Hand me downs
Half an hour into Mike Leigh’s so fine Secrets and Lies and I was surprised that it hadn’t yet happened. But I knew it was coming.
They’re sitting in a restaurant, and Brenda Blethyn refers to herself for the first time as Hortense’s mommy. And that’s when I fall apart. As usual, when it did come it was as suave and discreet as a convenience store hold-up.
I’m convinced that everyone who’s been adopted carries around that same clump of void. Mostly, it resides in your gut. And every time you’re unexpectedly reminded of that pivotal event you’ll never remember, and still can’t entirely reckon with, it sets to unfurling. Like a crappy old flag on fire. Engulfing and insidious as an oil spill, until that’s all there is of you.
Man, it’s hard to describe.
Mind you, in spite of the melodramatic metaphors, I’m not at all embarrassed – and it seems ludicrous to be resentful – about having been adopted. When I was little the rare taunts Gail was adopted from kids in the schoolyard left me baffled. (Very helpful was my father’s suggested retort: ‘yeah, well, your parents were stuck with you, but mine got to choose me.’) More baffling still is seeing that people are startled when I mention the fact. And I get the sense that for many it’s one of those unsavoury topics – like death and credit ratings – that they feel are best not spoken of, or at least in hushed tones only.
The only taunts that did stick were those from an uncle who took perverse pleasure in calling us interlopers, accusing us repeatedly of conniving our way into the family for the money (what clever babies we were), and a grandmother who was fond of enquiring what it was like knowing, ‘you aren’t one of us.’
To my parents’ credit, all three of us were told early on that we were adopted. So we didn’t have to go through the gruesome experience of finding out suddenly when we were 18, and so plagued with wondering what else we hadn’t been told.
Slightly less to their credit, they never told us what they knew about our natural parents. I suppose I can understand their reluctance, if I try really hard.
I discovered much later that they too harboured irrational feelings, dreading that we would some day find our birth parents and want to trade them in.
Of all three kids, my older sister was the most tenacious in her search for information. The regular channels proving empty, she ended up hiring a private detective. The parents were tracked down, and my sister began a correspondence with the man who claimed to be her birth father.
Then came the photos, and we would stare and stare at this unknown woman who looked exactly like my sister. Then uncles and aunts and family gatherings, spilling the air with what ifs.
It eventually came out that my sister’s mother had committed suicide not long before, on the eve of being confined to a loony bin.
Under the law at the time, an adopted child needed to have the signed consent of their adoptive parents before they could meet their birth parents face to face.
Our father threw up three times before leaving to sign that day, and his hand shook so violently the pen kept falling to the floor. We had no idea.
When my sister finally met her birth father, he asked her to help choose the tombstone for her dead mother. Then he got creepy.
Under the new adoption laws in Ontario, children are able to obtain what is called “non-identifying information” about their biological parents. No names, in other words, only a physical description, some family history, how you reacted to foster care, and the reason why you were given up for adoption. Mostly culled from your birth mother’s statements.
After waiting a year and a half, I was finally called in to Children’s Aid – the agency that had handled my adoption. It was a shabby old place still stuck in the 60s, hospital walls of peeling paint and half taped posters of irresistible babies for the taking.
A pair of sweet old ladies came into the room, sat down on the other side of the table and handed me two type-written sheets. Part of me wanted to say, ‘that’s it?’ but I’d waited this long so anything was something and, besides, my throat was too tight and I could feel the ambush coming.
They smiled the sweetest smiles, folded their hands on the table top and waited for me to start reading.
I made it all the way to the third sentence, then the words began to swim on the page. Everything was swimming and I remember thinking, ‘Dickens would have liked this.’
I’m unable to forge a suitable simile for what it felt like, staring and staring at those pages, unable to focus.
Maybe like staring at a fortune cookie, knowing that what’s inside is irrefutable.
So I skimmed the rest and hoped to leave, already picturing myself on a park bench, reading it over and over. But they started to ask about my life now, my interests and studies and making me tremble a little more each time they said, ‘oh my, how lovely, just like your mother. Now, isn’t that a coincidence.’ And it didn’t bother them a bit that I pretty much cried the whole time.
It’s hard to say what you hope to find when you go looking for your birth parents, and it’s undoubtedly perilous to hope for too much. For some it’s enough just to see their face on another human being. Those who I suspect are bound for disappointment, hope to find the key to their existence, to have that void filled at last.
All, I expect, crave the release of being told that it is irrational to still harbour the conviction that there was something so wrong with you from the day you were born, that even your own mother didn’t want you. And to know that she thinks of you on your birthday.
I haven’t yet met my mother, but still hope to someday – and suspect that if ever I do, it will be as pummelling, awkward and unscripted as Blethyn guessed in her gut. And even if I don’t, what I discovered in those pages answered more questions than I’d cared to admit, soothed and intrigued me, and allowed me to lull in not having been easily discarded.
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Comment
- That was really beautiful.
— Charles Oct 30, 3:54pm # - Familial love is such a strange creature… almost like a platypus, but at least on the animal you understand what parts do what. In families, it’s never, ever that obvious. Humans have parts to themselves that often they don’t realize they have until some event or emotion jars it from hiding.
How one weilds those newly discovered components, and how one’s family adapts, is where you find out the various definitions of love and how it contours itself to you or falls away.
And in knowing two friends of mine and their adoption stories, I can say the above is an even greater concentration of discovery.
Thank you for your generosity in sharing this with us.
— roggey Oct 30, 4:14pm # - Silence would be the best words I could think of to put down here -but still
-look at your children, and one cannot die
-did not one young boy in France kill his parents?
sorry.
Time of the Gypsies.
— Koen H Oct 30, 4:37pm # - That touched my heart… Best blog entry I’ve ever read!
— Hans Oct 30, 9:14pm # - That was beautiful. I’m a 28 year old who was adopted at the tender young age of 2 weeks old, and I’m currently searching for any information about my birth parents. I basically know nothing other than the city in Northern Alberta where I was born.
I hope my story ends something like yours. You give me hope.
— Scottie Oct 31, 2:00am # - How unexpected and touching. Just keep in mind that when and if you do meet, your birth mother will be presented with a beautiful, brilliant, funny and talented daughter, who has made her way in the world and lives an interesting life surrounded by people who love her. What better gift to give any mother?
My own parents weren’t married, and had broken up when I announced my intentions of being born. They chose marriage, or rather my grandparents chose it for them, and despite producing two additional children and staying married until Mother’s death 25 years later, I’m not convinced that adoption wouldn’t have been a better choice for the three original cast members. Life is just so damn interesting and complex, isn’t it?
— wizmo Oct 31, 7:40am # - Just. Beautiful. Gail.
I’m forwarding it to all my friends who are adopted. Heartfelt thanks.
— Marshall Oct 31, 1:42pm # - I have a couple of people who I think would enjoy what you’ve written very much. Thank you for your candour.
— schmutzie Nov 1, 11:27am # - Gail, you website is one I frequently visit – and this is exactly why. You have such a wonderful writing style. Where can I read more – have you published a book of your life experiences? Best to you and yours.
— Heather Nov 1, 3:05pm # - Thanks all for the sweet words.
Oh, Heather, no. Once the euphoria wore off, I had the wisdom to treat “the novel” to a richly-deserved ritual burning. Although writing it was a very interesting excercise in obsession (which kind of freaked me out).
— gail Nov 2, 10:06am # - Amazing
— Bingo Nov 2, 11:02am # - The Family Jewels
In the spring of 61 I was 12. I remember coming home from the afternoon movies with a friend, the “Vikings” I think, though it may be conflated with another Hollywood epic. Whatever I’d seen I was unprepared for what I found when I got home. My friend and I ran up the stairs to the apartment, headed for some kind of snack before we went back out to the park, but my mom called me from the front room, and when I walked in and saw the stranger she was talking to she said, after a pause from all three of us while he and I locked eyes, “Mike, this is your father.”
I hadn’t seen him for seven years, since I was 5. I’d built a replica I used when I needed it, of a dad, made from what he did -a teacher – where he was – Northern California, Washington State – some of it true some of it not. The parts that were true became completely overshadowed by the things I hadn’t known.
It was the first of a series of demonstrations of how little control I had over things, and how unimportant it was for anyone to tell me in advance what was going to happen next.
A lot of the years of my adult living were threaded with a rejection of something that was physically impossible to get rid of, this was my bloodline, my inheritance, what I was, the inborn tools of my specialness and my failing, my genius and my idiocy. Right behind that recognition the other side of my family waited for the same acceptance and denial.
Eventually I learned to widen the embrace. My grandmothers were both fierce women, my great-grandparents even more so, and of course the deltoid expansion means lots and lots of familial ghosts – familiar tones in the accents of Texas and Stralachan, Rochester and Ballyconeely. So that accepting my father, and the wound his life was mostly, became accepting the strength of all those lives woven together before him.
His absence made him more prominent in an inalterable way than what his presence became to me, or later, what both of those together became to me, once I got past the horror. Which is what I wanted to say.
What we are comes through them, it doesn’t start there. Like thirst or hunger, not having what you need makes it intensely present. A glass of water, a piece of bread, a parent.
— vernaculo Nov 2, 3:27pm # - Wow.
Thank you for this deeply touching piece. Thank you for opening up to us. How beautiful.
— Jeff Nov 2, 7:41pm # - Thank you, Gail.
— mig Nov 2, 9:48pm # - What a beautifully written post on such a sensitive subject.
Unlike you, my parents let me read the letters from the adoption society describing my mother and father’s situation. I had my mother’s full maiden name and my adoptive mother had even tracked down her birth certificate, so we knew where she had lived with her parents when I was born. It was an hour’s drive from where I lived with my adoptive family in Yorkshire, England. I was encouraged to meet her if I wanted to, and my adoptive parents sent a letter to her (anonymously) on my 18th birthday to tell her all about my life so far.
But I didn’t feel the need to contact her until I was 29 years old, and planning to start a family of my own. My reasons for this were complex. A combination of being happy with my adoptive family, convincing myself that my mother had moved on, put the episode behind her and might have a new family who knew nothing about me. That it might be in her best interests for me to do nothing.
When I did contact her, by letter, she wrote back immediately and I wasn’t prepared for the strength of my own emotional response. For a while my boyfriend tried to persuade me to have some professional therapy. My mother had married the love of her life, my birth father, and had two twin boys, my brothers.
Our relationship over the past three years has allowed her to exorcise the feelings of guilt which had poisoned her life for years. She now knows her daughter and her grandaughter. We see each other regularly, because I feel it would be cruel to have found her and not maintain contact.
I don’t think I’ll ever quite recover from the disappointment though. We don’t look alike. We don’t have a lot in common. Now I know her/my story I could quite happily continue my life as though we’d never met. But I can’t now. I started something that I can’t finish without inflicting more hurt than I can imagine.
(In the UK there is an adoption contact register. An adopted child can be told the identity of his/her mother, provided that the mother has indicated her willingness to be put in contact. Which I think is a fantastic idea. I received a letter from them 2 days after my mother’s own reply to my letter…)
— petite anglaise Nov 4, 6:51am # - As a stepfather, recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my less than official standing as a Dad. I don’t think any adopted or stepchild wants to slight the parents that raise them, and I know searching for birth parents is normal and I’m sure a healthy thing. I think its just that while I know this in my head, in my heart I know there is a whole other story to your Dad’s throwing up that I am regrettable more aware of now. I know my stepkids love me; deciding to take on the responsibilities of a father to another man’s children was something I did without having to hesitate and think long on it. It’s been wonderful. However, increasingly I see little bits of slights in the way I am referred to in everyday society. Even the name, step-dad, is often in my mind just a euphamism for “not my real dad”. I find the kids doing it too. They explain to their friends who refer to me in conversation as “your Dad” “Oh, He’s not my real dad. He’s my step dad.” I find myself thinking well, yeah, if rubbing your back as you throw up at 3 in the morning, buying you school clothes, doing the food shopping and parent teacher meetings and school projects and poetry readings and piano lessons and buying you underwear and a new bike for your birthday is just step dad, I guess Im guilty as charged. But since I married somewhat late in life (35) and my wife’s immediate cancer the first year we were together have ruled out more kids, this is my chance, these are my children, for all of my life. I may not be able to look at them as the continuation of my name, or even my genes. But I know, when they are older and looking at their own lives, I’ll be a part of them.
— dvsjr Nov 4, 8:14am # - this is beautiful gail. thank you for sharing. i intend to adopt children on my own later and this helps me, as I hv to prepare when and how i will tell them that they were adopted. i hvnt really thought abt when should be the right time, but i do know that i will tell them the truth, and i will not mind them wanting to seek out their birth parents later should they want to.
— jennir Nov 4, 9:01pm # - Thanks for that, petite anglaise. I expect your adoptive parents’ openness helped demystify your biological parents to a large degree, which is a good and healthy thing. And it’s very true that blood ties are no guarantee of symbiosis.
And, dvsjr, I sympathise. I really admire people who take on the responsibility of another man/woman’s children. It can be an awfully ungrateful role.
But, despite the sting, I think that when kids say ‘he’s not my real dad’, more than anything it’s their innate sense of loyalty to their father talking, and they have no real idea of the slight to you. No matter how much of dick their dad might be (oh, the stories I could tell you), he’s still half of them, so they have a ferocious need to believe in him.
It sounds to me like you’re doing a truly fine job as a dad and I’m certain that someday they will realize, and be ever glad you were there.
— gail Nov 5, 1:41am # - Splendid!
— Kevin Nov 5, 8:27am # - Well then, Maman is an Armstrong, actually, her name is Gail Armstrong (yeah, really tiny world that)...anyway, what I’d like to say, (having read about some of your adopitve relatives), welcome to the family. Oh, and I’d also like to say thanks for the witty, often heartfelt and constantly enjoyable writing. Ta.
— J.D. Nov 5, 10:31am # - Gail – I, too, am adopted, and I, too watched “Secrets and Lies” with a knot in my stomach. Even though I was in my mid-twenties when I watched it (several years ago), and I had already met both my birthfather and birthmother, I broke down in uncontrollable sobs while watching the film. I was very embarassed when the lights came up and I was revealed in full light with a very wet face.
I am in Maine where adoption records are closed. It was only through a very kind court worker that I was able to obtain otherwise off-limits information. I am glad she did what she did, and I appreciate you sharing your experience here. Every adoption experience is unique, but some things make them the same, and in some ways universal.
— carol Nov 8, 11:44am # - I’m a 21 year-old student at the moment and while I wasn’t adopted, I did have a similar experience that essentially brought upon “that same clump of void.” Two years ago my mother laid on me the fact that the father I had known for 19 years of my life was not my actual biological father. Hearing this revelation, I was immediately struck with a numbness of mind and a flood of memories soured by tears. I realized why I naturally referred to him by his first name and not by “dad” until the age of five, which led to the epiphany that I had somehow known all along.
My mother told me that she knows who my biological father is and would let me know, in the case that I ever wanted to meet him. I’ve been reluctant to do so thus far. I worry about potentially having another father in my life, though this isn’t something I necessarily expect he or I would want. I worry about how my dad might feel if I ever met my biological father. I’m afraid that I might end up hating my biological father, which I might redirect into some sort of self-hatred. I’m sure a lot of my reactions might seem irrational, but this sort of situation tends to breed irrational thoughts.
I can’t say however that this situation has been altogether horrible. There had always been an air of awkwardness in my relationship to my dad, even before I was told. Now that I understand where that awkwardness might have come from, I feel like I have the opportunity to make a conscious effort to get rid of it and become closer to him.
I want to thank you for your wonderful entry. It’s alleviated some of my fears about possibly meeting my birthfather or at least learning more about him.
— losing blue Nov 11, 12:16pm # - Coming late to the party, as always…
I’m adopted myself. Something I’ve known since I was about five. What compounds the whole “I look different” feeling is that I’m a blonde-haired, blue eyed pale-skinned guy in a family of Eastern European Jews. My whole life’s been an example of “nature vs. nurture.”
I think I only used the “you’re not my real parents!” line once, and deeply regretted it. I know the biographical information on “the donors”, as I refer to the biological parents, and that’s interesting. Yet, when I had the notion to seek them out, I had to confront the reason why.
Would meeting my biological mother suddenly have everything else make sense? Would it be the epiphanic moment that I imagine it would? Or would it be the hard, cruel lesson that I expect it would: even knowing everything about my biological parents and knowing them, it would still be my life, and that it wouldn’t magically make everything rosy or easy or better. It wouldn’t be The Answer.
I’m very glad I get to make up my own history. I’m neither here nor there, and that’s okay.
— sjc Nov 17, 8:45pm # - A little late but still heartfelt. I visit because I like what is written at Textism. Gail, without question, this is the best you have written that I’ve managed to read. Keep writing!
A missing parent(s) can stir the gut wrenching emotions for different reasons. Your search to find your mother, in a weird sense, has reminded me of my search to find my father who died (somewhat mysteriously) when I was nine. I spent many years (still spend time on it) trying to piece together a reasonable story of who he was, what he did and what he stood for. I did not care what I found, I just needed to know. I have shaped these fragments into a plausible tale for my own consumption but it will never be a reality.
You can further your search—go meet her!
— Michael (still in Ontario) Nov 24, 3:24pm # - Hi Gail,
Thank you for sharing your story. You have written it beautifully.
— joann Nov 24, 10:06pm # - Very moving. Thanks to all that shared. I can relate both as a step-mother and as a child who was rejected shortly after birth.
I love the phrase clump of void, it fits. I feel it…and I wish it would go away. I will always remember your words now whenever it reveals itself to me again.
— Carol Nov 28, 7:01pm #
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