Daughter reveals why she walked away after reunion, Conclusion: Part 5

Jane and Lorraine--before or after this break? Don't remember. 

A continuation of the story started on April 27.  (Taken together, they are a chapter from my memoir-in-progress, hole in my heart. 

A few weeks later. It is a gray cold day, Tony is outside raking leaves. I want to be alone when I make this call. I sit in the kitchen at the table and punch in Jane’s number. Bill answers, registers neutral. He says they are working in the yard, he’ll tell her I’m on the line. Would she even come to the phone? A minute later Jane picks up and says, Hello. I breathe deeply and begin:

I know we talked about this before, and I’ve told you what it was like back then, but today I just wanted to say, I’m sorry—I’m sorry you were adopted.


I wait.

I don't know what to say, she says.

That’s all right, I wanted to say this once. Like that. 

We speak for well over an hour—about how she and Bill were fixing up the yard, painting furniture, her job as a home health aide. We speak like a mother and daughter. Maybe she’ll talk to me now, I think when I hang up. Maybe. By this time I knew she had a computer, but she had not given me her email address, or asked for mine, and I had not brought it up for I feared being rebuffed.

Once again, silence.

It happens to others, why not me?  One mother, whose daughter spent ten years trying to find her, says she always finds herself apologizing for something. To us first mothers, it feels as if there are all kinds of ways adoptees punish us.[1] Everything seemingly is going along fine, and then Phfft! and the illusion of a relationship disappears to be replaced by a void. Was it ever real, or only a phantom?     

Life continues—magazine pieces to write, I get a book-doctor job, write columns for The Sag Harbor Express, see friends, go to the movies. Yet Christmas is especially dreary that year. Tony and I spend a raucous Christmas Eve with his large contingent of nieces of nephews and their children, but the next morning when I go to mass I cannot hold back the tears when we turn to our neighbors, shake hands, and say Peace. I have no peace in my heart.

I miss my daughter.

Spring. She phones and when I pick up I hear: Hello. How have you been? I do not ask her why I have been in exile, and now why I am no longer. I know there is no answer she can, or will, articulate. We resume as before. Now she gives me her email address. Now we are on good terms again. But now, I am wary. Of saying the wrong thing. Of saying anything that might be misconstrued. Of relaxing too much. She could shut down at any time, for any reason.

It would take a long time to figure this one out. Over the months she let slip, in half-finished sentences, what had been going on: She had been determined to prove to her mother that she, Jane, deserved to be loved. There’s no way to explain without telling the story that leads up to her hitting “delete” on our relationship. At the memorial service for the eldest of the Rhymer’s two biological children, Ann let slip this comment: He was my favorite. 

Lorraine today

That’s a hard truth to hear in a family where none of the children are adopted; but in a family where there are adoptees? It ate at Jane, for it was irrefutable proof that the mother she grew up with did not love her, or her cherished older adopted brother, the way Ann loved the children she bore. A unfortunate comment, yes; but we humans are always coming up short. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles in unbroken families don’t intend to choose a favorite, but it happens, usually without the chosen one having done anything deserving. The roll of genetically coded dice has seen to it that this one will closely resemble a parent, or a grandparent, in face, physique, faculties and personal quirks, and there you have it. What was regrettable was that Ann gave voice to her feelings. And all her children heard it.

While the adopted son who lived far away was fuming, Jane let on that her own hurt gave way to proving that she was a good daughter, worthy of Ann’s love, and since Ann hated me--Well, she, Jane, would show her how little I mattered. How to do that? Ignore me, as if I too had skied off a cliff. Maybe Ann would love her more then. Irrational, right? Feelings by their very nature are irrational. They come out of our deepest needs, they rule when we want them to obey logic, there is not rational explanation.

Jane once said: “If I move close to you, then I have to move away from the other. I feel like a magnet 
torn between two poles.”

It ain’t easy being adopted.

Not long ago I came across these wise words at a blog called Fugitivis, written by adoptee, Harriet J: 

Story of relinquishing my daughter

“This is not to say that everything about adoption is wrong, but everything about adoption is painful. For our modern, legal concept of adoption to exist, families must be broken. Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case situation having already come to fruition. From there, you’re working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be. It is that should be that necessitates education, sensitivity, and trigger warnings, because it never goes away.”[2] 

--lorraine 

---

[1] Because I can hear adoptees saying: Wait one minute! My mother won’t even talk to me and she pulls all kinds of stunts, let me say that I know that is true. I’ve heard enough stories about recalcitrant first mothers, disappearing first mothers, first mothers who write letters saying DO NOT CONTACT ME AGAIN, but I’m talking about what happened to me and writing from the viewpoint of first mothers who have been cut off and know not why. I’ve heard many, many unhappy mothers talk about trying to maintain a relationship, but everything they do is somehow all wrong. 

[2] Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up, 101, Fugitivus, April 20, 2010.

To start at the beginning, read:
First Mother to (reunited) daughter: What did I do wrong now?
What did this first mother do wrong now? Cont.
What did I do wrong now? Cont. Part 3
My (reunited) daughter doesn't speak to me: What did I do now? Cont., Part 4

People have asked me repeatedly when the book will be coming out. As of right now, I don't know. I thought I had a deal with a small publisher, but the contract was not one that I happily could sign due to some provisions of the contract. Birthmark is the story of how I happened to relinquish her, my early involvement in adoption reform; it ends before I found her in 1981. It was the first memoir from a first mother and was extremely controversial when it came out in 1979.

Birthmark

"I bought and read Birthmark after seeing an op-ed from the author in support of current legislative efforts to open original birth certificates to adult adoptees. As an adult adoptee myself, I was impressed with Ms. Dusky's raw look inside herself and her life story, including most notably finding herself in the position to make the heart-wrenching decision to permit someone else to raise her child.
"Any adoptee who has the emotional wherewithal to want to see how the mother who gave them life may have felt about it should read this book."--from Amazon