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I’m named after an adoptee.
All my life, toting around this name, I’ve been followed by the shadow of a man who dropped off our genealogical charts, joined another family, went away. His baby sister, (my grandmother) never knew what happened to him. Did he die in the War? Did he travel? Did he have children himself? Did my grandmother have nieces and nephews she never met…maybe her own age? I have his name, that’s what we have of him. We can not visit his gravesite. That’s on my mother’s side.
I’m the granddaughter of an adoptee.
She was shipped to Kansas, probably on an orphan train. In late life she met two siblings, was photographed with them, the indelible stamp of the nose on the three of them, the joy in the wary eyes. A cousin told me once that my grandmother was the coldest woman he ever met. I try to imagine my father, the baby, growing up in that house, sneaking out the window to buy burritos from a street vendor. Trying to make a connection with the woman who had so much trouble making connections. Growing up to be the kind of parent he was, the man who searched out our ancestors for over 200 years, and passed his records on to me. That’s on my father’s side.
I’m the cousin of an adoptee.
We never discussed her, my cousin who lived 5 miles from here with my uncle and aunt. We visited them once, there was cake. My family was full of estrangement, but the case of my cousin was special…we were given to understand, by nods and whispers overheard, that she had not been a really successful experiment. It was probably due to ‘bad blood” in her background, they thought, that she got into trouble and was ultimately abandoned again, by her “forever family’, although that’s not what they called them, at the time. As an adult, I had the opportunity to visit her in prison, the most consistent home she’s ever had. She blamed the start of her drug addiction on my aunt, who gave her her own prescription sedatives to calm her down, as a child. Of course, hard to tell if any story an addict tells is true. The observable truth is, however, that while my cousin was using drugs, stealing, getting arrested and more or less not raising at least 4 children, my aunt had found her calling, as a dorm mother, far out of state. That’s also my father’s side.
I am the friend of a first mother.
My very best friend from childhood, keeper of all my secrets, called me when she was near me visiting her sister. I was thrilled. Then she told me she was pregnant, and there to have the baby for relinquishment, before being returned home to resume her life. We were 20. Even now, I can hear the tones of our voices, as we struggled with the enormity of this change in her life. It was all dandy, of course, all God’s will, but I couldn’t say anything that made any sense, even to me. She herself had been raised in the gap left by a sister who died as a baby, and watched her mother tearfully observe every missing birthday. A few years later, married and expecting, she would call me to talk about having to pretend it was the first time, and her husband’s jealous rage when she slipped. He knew about the adoption but considered it a shameful blot on her record, and she needed someone
