My (relinquished) daughter talks about adoption

From left: Lorraine and Jane, 1988; same jeans, bought separately

Well before my relinquished daughter Jane died, I did have the opportunity to talk to her about adoption on tape. She knew I was writing a memoir to follow up Birthmark, and that I would include her story. I was visiting her and her daughter Kim in Wisconsin, where they were living with her adoptive parents.
They were on vacation at the time, and had invited me to stay there while they were gone. We had had our ups and downs over the years, but as I've said here many times, we always got back together. I refused to give up, and she eventually would call or respond to one of my attempts at connection. 

Readers of First Mother Forum who are adopted have been upset that I have tried to interpret what Jane's silences, and the silences of so many adoptees towards their natural mothers, might have meant. Over the course of the next week or so, I will be posting from an extended conversation that Jane and I had about adoption. I never did have the guts to talk about her comings and goings in my life after reunion in 1981 in any depth because I was afraid it would be too upsetting--and the cause of more friction. We spoke of it briefly only once, after the episode during which she changed her phone number, et cetera, and she said that she felt very close to me and my family, including my husband, Tony (not her father). I said, "Well then, Never go away again." 

She immediately said, "Okay." 

It seemed best to drop the topic and move forward.

Fellow blogger Jane will be posting soon about other matters, but until she does, here is a section from my upcoming memoir, that Hole In my Heart, Copyright 2011.

Ultimately Jane and I spoke over a period of several nights, the two of us sitting in the semi-dark on a couch in her parents’ living room, lights on low. Kim had long ago gone to sleep. On the tapes, I hear her light cigarettes, hear her asking me to have one with her, her hoping I’ll join her. Even though I quit three decades before, I occasionally lit up now and then, and so one night I have a smoke with her. I hear the click of the lighter that Patrick [her biological father] gave me, the polished-chrome Zippo that he had engraved with a single letter, a lower case l in script, the way I sign my name—lorraine—that I’d given to her. I hear the grandfather clock on the wall of the Zimmerman’s living room announce the hours, ten, eleven….

“I thought about you way more than I let on to my parents. When I lay in bed I wondered why I was put up for adoption, what my history was. I’d look out my window when the moonlight is reflected on the snow, and the sky looks royal blue, even though it is eleven o’clock at night, and I’d see the moon. That’s when I thought about you, because that was a safe time to think about it. And the rest of time I tried not to.” Though she mostly kept her thoughts to herself, she had spoken to Ann [her adoptive mother] about searching one day, and Ann said she would do what she could to help her once Jane she finished high school.

 How did you imagine me, I ask. “My mother told me you were young and poor, not married, that was it…But I had fantasies of you being older, and not being able to raise a child, that you were old and just scraping by.
          How old?

“Probably like fifty.”

We laugh. As if fifty were old. 

“Or that you lied when you left your name at the agency. Or that you left the baby with neighbors and never returned. I would lie in bed and wonder why I was put up for adoption, what my history was. Sometimes you were a movie star. You lived in California. I saw lights and glitter.”

Did you ever imagine that I was a prostitute?

“NO—that is just too horrible a memory to have.”

We laugh again. “Did you ever imagine that I was just some middle-class married lady?”

“Once. You had too many kids, like fifteen, and couldn’t raise them, and I was the last one. Like Agatha.” She was the adoptee who lived on the next block in Sag Harbor, and with some detective work we had found her mother still alive in Poland, and indeed, she was the late last child of a large, poor farm family.

Jane pauses, then goes on: “I wrote a million different endings to what would happen when I searched. I would go to Rochester and they would have the information and somebody would whisper something to me, or run out after me and hand me an address, and it would be old and I would have to track you down. And that had a million different endings. I would call and you would hang up. Or say, I don’t know what you are talking about. Or I would knock on your door and you would let me in and we would sit at a table and talk., like for four hours, and you would tell me why I was adopted, but that’s kinda ridiculous because it doesn’t take four hours to explain why someone is adopted. Or you would slam the door in my face.”--lorraine
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 The conversation continues: Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 2
and  Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 3

Birthmark is the story of how I came to relinquish a child for adoption. It was the first memoir to tell a first mother's, birth mother's story and was extremely controversial when it was published in 1979. "She describes these experiences with such openness and raw emotion, without polemics or self-conscious feminist attitudes, that the impact of the book is overwhelming...a spectacular additon to feminist literature."--Library Journal