Family Reunions: Distorted by Adoption

Jane

Family reunions are a fine tradition but for me and other natural mothers, they can be a catalyst, bringing our buried grief to the surface, reminding us of the missing unnamed and unacknowledged family member. 

I'm leaving for Maui tomorrow to spend a week with my sisters and brother, nieces and nephews, great nieces and nephews, and their spouses and significant others. We've been holding these reunions every three years since 1975.
 

I’m the fourth of five children, with three older sisters and a younger brother. My sister Katherine put together the first reunion at her home in Clinton, Illinois (pop. 8,000) where she moved from our hometown of Chicago after her marriage. Three of us, my sister Lucy, my brother David, and I lived on the west coast. My sister Helen remained in Chicago as did my mother. My father had died years earlier.

Family reunions were a tradition in Katherine’s husband’s family. When she first announced that she wanted to host one for our family, it sounded hokey, provincial. Nonetheless, I and my two (kept) daughters, ages three and one, headed off to Clinton, in the heart of Illinois. At the end of the week, we decided we would do it again. I became a convert and offered to hold the next reunion at my home in Salem, Oregon. We selected 1978 as the date and it’s been held every three years since then. We take turns arranging the event. As our families have grown through births and marriages, we’ve re-located from family homes to tourist areas, meeting in nine different states and once in Ecuador where my brother does business. My daughters, joined by a third in 1977, are always enthusiastic. "When’s the next reunion going to be? I hope it’s somewhere cool."

We’ve lost two family members since that first reunion, my mother in 1988 and my sister Helen a few months after our 1996 reunion. Helen's death from lung cancer is still hard for me. She was only 54, a victim of the tobacco industry.We held the 1996 reunion in January because we knew that Helen would not be with us in the summer. We met in Florida, giving Helen a respite from the harsh Chicago winter.  

I gave up my first daughter, whom I named Rebecca (in previous blogs I have referred to by her adoptive name) shortly after her birth in 1966. At each family reunion until Rebecca and I reunited, I felt acute pain from her absence. I grieved in silence; she was unknown to the rest of the family. I tried to imagine Rebecca was with us, riding on the Matterhorn at Disneyland, swimming in a lake in Washington, feasting at a barbecue in Illinois. I tried to visualize her in the photographs we brought home, constructing her face from her father's and mine. At each reunion, I promised myself that someday she would join us. And in 1999, two years after we reunited, Rebecca came to a family reunion, the one in Ecuador.

Family reunions allow us to catch up with family doings in a way that other forms of communication, letters and electronic gadgetry, can never accomplish. Reunions let us know we’re part of something larger even if we don’t much care for some of the components. Reunions reaffirm that we’re okay; our traits may unnerve others but to us, it’s just the way our clan is. There’s no pretense when you’re with family members who have known you since you were in diapers. To paraphrase poet Robert Frost, reunions are the place, where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Reunions must be difficult for for those who were raised apart from their natural families. Adoptee Katie Hern describes her feelings after visiting her natural family: “Back in San Francisco, as my feelings started surfacing, one of the first to arise was grief that I am a stranger to the people I now consider family.”. 

Rebecca did not share her feelings with me when we returned from Ecuador. Perhaps two weeks with biological kin--but social strangers--was stressful. Perhaps it was also rewarding. I hope it was. 
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This is an excellent book. The authors, the mother and the daughter she relinquished, are sensitive and perceptive. It's loaded with insights on the adoption experience. 

Katie Hern and Ellen McGarry Carlson (Reunion: A Year in Letters Between a Birthmother and the Daughter She Couldn’t Keep, 1999)