relatedness
Recently had my 39th birthday. Wrote this post partially the day before:
I am an adult adoptee. For most of those years, I would go foggy--not entirely painfully--with wondering who, where, why, is she thinking about me? around this time. Not so much since Sprout's birth.
Today at lunch I listened to This American Life: Switched at Birth, an episode about the Millers and Macdonalds. Two babies switched at birth in 1951. One mother who knew immediately the baby was not hers, whose husband made her take no action for fear of offending the doctor who provided their large family with free medical care, who said, heartbreakingly in the interview, "I knew I'd lose my husband's friendship if I [pressed the issue] and that would damage my marriage. . .I had seven children to raise." Her talk of gratitude for the child who then became hers--a sunny, popular child unlike her six serious others, a gift to the family. The two grown women's reactions and dances to find their places once the story--an open secret in their small town--came out. The other mother's sense of grief and loss, that she did not get to raise the baby she'd wanted so much and waited so long for. A story of fears and jealousies and irreparable actions and inscrutable behaviors and then ham-handed attempts to remediate. . .
I think about this today because my own adoption--like so many--was couched in the socially norming idea that you can rewrite biology with laws, religon, and the resolute blindness of patriarchy. The belief that you can disregard that growing a child inside you means something--not everything, but not nothing either. It is the second and last birthday I will spend pregnant with the only individuals I've ever known to whom I am related by blood--this time a daughter.
It is arrogance--largely male arrogance, I believe--that causes us to try to rewrite the most basic rules of being human. Not counting the Amazons and perhaps any other matriarchal warrior tribes throughout history, what mothers have not thought of war as a tremendous waste? Regardless of the sociopolitical conflicts at issue, don't we all just think from our wombs that, jesusgod, I spent all these months and years growing this (usually but not always) boy up?
This mother let her husband take away her child because of his own misguided belief that one child was as good as another. And she had to let him because without his husbandly protection (such as it was--by all reports the family was abysmally poor because of his choice of careers), she would've been cast adrift financially and socially. Her voice, her speech pattern, her girlish but squeamish laughter while she told this grim story--sounded so much like my own adoptive mother's resigned explanation of her making herself smaller to suit my incompetent and blustering father, I could hardly listen without throwing the MP3 player across the room.
It's not easy being a modern woman. Sometimes more choices just makes my head spin. But I know to my core that I don't need a man, that I can make my way in this world--and my children's ways if necessary--without one. But because I know how slippery a slope it is, it seems like a good day to ask myself, what are the compromises I make to be partnered, even with someone I love so much? Just how imprinted am I with the mores of the culture and family I grew up in, not so dissimilar from the crazy woman who allowed her baby to be given away: that the husband is the head of the home, and that the woman's job is to comply, to make herself fit his need, his idea of her, his want? Where it has insidiously shaped me, what has it cost us both?
I am an adult adoptee. For most of those years, I would go foggy--not entirely painfully--with wondering who, where, why, is she thinking about me? around this time. Not so much since Sprout's birth.
Today at lunch I listened to This American Life: Switched at Birth, an episode about the Millers and Macdonalds. Two babies switched at birth in 1951. One mother who knew immediately the baby was not hers, whose husband made her take no action for fear of offending the doctor who provided their large family with free medical care, who said, heartbreakingly in the interview, "I knew I'd lose my husband's friendship if I [pressed the issue] and that would damage my marriage. . .I had seven children to raise." Her talk of gratitude for the child who then became hers--a sunny, popular child unlike her six serious others, a gift to the family. The two grown women's reactions and dances to find their places once the story--an open secret in their small town--came out. The other mother's sense of grief and loss, that she did not get to raise the baby she'd wanted so much and waited so long for. A story of fears and jealousies and irreparable actions and inscrutable behaviors and then ham-handed attempts to remediate. . .
I think about this today because my own adoption--like so many--was couched in the socially norming idea that you can rewrite biology with laws, religon, and the resolute blindness of patriarchy. The belief that you can disregard that growing a child inside you means something--not everything, but not nothing either. It is the second and last birthday I will spend pregnant with the only individuals I've ever known to whom I am related by blood--this time a daughter.
It is arrogance--largely male arrogance, I believe--that causes us to try to rewrite the most basic rules of being human. Not counting the Amazons and perhaps any other matriarchal warrior tribes throughout history, what mothers have not thought of war as a tremendous waste? Regardless of the sociopolitical conflicts at issue, don't we all just think from our wombs that, jesusgod, I spent all these months and years growing this (usually but not always) boy up?
This mother let her husband take away her child because of his own misguided belief that one child was as good as another. And she had to let him because without his husbandly protection (such as it was--by all reports the family was abysmally poor because of his choice of careers), she would've been cast adrift financially and socially. Her voice, her speech pattern, her girlish but squeamish laughter while she told this grim story--sounded so much like my own adoptive mother's resigned explanation of her making herself smaller to suit my incompetent and blustering father, I could hardly listen without throwing the MP3 player across the room.
It's not easy being a modern woman. Sometimes more choices just makes my head spin. But I know to my core that I don't need a man, that I can make my way in this world--and my children's ways if necessary--without one. But because I know how slippery a slope it is, it seems like a good day to ask myself, what are the compromises I make to be partnered, even with someone I love so much? Just how imprinted am I with the mores of the culture and family I grew up in, not so dissimilar from the crazy woman who allowed her baby to be given away: that the husband is the head of the home, and that the woman's job is to comply, to make herself fit his need, his idea of her, his want? Where it has insidiously shaped me, what has it cost us both?
posted by nann at 4:53 PM
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