Thursday, January 6, 2011

State of the (re)Union

Last week, I met my brother ("Luke"), my grandmother, and my grandfather for the first time. I think I can see now why some reunions succeed, and some fail. I can see why they break apart. It's painful, and awkward. They are more than strangers, more than friends, bound by mirrors and reflections, and yet less than what we think of us as family, for there is no shared history. No matter what is gained, nothing can be regained that was lost.

So. My grandparents. I love my grandmother. I'm ambivalent about my grandfather. I don't think that's unusual at all, except that everything is much more fraught in this situation than in a typical family. We connect with some family members but not others, and the parts of my grandfather that are reflected in me are the parts of myself that I don't like, that I have tried to change and to fix. So it stands to reason that it would be uncomfortable to spend time with someone who exhibits those qualities. In my grandmother, on the other hand, I see the parts of myself that I treasure. Neither one of them is perfect - it's just a matter of whether or not their faults are ones I can tolerate, and forgive. I am more like my grandmother; whether it's because I have nurtured the tendencies we share more than others, I cannot say. As someone who lost her adoptive grandparents at an early age, it is a revelation to have a grandmother again, and to interact with one as an adult.

I don't have a barometer against which to measure my brother.  I now know that I have half-siblings, none of whom I've met, and none which are close to me in age, but my only 'sibling' growing up was my mother's poodle. It's hard to develop fraternal feelings for a dog you hate, much less have a conversation with it. So I was the only one, the lonely one, and if you had asked the child that I used to be what her one wish would be, it would have been a sibling. I was jealous of my aunts and uncles, how my dad called his sister 'sis' and my mom called hers 'her best friend'. There was something there that was beyond my comprehension. There is a deep, deep understanding. I get him because, in some ways, I am him. There are a few who may understand the desire to go out to the woods and howl at the moon, or the pain in poetry, or the poetry in pain, the way that he does - but none in so unfettered a way. We have a dependence on our forebears, and a responsibility for our descendants, which mars the purity of our understanding. I can't encourage my son to howl in the woods, because the woods aren't safe. I have no responsibility to my brother except to be his mirror. And he has none to me except to provide a reflection.

When I first found him, I was a little bit frustrated - mostly at our first parents. I didn't understand that in the end, the fact that we were both separated, the fact that we both yearned and fumbled and groped for our identities, would tie us together with some of the shared experience that we missed by not being raised together. Because in whatever ways our childhoods were different, in one way they were the same - we were both adopted. And in a strange sort of way, it's the next best thing.

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