Shaped by Desire

When I was growing up I was placed on a path.  That path was somewhat disguised, well enough that I wasn’t always aware of it, but it was always there.  It was a pretty simple path.  It went like this: Go to school, graduate, attend a 4-year university, graduate with a degree that will get you a job, get a job that is respectable enough to be a career, get married, provide grandchildren. 

None of those items were open to debate.  I was free to choose a career, but I was expected to choose one.  I was expected to attend a four year university right after high school.  I don’t recall ever having a conversation about this; it was just something that was understood.  I didn’t have any other option.  The problem was I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I was so adrift emotionally by the end of high school that I knew it was a huge mistake to try and go off to a four year university without any real plan or direction.  I also understood that nothing I could say about that would change the plan, so I went.  As expected, it didn’t turn out so well. 

My parents had a plan for their child and I was expected to follow it.  I was, after all, the only child they had.  There was no chance for a do over; I had to be the perfect kid to carry on the line.  There was only one problem with that.  I wasn’t their child.  I was the stand in they had to settle for when their dreams of having their own child didn’t work out.  I tried very hard to shove myself into the role they wanted me in, but like the proverbial square peg trying to fill the round hole, I never fit. 

When I failed to deliver; and that happened a lot, my mother always got very mad at me.  I doubt she ever considered that what she wanted from me simply went against my nature.  It wasn’t ever about me; it was always about what I could do for her.  I tried very hard to be who she wanted.  In doing so I both failed to be who she wanted and failed to be who I really was.  I simply could not be her child; I was always going to be a stand in.  I was intended for another family where I did fit.  Unfortunately for me elements of that family didn’t want me.  So, I ended up where I was trying very hard to be a child that would never exist and as a consequence never learning who I was either.

By the time I reached my mid 30’s I had been divorced twice and failed to produce even a single grandchild for my mother.  I could tell that I was seriously disappointing her as the comments about her lack of grandchildren became more and more frequent.  Never once did she express any concern to me about how I might be feeling about being in my mid 30’s, twice divorced, and not having any children.  It was all about her and how she felt.

When I was sixteen my mother was an office manager for a couple of psychologists and a clinical social worker.  She told me in May or so after my sixteenth birthday that she thought I would benefit from talking to someone and she set up a series of appointments for me to meet with the social worker in her office.  It was extremely awkward going to my mother’s office to meet with this person, especially since I knew that the social worker was free to discuss whatever we talked about with my mother since I was a minor.  Of course how I felt about the situation wasn’t a concern to my mother, how I felt about any situation wasn’t a concern to my mother. 

Once these appointments started it rapidly became obvious to me that the reason for them was to determine if I liked girls or not.  I suppose that I was old enough at sixteen that my mother expected me to have a girlfriend and the fact that I didn’t meant that there was something “wrong” with me.  If I turned out to be gay or something then I couldn’t produce the required grandchildren and that would not be acceptable.  I assured the social worker I did in fact like girls; I was just absolutely terrified of them.  I was asked a lot of prying questions about which specific girls I liked, what I liked about them, what I thought I might do to attract their attention.  It was pretty clear to me the questions were intended to verify I was being honest and wasn’t just making a claim I couldn’t support with details. 

The other thing the social worker wanted to talk about and kept bringing up was my adoption.  This was of course during the time that I believed that my adoption had no effect on me.  However, I often wonder now how my life would be different if I could have really explored the issue back when I was sixteen.  I knew that questioning anything about my adoption, wondering about my natural family, questioning whether my adoptive parents were my “real parents” or not, or anything else related to the adoption that was anything other than in complete support of my mother was off limits.  That was not a discussion I was prepared to have with a person that worked with my mother.  If my mother was actually concerned about my wellbeing and not how my behavior affected her she would have found me someone to talk to that I could trust not to reveal what we talked about.  Perhaps then things would have been different.  Again, it wasn’t about me, it was never about me, so how it made me feel didn’t matter.

It wasn’t until I got in contact with my mom that I realized the impact my adoption had on my life.  Thinking back, there were signs and I really wish I had noticed them.  The visits to the social worker were one of the signs.  Another came many years later, pretty recently, about a year before my mom and I found each other.

My wife and I had been talking about having another child, but we really wanted a girl.  Of course with the traditional method there is no way to get what you hope for, you just take what you get.  My mother suggested we adopt a baby girl.  She even offered to help with the associated expenses.  We came up with all sorts of reasons why adoption wasn’t feasible for us, they were all even true.  However, inside I had a very visceral reaction that was “I cannot do that to someone”.  For someone who claimed to have no problem with either being adopted or adoption in general that is a very unusual reaction.  Too bad I didn’t explore it further.   

I wonder how my life would have been different if I had been allowed to be me instead of the replacement for the never to be biological child. 

Secondary Rejection

My biological father was married before he met my mom.  He had a daughter with his first wife and when they divorced in 1972 he signed his rights away.  So, I have another sister out there.  This time she is older by almost two years, born in May of 1971.  I have no reason to believe she has any idea I exist.  I doubt she had any contact with our biological father after he signed away his parental rights (I believe my sister was adopted by the man her mother married shortly after her divorce was final in 1972) and I wasn't born until 1973.  I've known about her, though not who she is, since I met my mom and heard her story.  I've kind of put off looking for her because she is connected to that side of the family, but that isn't her fault any more than it is mine, so I decided it was time.

My wife and I spent a fair amount of this past weekend looking for her and I think we found her.  We are waiting for verification, but I'm 99% sure we have the right person.  During the course of the search I found a high school yearbook picture of my "father".  It is the only picture I have ever seen of him.  I don't share a lot of features with him, but there is some resemblance, and it hit me pretty hard, harder than I would have expected.  This is after all the man that didn't want me then and doesn't want me now.  I would very much like to be able to say that it doesn't bother me but I would be lying. 

We as a society use a lot of pretty words and phrases to describe adoption and adopted children.  We like to make it sound like something that is positive and a great experience.  We say things like "special" and "chosen" and "your parents loved you so much they had to give you away".  It sounds good, but its crap.  At its heart adoption is about rejection because barring exceptional circumstances like the death of the parents, children are available for adoption because they were rejected by someone, someone didn't want them.  We grow up wondering, usually just to ourselves because for most of us talking about the natural parents isn't an option, why we were not good enough to keep.  I always believed that the person who didn't want me, the person for whom I just wasn't good enough was my father.  I understood how things worked when I was born.  If he had wanted me then more than likely he would have married my mother and they would have kept me.  That might not have turned out well, and I understood that, but I also understood that is how things were done.  Many years later when I learned the real story that turned out to be the case. 

When my mom talked to him a couple of months ago to find out if he ever intended to respond to my letter he told her that he didn't regret my being adopted and thought things turned out the way they were supposed to.  How very thoughtful of him.  I'm so glad that my years of feeling out of place, without a real home, and rejected were the best thing for him.  I really hope my sister has had a better experience as a result of him being her "father" than I have.  I also hope she doesn't hold our shared parentage against me.

Another sister.  I can't ignore that.  I don't know how to be anyone's brother though.  I really want to do a good job of it, but like almost everything else I do I mostly feel lost.  So many things involving family just don't come naturally to me like they do to other people.  One of the fantastic results of adoption, never having a real family.  I'm lucky to have one now, though I'm not sure how lucky they are to have me, as inept as I am at being a brother and son. 

Seeking Help...

I decided to take a big step, for me anyway, and started going to counseling.  It took a lot of soul searching on my part, and a lot of prodding from my wife, but I had my first visit last week.  I have another in a couple of days.  I think it is going to be helpful long term, I certainly felt better for a little while right after I left the first appointment although it did catch up with me later in the day and several times since.  I went there with the intention of talking about my newly found family and the whirlwind of emotions involved in processing it, and while that did come up, we spent most of the time talking about my childhood.  That makes sense of course; it is how I got to this place, at least in a sense.  Near the end of the hour I told him that I felt like I was in mourning for the death of the person I was supposed to be.  He told me that made sense but what I should really be saying was that I was in mourning for the person I could have been because there is nothing wrong with who I am.  My response to that was he might be right but I felt like it was “supposed to be” not “could have been”, so perhaps that at least gives us a place to start.  

I think adoption will always be front and center in my life as an issue I have to deal with and work through.  That doesn’t make it my only issue.  I have a lot of law enforcement related stuff, sixteen years’ worth, that I have never addressed.  Police work tends to be about a lot of little traumas that build up over time, not about major incidents that knock you down all at once (although some cops are “lucky” enough to get both).  As such, they tend not to get noticed, or at least that was my experience.  I’d been a cop for about twelve years when I noticed that I got angry a lot more easily than I ever did before.  It was often about stupid things that didn’t matter at all and wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest in the past.  Police work being what it is and me being who I am it didn’t even occur to me that perhaps I should seek some kind of help; I just went on and tried to keep my temper in check.  

I feel the need to tell a little story here to drive the point home about how different of a job law enforcement is from what most of us are making our living doing.  A while back I was riding somewhere with a couple of coworkers and we were discussing the various different kinds of suicide calls we had been to.  Yes, morbid I know, but law enforcement is different.  During the course of this conversation I made the statement that I had never been to a gunshot suicide.  They both thought that was odd given how common those are.  It wasn’t until quite a bit later that I realized that my claim I had never been to a gunshot suicide wasn’t true.  In fact, I went to one about two years prior to this conversation where the victim was still alive (he died at the hospital) and still holding the gun.  I had to take the gun out of his hand (since he had a brain injury I didn’t want him to start convulsing and fire the gun again), while at the same time trying to keep his girlfriend calm and away from him (she was there when he did it), and keep the brand new officer I had with me (who I was training) from screwing up the scene, generally freaking out, or losing her dinner.  I didn’t block this event out because it was so traumatic, though I won’t deny it was traumatic, I just didn’t remember it because it was simply not that unusual of a day in police work.  It was one of those “little traumas”.  Now, multiply that by sixteen years, they wear you down.  

I’m hopeful that it will mean good things for me.  At the same time, as positive as it seems to be going in, it can’t solve my major problem.  That is of course the physical separation.  It doesn’t get easier with talking.  I suppose it just comes down to wanting my mommy, as childish as that sounds. 

Not missing the forest for the trees...

I’ve been thinking back through my life here recently and I don’t recall ever knowing anyone else who was adopted.  I’m sure I must have met people who were, but I don’t recall ever actually knowing anyone who was.  I had a “cousin” who was adopted, but I don’t know that I count that.  First off I put cousin in quotes because I don’t know that I consider the adopted daughter of the brother of my adoptive mother to actually be a legitimate relative.  The courts might have considered her such, but I don’t put a lot of stock in state fabricated relations these days.  Second, I can’t say that I knew my “cousin” anyway.  Sure, I met her a couple of times, but I never knew her.  The family I grew up in was remote from any other members by hundreds to thousands of miles.  If we saw my adoptive mother’s brother and his family more often than once about every three years it was due to some highly unusual event like a wedding or funeral.   The girl they adopted was about four years old when they got her and by the time she was fifteen she was no longer living with them.  I don’t think the adoption was actually legally dissolved but she went to live elsewhere.  Apparently she was quite the handful and I suppose they eventually decided she wasn’t worth the effort.  I don’t know the details; I wasn’t privy to all that information, only being a couple of years older than she was.  I do remember my mother being very upset about the whole situation as it progressed over the years.  Her primary focus was that this girl was ungrateful to her brother.  I suppose that the poor girl was supposed to be grateful for having been abandoned by her natural family at a young age or so mistreated by them that the state took her away from them permanently; because hey, this nice guy and his family took her in after that.  Well, until she caused too much trouble for them.  The underlying message was pretty clear though; adopted kids who misbehave enough can get cut loose. 

The point of the last paragraph is this, not knowing anyone who is actually adopted I could talk to about all of this I did the next best thing, I went to the place we all know and love for the most accurate information known to man.  No, not the library, this isn’t 1987; the Internet-Al Gore’s greatest invention since Man-Bear-Pig.  OK, perhaps not the most accurate information known to man, but there are at least some funny cat videos and wildly one-sided political memes.  Speaking of political memes I’m still either voting for pine straw or getting behind the plan to change our political leader selection system to “Strange Women Lying in Ponds Distributing Swords” because I cannot in good conscience vote for either of the major parties’ candidates.  Anyway, I’m getting side tracked.  My point is that I found a forum full of adoptees venting about being adoptees and how they feel about it, cope with it, and experiences they have had in relation to it.   

This forum has been pretty helpful for me.  It isn’t quite like knowing “real people” who are adopted, but it is nice to know that basically none of my feelings or experiences are unique and there is a group of people out there who understand.  No one expects me to drink the Kool aid.  I’m not expected to be grateful I was adopted, I’m not expected to believe all adoptive parents are saints, I’m not expected to hide how I really feel.   I’ve also learned one very important thing, something that I might have overlooked even as I was enjoying its benefits at the same time.

What is that one thing?  My natural family accepted me.  There are so many people on the forum who were rejected again, or found their natural family only to find they were not the sorts of people they wanted to be around, or found them only to find too much had been missed and they just didn’t fit with them, or found out too much time had gone by and no one from their natural family was left alive.  I had none of those experiences.  When I met my mom I felt like I had known her my whole life.  When I met my brothers and sisters I felt like I belonged with them, like there were finally people who “got” me.  I also felt like they accepted me.  One of my sisters, not a woman who has a lot of free time on her hands, spent months emailing and/or texting me literally every day before the first time I visited.  In doing so she made me feel comfortable enough that I could actually make a trip alone halfway across the country to meet all these people at once.  I felt like she was already on my side.  She also picked me up at the airport despite my flight arriving late on a week night and she had to be up early the next morning for work.  After the first time we were all together she told me I fit in just like we had always been together.  It was just what I needed to hear. 

I think that I have taken a negative tone as of late and there are certainly reasons for that.  However I read a post on the forum yesterday that really got me thinking about why the separation from my family and the feelings I have about it are so hard for me.  The answer is that if I had wished for an outcome before knowing anything about my natural family I couldn’t have wished for anything or anyone better than what the reality is.  No one is perfect, but they are perfect for me, and that is what matters.  So many people go on this journey and don’t find what they wished for at the end.  My journey resulted in more than I ever could have wished for and rather than an end offers a new beginning.  I’ll endeavor to remember how lucky I am when I am feeling down.  Perhaps I will be successful, perhaps not, but I will at least remain lucky whether I manage to remember it on any given day or not.

What's in a name?

I haven’t written anything here in ten days or so.  Again, this is primarily because it has been hard to put pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard, on this subject recently.  I feel very much like I’m in mourning, though the lost life in this case is my own, and it is what should have been rather than literal death.  Even so, I feel very much like someone close to me has died unexpectedly and I have been left trying to deal with it.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the person I was supposed to be and wondering how he might have been different from the person I am.  One of the many problems with being adopted as an infant is that I have no pre-adoption personality.  I have no idea what parts of me were shaped by the adoption and what parts were part of my natural wiring.  I certainly display some classic characteristics of an adopted person: I’m a people pleaser, I don’t make friends easily, I tend to have a few close friends instead of a lot of friends that are perhaps less close, I’m uncomfortable in crowds and large groups, especially of people I don’t know, the list goes on.  However, I can’t say for sure that all those things are a result of my being an adoptee or are simply part of who I am and would have been no matter how I grew up. 

When I first started talking with my mom I wanted to find out if she had a name for me and if so what it had been.  I’m going to stick with my trend of not using names here, but I’ll use some initials.  My initials are CAS.  Since my biological father didn’t want anything to do with me at the time (and nothing seems to have changed there) I likely would have ended up with my mom’s last name.  Using the names she had chosen for me and her last name, I would have been CWS.  Not the same first or last names, but similar initials anyway.  The foster home I spent three months in between the hospital and going to my adoptive parents also had a name for me.  It was Corey, so everyone involved in this mess really seems to have been determined that my first name should begin with C.  Thankfully Corey didn’t stick.  I feel especially good about that since I don’t particularly like the name and I grew up in the 1980’s, the era of the actor/drug addict Corey Feldman/Corey Haim child/teen star duo. 

I know who CAS is, or at least I did up until late last year.  I haven’t always been happy with him, but I did understand him.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call CAS’ childhood unhappy, it wasn’t, at least not overall.  I wouldn’t in truth be able to describe it as happy either though.  I think the best description I can provide of his life, both as a child, and throughout much of his adult life, is lonely.  He didn’t really fit in with other kids very well and that meant he often didn’t have friends.  That trend has continued, he gets along fine with people, but he doesn’t really fit in with many of them.  He has lived in the place he lives now for over three years and can’t honestly claim to have made a single friend.  CAS finds it extremely difficult to be separated from his family, which is full of people who seem to get him and accept him.  The only person here that really gets him is his wife. 

I often find myself wondering who CWS would have been.  Would he have been the same as CAS?  Would he have been completely different?  I won’t ever get to find out who he was because he was murdered by adoption.  That sounds a little dramatic, even to me, but I don’t know how else to describe it.  The person I was supposed to be was prevented from becoming and the world got me instead.  I hope that was a good deal, but it often doesn’t feel like it to me. 

There will never be any answers and I hate that.  Adoption stole my identity and my family.  There is no question the person I became after that happened was influenced by it even if I didn’t know it was happening.   I’ll never know who CWS was, my mom will never get to know him, my brothers and sisters will never get to know him.  They get me instead, and while I my wear his body, I feel like an imposter because I missed his life.  I keep missing it, every day that goes by is another I will never get back and it breaks my heart a little more every day.