Reunion & the Reaction of a Younger Me

One thing I love about reading other blogs is the viewpoints of other people often urge me to self-reflect.  Reading about reunion and rejection makes me think about how I have changed over the years.  While I know how I feel about reunion right now, as I am reunited with both my maternal and paternal first families, I have to ask myself, would things have been different had I been found or tried to reunite before I actually did?  Foremost, this is not about about what I think people should do.  I do not think there is one right way of thinking or one right opinion.  I am not saying that 24 is an ideal reunion age or that my reunion is the perfect scenario.  I am simply reflecting on my own self just a few years ago and wondering how can I contribute to these conversations from my own perspective.  These are things that would have possibly been true for me as I enter into the relm of "what if" for this post.  It does not mean they are true for anyone else.

This topic brings me back to a conversation I had with my first mother when we first re-connected since my birth 24, almost 25, years prior.  Per her understanding at my surrender, my parents were supposed to be given the information she told the agency about herself.  She did not know they would not be able to know her name or my original, legal name.  It was important to her to know when we could re-connect.  She was told that somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18, I would be provided with complete and updated information so that I could contact her.  Those years went by.  When I was 18, she told herself that I was graduating high school and probably busy with this big transition in life.  She did not have answers to give herself about my silence as I progressed into my 20's.  At one point, she told me, her brothers offered to try to find me.  She refused, thinking I had my information, and wanting me to find her when I was ready.

"I think maybe it's good that you didn't.  I didn't know all of the things that I know now.  I wonder how I would have responded.  I think I would have been mean."  

For lack of better words, was my response when she told me about her brothers wanting to look for me.

It was a closed adoption and what my parents were given in actuality on my original family's social and medical history fit onto a one to one and one half page, type written, heavily censored, sheet of photocopy paper.  I did not know any names.  We were not sent a file or current contact information between ages 16 and 18.  I received little of what she thought I was supposed to have.  And the point I am getting at here is that I believe it would have made a world of difference in order to have that information.  Growing up when I had questions, my parents answered them honestly with what information they had.  But large blanks were left in questions that could only be partially answered and I filled those blanks with what I thought was fair to assume.  I grew up in a Christian community that said adoption was wonderful because it was it is an example of salvation.  The heavy societal correlation between abortion and adoption did not escape me; I believed that I had not been wanted.  I made sense of my adoption with these things and a lack of information and it is what I became comfortable with.

Looking back on my emails to the adoption agency in my early 20's when I started to realize that I did want and need to know more, I recognize how hard it was for me to articulate why I was asking for more.  I was very sensitive to being perceived as disloyal and feared that no one would understand.  I wasn't even sure that I understood.  It was not until I became a mother that I gained the confidence I needed to pursue reunion.  I could answer the "why" questions now if someone would ask.

When I realized that I wanted to know her, it was a journey to overcome the "only unhappy adoptees talk about adoption or search" stereotypes, because I believed these things myself.  Had I been found earlier, I wonder how the "I have to be loyal," "will this mean everything I've ever thought was wrong?" Amanda would have responded.  How would the Amanda who had at the time come to accept that she would never know her first mother or know more about herself pre-adoption (up until my early 20's I had no idea that OBCs or sealed adoption records existed) responded to this change?    I likely would have thanked her for giving me up.  Maybe I would have kept the reunion a secret.  Maybe I wouldn't have been able to form a relationship at all.

And let me explain those responses and why they would not be, for me personally, things I would do now.  They would not have been right for she and I.  They would have hurt her feelings.  In order to appreciate my parents, I do not at the same time need to be glad she didn't raise me.  She did a great job with my two brothers; she is a good mom.

Realizing that I wanted to talk about adoption and that I wanted to reunite was a gradual journey for me that initially began with a health scare.  Faced with what I did not know about myself when asked questions about heredity, I began to realize what had been missing.  Watching yet another doctor stare at me in shock when I replied for the umpteenth time in my life "I don't have any genetic information," was not enough.  No, having a mysterious tumor pop up where I needed surgery that threatened to paralyze part of my face at the age of 21 (it didn't, I healed well) was not enough.  Nothing had yet to convince me that I deserved the opportunity to connect to my first kin.  What I perceived as being social "norms" for adoptees: adoptees who search are unhappy or have bad relationships with their adoptive parents was still too strong.

What pushed me toward thinking critically about my adoptedness, adoption in-general, and embarking on a search was the birth of my first child.  It was a mixture of things all at once.  There wasn't a day during my stay at the hospital where I wasn't asked a question about heredity.  I would let my husband say his side and look down at my toes wiggling beneath those tan hospital slipper socks and mutter "I don't know."  I saw my own genetic mysteries reflected in the tiny face of the first biological relative I had ever known.  I knew the mother-child bond..

I believed wholeheartedly that my son deserved to know more about his ancestry and my first family.  While up until that point, there were any number of reasons I could come up with as to why I did not deserve to know, I was unwilling to rule out the importance of what I was missing on behalf of this small and magnificent person.  In a moment of self-reflection, I asked myself "if he deserves to know, why is it really that you think you don't deserve to know as well?"  Then I thought about my new role as a mother and thought about her; didn't she deserve to know too?

And so I embarked on my search.  I can explain things now; hence the entire blog I have here full of my musings.  But for a while after the above heart-to-heart I had with myself, the only answer I had was "I am a mother, and now I know" which I usually could not utter to someone asking me a question about my search without bursting into tears.

I wasn't sure at the time she would want to know me.  But I wanted to know her and I was now more than willing to give her that chance.  Realizing what things were stereotypes came later when talking to other people who were reunited, getting involved in activism, and reading.  I am thankful for many of my Adoptee Rights friends for their support.  Of course, reuniting for myself and knowing real details about my life pre-adoption and my family was what really freed me from these stereotypes and assumptions that I once had.

Years ago, had someone told me that my attitude (what it possibly would have been) was wrong or told me to snap out of it, I would have had no idea what they were talking about.  "The fog?"  What's that?  I had no clue.  I believed that the opinions and answers that I had accepted for myself were valid.  Now, looking back, I can say that I would not like how I might have responded had I been found years ago.  But I also cannot blame myself.  How does one know what the right answers are when they have not had any information to do so with, or false information?  It's upsetting when adoptees are rejected; I know because I've consoled and listened to many a friend going through that rough experience.  Likewise, I can't even imagine how painful it must be for a mother to be rejected.  As an adoptee when I hear about these experiences, I can't help but feel badly that I might have been someone who rejected family.  It would not have been because I think I am the center of the universe and the world revolves around me or because I think what I say goes.  I think relationships can only go as far as the person willing to commit the least is willing to go, no matter who in the constellation or relationship it is.  It would not have been out of meanness or anger; it is just where I probably would have been on my own personal journey at the time.  I am not making excuses for people; I can't and don't want to.  I can only talk about my thoughts, how I thought then, and how I thought now.  Thinking of the very real possibility that I could have caused someone that much pain by rejecting them makes my heart break even more for my friends.

I am very glad things worked out the way they did.

"Those who do not have power 

over the story that dominates their lives,

power to retell it,

deconstruct it,

joke about it,

and change it as time changes,

truly are powerless,

because they cannot think new thoughts."

--Solomon Rushdie

Photo: me, at 17