finally figured out the secret, found the switch but fuck hasn’t someone hidden it again. I’m tired of this Mom. I’m tired of being unhappy, of being tired and sad and short-tempered and mad and useless. Ugly. I’m tired of fighting with medications, trying to get a doctor to understand that yes, weight gain and sexual dysfunction IS a FUCKING BIG DEAL. I’m so tired of feeling disconnected, lost, unmotivated.

Somedays Mom, I’m tired of being alive. I hate myself so much somedays that I so want to die. I want the waves of life and death to spin me from my own grasp, and take me away. And I hate myself even more for believing in taking the easy way. I mean shit, you waited for us as babies, you watched us grow, you tried to hang on through the cancer. And I can’t even get excited over the things you wanted so much. I take it so much for granted, and I wish I couldn’t, wish that I didn’t. But I know no other way. I do not know how to enjoy being alive for longer than a few months.

I hate this. It’s eating me alive, this “disorder” this chaos and I’m lost within it. WHo the fuck am I? Did I know as a child? Did I have a personality that didn’t change from day to day? Was I even nice to anyone? I know that other people are suffering more than I, in many many ways, and that what’s happened to me, and what goes on in my head is nothing in comparision. So why do I still want to not exist? It’s that numb too-I don’t want to off myself. I just want to not wake up, to not be weighed down by all of this life that hates me so.

See, if I look at things from a biological standpoint, eventually my line of crazy will kill itself off. So maybe then I won’t have existed at all?

I hate even more the idea that my children will have this, that they will sit, 15 years from now, talking, dreaming about not being alive. About no longer suffering this obscure petulant shame and sadness. That they will wish they were never born. I wish that sometimes, and I know you’d hate it. But everytime I see one of those pro-life “save a life, your mom did!” signs I think, “Why? Why did she bother with it? What possible difference have I made on a grand scale?”

I’ve caused heartache and suffering. I’ve hurt people, accidentally almost, the way bipolar folk can. I’ve made my life into a shambles I don’t recognize. (Shouldn’t I have finished university? Done something with my life?) I tell myself that raising children is this great job, but I lie.

I fucking hate it. I fucking hate the mindnumbing boredom and irritation that it brings. The constant struggle I have to not lose my mind and spend the day screaming at them. I end up eating instead, eating cause I’m bored, mad, sad, upset. Can’t get out and run the shit off me-can’t get far with two small kids. I can’t get anything for me in that regard-there’s no time. So maybe I should stop eating instead. Something has to give.

Mom, I hate this. I hate it. I don’t know how to change it. I wish I was someone else.

Happy Mother’s Day.

9 Years Ago

Two weird kids got married, and then got totally trashed for 3 days. (We drank the absinthe I made if I remember right) You had new tattoos on both wrists the day before-you joked that it looked like you tried to kill yourself. It sorta did.

No one seemed happy to be there-instead, it was like an obligation. My biological family especially. No one asked them to all come. I would have preferred my name on my grandmother’s obituary 6 years later to validate me. My father only asked if I was sure-told me he didn’t agree with marrying that young, and wished me happiness, as it was my life.

I changed into army pants for the reception at that bar-that grubby sports bar. Your friends played their own music, we got drunk on free beer, and received 3 steamers as gifts. We held knives to each other’s neck in the pictures, smashed icing into ears. My favorite picture is when we’re talking to each other, and someone took a picture, unknown.

I looked so happy then. So happy to be with you.

I still am. I love you baby.

I was watching Beverly Hills, 90210 earlier. (I do that-I have a weird nostalgia for early 90’s TV.) It was their graduation episode, which of course was full of maudlin moments and flashbacks.

It got me thinking.

When I was 18, my father likely watched me walk out the door at night, thinking how I have so many new experiences to look forward to, how the world was waiting for me, as he went back to watching bad made for TV movies. He saw my graduation as a beginning, the start of my real life maybe.

I didn’t. I was a pain in the ass before and during my grad, because I was completely emotionally mixed up. I was graduating with a class I didn’t really go to school with, since I had switched schools a bit. I missed my mother terribly, and had to deal with integrating my biological family into this that year.

I hated polyester, and especially hated having to spend money I really didn’t have on renting a gown I HAD to wear. I remember having very loud conversations about that. I didn’t have the money for graduation photos, or yearbooks or rings. Stuff many students take for granted, I couldn’t get. So I pretended, very well, that I didn’t care.

I cared though. It was that time in your life that was meant to be transformative, special, meaningful. I wanted something meaningful in my life, other than something painful. But it wasn’t to be. I saw it for something hollow.

I muttered as much to my father as the end scenes rolled, how I couldn’t wait to be out of high school, and on with my life, and how we didn’t sit there holding eachother’s hands smiling. I don’t much remember what we did after grad. From the group of friends I had, I was the only one graduating Grade 13-everyone else I knew had another year to go. So I was leaving everything I was familiar with behind, instead of us all leaving together.

And I was in love. So I was a little, confused about where my life was going.

The show tonight, the cultural impression of graduation is one of closure and beginnings, of surety, or direction and decisions. I never had that experience-I had multiple decisions to make in one summer-what university I wanted to go to, where I wanted to spend the summer, where my heart was taking me. I was also mourning the true, offical end of my childhood, and I was mourning it hard, but in quiet.

I was nothing sure. But I felt melancholy for high school as soon as it ended, even as I do now. I feel nostalgic only for that sense of freedom, the ability to do anything, at anytime that I had. But that is precisely what scares me about having daughters who are teenagers. I don’t know anything about mothering teenage girls, but I certainly remember what it’s like to BE a teenage girl. While I love and cherish many of my experiences, do I want them for my daughters? Do I want them to sit in a park with a friend and smoke pot all night when everyone else is at the prom?

No-I want them to have the frilliest, prettiest dresses they’ve ever seen-the one thing I never dared to have, or ask for. I want them to enjoy their years as teenagers, which I, in some ways, never could. I want them to watch 90210 and really get what’s being said.

(and OMFG! Their graduation was 1993! Am I THAT old?!?!?)

Women just can’t win

I’ve been stewing on this article for awhile.

I know it’s opinion. I know that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

But shit, can’t a woman catch a break?

I’ll state for the record that I respect Angelina Jolie, the work she does for refugees with the UN, and how she shares her life with children from around the world. I believe that many of us could do well to focus on a cause the way she has.

So why all the hate?

The fact that this article calls her child “human fashion accessor(ies)” really stuck in my head. Because it’s not just attacking her. It’s attacking any woman who dares to have children and a job.

Oh! they complain, she’s travelling all around the world, dragging these kids with her, or leaving them behind! Oh the horrors! They use nannies! They act like human beings! She can’t possibly be a good mother because she has a passion and a job outside of her children.

Are we back here already? She’s less of a mother because she adopted, and because she tries to continue her good works as a goodwill ambassador? What would they say if all the kids were from her own womb? We celebrate the Duggers, don’t we, for having produced a bloody football team, but when someone famous adopts children because they can afford to provide a good life for them, we jump on them. They can’t possibly be a good parent because they aren’t in one place all the time.

We all know that all parents sit at home with their kids all day, not working, and not having lives or interests of their own. And we know that adoptive parents are even more sainted.

We can’t paint any woman, or mother, with this brush. We shouldn’t assume that we know what is going on in her life, or her adoptions, any more than we would feel the need to stick our noses in the lives of our coworkers. Regardless of what this woman does-she will not win in the public eye. Because now she’s too “good”. So stories must be invented about how jealous she is, how she bribed officials, how she grasps her children too tightly. She cannot just be a good mother and person-she must be defective somehow.

What if we were all judged so harshly, for trying to grow a family we can call our own? What if we were all considered bad mothers because we didn’t sit at home cooking cupcakes all day. No one points this at men, but women continue to be held up as examples of martyrdom parenting-we must sacrifice, we must be lessened, in order to grow our children.

Hidden sadness doesn’t lie

I’m not sad anymore.

I’m not much of anything. Attaining any type of release lately is well nigh impossible. I’m blocked. It’s like when you have a cold, and you try and try to blow your nose, and your godamn sinus cavities will not give it up, and you make that lame “snrtk” noise and give up.

My emotions, as well as other things, are like that right now. It’s the most frustrating thing.

You’d think I’d be happy-I haven’t really cried in weeks, aside from a few stray tears when I was really upset about something. I haven’t felt that pressure in my chest, that heaving sadness prelude to crying. I haven’t felt my heart fill up either. But my dreams-they’re another matter.

All night last night, I dreampt I was crying-really crying-sobbing, death sobs. In the dream I had found a box that contained all the answers to my life, pictures from when I was born, the time between birth and adoption, written memories from both my biological parents. The words of my dead birth father. I cried to have it, I cried to open it, and I cried even harder to know what it contained.

Can I only cry in my dreams now? Is that all that’s left to me? Has Celexa robbed me of normal feelings along with the urge to off myself? To outside appearances, I’m actually normal-relatively social, friendly, not so cranky. But I don’t feel like me inside-I feel like it’s just become easy to fake it, to pretend that I’m someone I’m not.

I do not like this sam I am.

I woke up exhausted, couldn’t get out of bed. The Dorf was upset that I made him get up, was cranky and yelly with the kids. But how do I explain all of this when I’m barely coherent, unable to move, paralyzed by this hidden sadness that I cannot vent? I can’t help but feel that Celexa hasn’t removed the problem, it’s merely covered it up and stashed it somewhere, ready to spring at the worst moment.

In my dream I held myself, grinning in a photograph, holding my infant self. What am I clinging so tightly to?

Dragonfly

When I was a little girl, I was petrified of dragonflies. They were so big and scary, and always seemed to head straight for my eyes. I spent summers terrified of those giant bugs. To a 4 year old, they’re rather large.

One day my father held a dazed dragonfly in his hands-it was nearing the end of summer, the days were cooler, and it was obvious it was dying. “Look!” he said “It’s beautiful! And you’ve been scared silly of it this whole time. They’re so gentle, and it won’t hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of!”

It was green and blue and lovely. It’s wings were delicate, and perfect. It was a harmless, beautiful creature.

———————————————————-

I do grieve for the mothers I will never have. I grieve for the moments I have lost, twice. I grieve for the person I have never had the chance to become. There are days when I want to scream at the world that it’s a fucker, and I want what’s mine. I want a mother. I want someone in my life who will let me be a little girl, who will allow me to be delicate and beautiful. I grieve for the little girl who has never really had her mother, who has needed to forge a path in motherhood out of make believe, words and air. I grieve for what my mother’s have lost, for what they shall never have.

I shouldn’t be angry, and I am. I should get over it, and get past it, but something prevents me. Something holds me in thrall to this, to wanting to know who I am, and why I am so rejectable. Why every person who’s been in my life will eventually reject me somehow. I should move past all of this and allow the few people who do allow me in their life to hold me there. But I distrust even them. I await their scorn.

My biological family never wanted me. They likely still don’t, only feeling guilt towards me, some sense of “make it right”. I’ve spent my life feeling rejected and never wanted, and have always wondered how much of that originates in that initial rejection, some knowledge that the arms that held me were not the ones meant to hold me, some vague inkling of the breasts drying up, unused. I’ve always sat in corners, trying to blend away.

I don’t want to be angry, or sad, or upset by this. I just want it to disappear, to be away, to have never happened. To be someone else’s story. I want someone else to be broken, and I want my life to be disgustingly easy and well adjusted.

I want what I cannot have. And always will.

————————————————

Awhile back, Vivian and I found an incredible saphirre blue dragonfly, dead on the ground. It was perfect. She picked it up gently, examining it, petting it.

“It’s so pretty Mommy. But he’s dead and it’s sad.”

We set him lightly on the grass, to be eaten and carried away as we all are, eventually.

She wasn’t ever scared. Not even for a second.

Go forth, and forget

I spent most of last night thinking about the responses everyone gave to me in regards to my birthmother. Many of you had good points. Some of you made me cry, because it made me realize that this entire process has hurt me more than I have ever admitted to myself.

My birthmother gave me up, years later searched for me, found me, and rejected me yet again.

I’d have to be pretty cold to think that wouldn’t fucking hurt. Because frankly, it does.

I don’t have a right to that anger though. I don’t have the right to believe for one second that she would have taken any place in my heart, or my life. I don’t have any right to expect or want from her. I have no rights to her.

When I first met her, my father took her into his office to talk to her alone. I’ve never found out what he told her, but in my mind I imagine it was something along the lines of “Do not break my daughter’s heart. It’s barely together as it is.”

What he didn’t realize is that it broke my heart to do the one thing I had to do-I needed to know who my people were, who my blood were.  It broke me to pieces to leave him alone and likely wondering that day. And it broke me to be so alone in the midst of all these people who wanted me, wanted to know me, only to discover I was nothing like them.

There’s a level in me that craves that acceptance, a place where, for all my talk of being the outsider, the freak, the weirdo who never got beat up only because of her sheer bulk, a place that wants the numbing stillness of being the same. I have never belonged. Being aware of my adoption from day one also made me vividly aware one thing-I am NOT like these people. I was thirsty for someone like me my entire life.

But these people, my mother, even my half sister who looked so much like I did as a child, they are not me. They never will be. They are a road, a diversion I never took, a place I could have been, someone with another name who died when my own parents found me, took me home, signed the papers for my new name. That girl on the first birth certificate-she no longer exists. She never really did. She’s a figment, as much as the person I once pretended to really be when lonely in my backyard, making stories up for a past. I was never a princess from another planet. I was never Patricia either.

Where ever this road takes me, however much contact I have with any of my family, I would never not find out. I needed to know where I was from. I needed to see the hands that bore me, the body that help me, cradled, for 9 months, the mother that would not be. But to see her holding my half sister, with all the love in the world in her eyes, love that will never ever burn for me-I cannot do this anymore. I’m spent. I know what I needed, and the realization is dawning that I don’t need them anymore.

Perhaps I never really did.

An email, a letter, and a question.

Awhile back I received a card from my biological grandfather, as detailed here. I sent a letter back with pictures of the girls. I asked about my father’s side of the family. I asked about mental illness, or any illness in the family. I put my neck out there, explaining I want my daughters to know their family. It might be important someday.

I received nothing back until an email sitting in my inbox last night. With pictures of people I cannot find myself in.

I took a very deep breath, calmed the jitters, and read.

I don’t know why I get so jittery, other than the fact that the people who should embrace me, who should want me around as I am one of them, they don’t. I get nervous, and shaky, and want to cry.

The fact of the matter is, my own mother doesn’t seem to want anything to do with me. My aunt is the one making contact this time. not my mother, who’s email address has never changed, who I have sent numerous message to. If she had ever said “I don’t want you in my life” I would have left her alone, I would never have emailed her again.

This bothers me more than it should. Why would she ignore me? Why can she not be bothered to answer an email? Doesn’t she own me that much? Does she own me anything?

Or is she still angry that I am not the little girl she thought she’d find?

More later….I’m still all weird about this sudden contact.