My coworker and I had to fly to Dallas for a customer issue and the conversation turned to the fact that I grew up and Dallas and did I have family there. I have gotten pretty good at providing a skinny version of my life for people and I do tell it because it does not really bother me. However this particular co-worker has the appearance of serenity now and complete family normalcy. I did not know how he would take my story but it is easy enough: Adopted at 5, out on my own at 17, no longer in touch with my adoptive family and met my entire biological family. I explain it is not uncommon in Texas - or at least in my experience - for a family to have a black sheep. My bio mom and dad were both the black sheep and my adoptive mom and dad it was their brothers. Of coarse, I took the role in my adoptive family - someone had to step up.
The irony is that night I met up with a few family members (wait for the clarity) and I had to do a similar recap for my cousin but I started back even earlier in the story. It amazed me the ease and fluidity in which I am able to susinctley tell the story and yet feel so completely removed. It does not feel like a story about me but something I have learned to regurgitate. This is a story that I would consider too personal for my blog because it exposes me but for some reason I feel like this is part of my current journey right now. It is the acceptance and the release of a life time of dysfunction that stands in my way.
It starts with them. My father always speaks and writes about how he spotted my mother across the room and was captured by her beauty. He fancies himself a poet and has turned the whole event into a Harlequin romance that I can not discern his fantasy from the truth - but I never speak of that - instead I think and describe two young kids first year of college in the mid 1960s that managed to get her pregnant and got married and tried to do the right thing. Instead my father buckled under the responsibility, struggled and eventually deserted my mother leaving her to move back to her parents house and slowly became mentally unglued. I am mentally generous (wow how clinical does that sound?) about all of this because I really understand that these are crimes of youth, inexperience and victim of the society expectations that should have never been the life sentence it has been for both of them. The part I never really share is that my mother tried to end her pain and decided to kill herself and me, but from the stories as they have been related to me, she lost her nerve after giving me the overdose (never giving herself one) and at the last moment begged my grandfather to save me. The path is confusing to track after that because there was family fighting, my mothers demand that no family member have me, my fathers release from jail, my mothers release from the mental hospital, foster care families and eventually adoption when I was five and half. I have a 50 page document that attempts to explain the whole thing but the more people I meet from that time and hear their stories the more vague it becomes. The first thing that I remember really - much to my natural grandmother's constant dismay before her death - was meeting my adoptive family.
It was not really a good match and right from the start it was pretty acrimonious. I probably was pretty screwed up emotionally and they were people living in a time and a place where you did not really deal with screwed up - toughen up and deal with it yourself silently - was their philosophy. I actually remember that during my childhood my mother had some sort of incident where she went away for awhile but it was never discussed. Looking back, I think she had a nervous breakdown (whatever that means) and spent some time recuperating but I cannot know for sure. It was hard between us always until finally in 10th grade when they sent me to boarding school. I believe they really wanted to do the right thing by me and their intentions were good, but their hearts and own disfunction were the perfect antimatter to my entire world. Right before I went to boarding school, they sat me down and told me about my mother, the "murder" attempt, the state involvement - the disaster known as my birth. I think they were doing their own scared straight but at that point the thing I remember most from that talk is the devastation that my dream of two parents being tragically killed on the way back from the movies was wrong and my father kept yelling at me to stop crying (I can still hear him yelling RENEE - Stop Crying right now) It felt like a lifetime had passed in those few hours until they finally sent me to my room to "get myself together."
I remember when they pulled my out of boarding school for my senior year - honestly I do not remember why but I believe it had to do with several events including one of my school counselors reaching out to them concerned for me. Bitterly I still assume they took me out because they wanted to retreat from public exposure of our issues, but maybe they felt they could help more directly if I was home. At one point things got so difficult they sent me to a shrink who also expressed deep concern for me and wanted to see me twice a week. For context, I had been suicidal most of my teen years (one time I told my parents I had tried and failed and they commented that they hoped I realized now how stupid that was) and really believed I would never live past 23 - I was not a happy girl.
They gave me the choice to go to counseling or not but asked if I really thought I needed someone else's help to get my head on straight. I wonder if I had been strong enough to go to counseling if it would have helped but I had learned to tow the family line and realized it would be worse to get help and live with them than to just survive. When I was fourteen I had taken money out of saving, researched bus tickets and was going to run away to California, thank god my brain kicked in and thought about what would happen once I got to where I was going and after that my whole goal in life was to survive and get out of that house. We didn't make it through my senior year before we had the big show down. The words I can never get passed was my dad telling me that I was going to die someday - probably murdered and cut up into little pieces in the trash - and no one in this world would care. Sometimes I wonder if that is true (because who would say that to a child and for what purpose) and maybe he did not say that but I can still hear his voice saying that to me in my head so either I have an incredibly creative mind (possible) or it is true. The shocking part was at that point I was just numb. I finally did not cry I just let them yell and berate me. The next morning I skipped school, went to the bank and took out all my savings, bought a piece of shit car and moved out.
There was a very sketchy year for the next year that involved sleeping in cars, trying to go to college, boys, men, and then finally the Air Force where my life sort of normalized. Well that's not exactly true but close enough.
I talked to my adoptive parents in my 20s maybe two or three times. I desperately wanted reconciliation and closure and healing although I was not healed and they were no different. My greatest fear was that they would die before they every got a chance to accept me or even life me. We tried once or twice to talk and be together again but it was always an opportunity for me to apologize for my crimes against them, the pain I caused them. I thought as time passed the pain would lessen for both of us and as adults we could find our way to at least forgiveness. I tried in my late 20s again and then in my early 30s but finally they sent me a note that said they never wanted to talk to me again and did not care about me or my life and I finally got the message and have never tried again.
I met my biological mom when I was 20 after finding out she had registered at the adoption agency for matching if I ever joined. A few years later I went on an emotional journey and met her family, my dad's family and a half brother. I took another ten or fifteen years before my dad was found and we met for dinner one night. Meeting my origins is not like what you see on all the day time TV shows, because for everyone the event of your birth and then your loss had significant impact on their lives. It is hard to absorb the blows of what your existence did to the family. I begin to feel like it was important to do this for them and struggled with what it meant to me. I am still meeting relatives as the other night I met my cousin (my father's sister's daughter) for the first time. We had dinner and my Aunt and I discussed (more like debriefed/decompressed) the trip where we visited my dad - she had not seen him in 30+ years and I had only spent a few hours before that trip with him. I wish I could say I take comfort in these people and it has healed old wounds but there is a strange curse about the whole thing. We are like puzzle pieces that were cut slightly wrong - all of us. We see how the picture fits together but it is painful to force it together.
Not sure where this is going or why I put it down. Being in Texas always does this to me and I am really glad to be home.
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