My Dog Deserves Better

While we were on the Great Discovery Road Trip, ‘Grandpuppy’ got to spend the week with my adoring parents. I have to admit, I didn’t really consider his stress level when I arranged to meet my mother in a parking lot to transfer him to her car. I heard him yelp all the way to the freeway. It was the sound of panic.

He knows my parents. He visits them occasionally with us, and they visit all of us. I never thought it would bother him.

Here’s his routine. We get up early to get the munchkin ready for school. Sometimes grandpuppy gets attention, but often he gets hooked to a leash and walked – very quickly – out to the potty spot, since our patio home doesn’t have a private yard. He comes in, he attempts to steal leftover waffles, we trip on him, and he goes into his part of the house, which is tiled slate and therefore easy to clean. He has a nest of doggie beds under the desk where he sleeps. If he can find bones the munchkin hasn’t hid, he chews on them. He waits for us to come home, plays for a little while at night, curls up on the couch with my hubby, drifts into doggie dreamland, and then is abruptly woken and put back in his kitchen/dining/den area. He’s very, very loved, but it’s a crazy house and a crazy routine.

I wasn’t there when he arrived at their house, but I can imagine the scene. New toys were laid out; new bones were given to him. There were acres to run across, peacocks to chase, foxes to study, and at the end of the day there was a fluffy bed piled with blankets for him to sleep on. When morning came, no one got up to go anywhere. He spent time in the backyard, or the barn, as he wished. He ate horse poop and barked at the cows across the road. Doggie heaven. 

Isn’t it interesting that he was depressed? Isn’t it interesting that he didn’t eat for three days, that he cried when I came to get him, and that he clung to us for the first few hours he was home? His little doggie mind couldn’t rationalize that he was in a home that would generally be judged as better for dogs, with people who loved him. He didn’t care that it was doggie heaven. He wanted his people. 

But.

Rest assured, potential and actual Adoptive Parents, I’m sure all of this is only applicable to the canine species. He’s an angry doggie who doesn’t understand that he was saved from time at Ye Olde Doggie Daycare or some other sterile and institutional setting. A child would understand that a home with ponies and barns and peacocks made for a better life. A child would know that her pink princess canopy bed came at the cost of her people, her identity, and would find that a reasonable trade.  A child would understand that all the love, adoration, money, and idyllic nature scenes in the world made up for everything. She would be grateful. She wouldn’t cry. 

I guess I’m glad my dog deserves better than she did.

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.

Like a band of gypsies they go down the highway...

T-minus 13 days until live reunion. I've scheduled my time off at work. I've rented a car. I've made reservations for my brother's flight.

Two weeks from now, I will no longer be an only child. I will be in a room with both my brothers, and my grandmother, and the entire extended family - with the sole exception of my father, who is the compass point of the entire meeting but missing. He will be far away, dealing with his life, which is sinking faster than a lead cannonball. I forgive him, though, because I am a misogynist and he is broken, and his flight from reality has very little to do with me.

I'm beginning to feel something that might be guilt as regards her.  I know that she will be a short fifteen minute drive from where we are going. I know where she lives, what she looks like, who she's married to, what she does in her spare time, and something of her relationship with her remaining child. The thing is, though, that she doesn't know I know. She doesn't know that I'm meeting my brother there, who she also gave away. She doesn't know that she's a grandmother, or that her grandson will go the places she went when she carried us in the space beneath her lungs. She knows nothing except that she had children - a lot of children - and abandoned them.

I did romanticize her. I read reunion stories of mothers who waited for thirty, or forty, or fifty years for their lost child to come back. I read about how they ached. But to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, "To lose one [child], Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose [a whole frigging lot of them] looks like carelessness." I think I could process this better if I were one of several children of varying ages who were removed from her care after she'd done something - but we weren't abused, or turned over to foster care, or kept past the one-week Healthy White Baby sell-by date. We were individually packaged for Domestic Infant Adoption, and only to be sold separately.

Rambling, rambling. But should I contact her, or no? Is this guilt, or am I looking for an excuse to break down a few barriers when I know I'm angry with her, and not able to give selflessly?

She should know all about giving, right? She's the original professional.

I'm a misogynist...

I have always described myself as a feminist. I'm a little reactionary in some of my politics and I have an abiding passion for Edmund Burke that makes me susceptible to the rhetoric of tea partiers, Fox commentators, and anyone else who quotes him with abandon - but I can juxtapose Wollstonecraft against Burke and find just as much to agree with even though they were mortal enemies. I'm a working mother - an executive - and I know how much I owe to the women in the generation before me who shrugged off their shackles and beat a path for me to follow. I'm pro-choice. I read Gertrude Stein and Gloria Steinem.  If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have called myself a socially-liberal feminist.

But I'm not.

And here's how I know - I forgive him more than I forgive her. It's misogyny. A woman should care about her children. A woman should love her children enough to fight for them, or at least to keep from having multiple kids and giving them away. A woman shouldn't walk away. A man, though - well, shouldn't we just be grateful that he was there, that he talked to us in utero, that he cared for her when she was pregnant, that he didn't drive her to the abortion clinic or drive away. That he went to the hospital, signed the paternity papers, and signed away his rights. He stuck around long enough to give me away, so he - he can be forgiven almost anything. Her? Not so much.

I don't agree with these feelings. I think they're sentiments that Sarah Palin would agree with, and that terrifies me. The reasoning is specious - but this isn't reason. It's just feelings, and that's what I feel. She should have tried harder. She isn't much of a mother.

She did it three times.  I have another half-sibling somewhere out in the world, not his, but hers - and she gave that one up as well. Four children, and she kept one. I don't know that I can forgive her.

I've forgiven him everything. And I hate myself for that.

Family History

I met my aunt, in person. She's the only one who lives in the same metro area that I was raised in, and that's just coincidence. We had dinner - my husband, my son, her husband, and us. My aunt takes after a side of the family that I don't, so we don't look alike. We have the same sense of humor, though, and that was wonderful. I'm glad that I met her first - it was less charged, and I feel better prepared for some of the upcoming reunions that will involve my immediate family.

Anyway, she gave me a photo album. It contains pictures of my father's family going back to the 1840's, when photography was new. It's amazing to trace them down through the years, as their resemblance to me grows stronger and stronger. It's amazing to look at someone born a hundred years ago and think, "I have her chin"...these are things that I knew, intellectually, were missing from my life. But having them - oh, that's another thing entirely. More than any other photo, I keep going back to the one taken shortly after my birth. My grandmother stands with her children; my uncle, my aunt and her first husband, and my father. And my mother. His hand is on her shoulder, and he's looking over the top of her head. They're staring into the camera. I'm the only grandchild at that point in time. And I'm missing. I'm a thousand miles away, I'm toddling out behind the barn, watching the horses, playing with my dog. I'm not there - but I'm in the world. I have a life unfolding, but all I see in that picture is my not-there-ness, a space in her arms where I should have been. So - gifts. That come wrapped in the pain of knowing that the picture is incomplete.

Is it wrong to think about photoshopping myself in? I'm tempted, just to see what it would have looked like if they had, you know...kept me.

It does hurt.

Reunion

B-Dad's girlfriend hates me, and would like to shut me out of their lives. Luke needs support that I can't give him from half a continent away. My grandmother is myself in forty years. And my aunt has developed a friendship with my husband in the past week that is shocking since he was supportive of the search but totally opposed to being involved in the result.

And despite the emotions that are swirling around me, I am left with life instead of a fairy tale. This is a family. This is my family. It's not perfect. It's a little screwy. And it makes me feel like I belong.

They (Dad) keep(s) apologizing because it's messy and hard and not Leave it to Beaver. But I don't want that - it would feel too much like Pleasantville. That isn't who I am. Good lord, I'm listening to Grace Slick as I type this.

I know that some of these feelings of amazement won't last. I hope that eventually they feel enough like real family that I can just look at them as a major pain in the a** and a joy and a blessing like I do with my a-fam. When I try to ignore them because I know they're not going to disappear, that's when I know I'll feel like we've settled - it may take years.

What I hope I don't lose is this feeling I get who I am, where I come from, and how I relate to the world. It's the first time in my life I've ever felt this way...

And we're off...

Once upon a time...

It isn't a fairy story, but it's my story. And my history, and my roots. The search is over, and reunion has slammed into me like a train.

I found Luke's father on Facebook. Luke's father is my father. Luke's mother is my mother. This is the story of how I happened.

They were high school sweethearts, in their way. She isn't the one with the taste in fast men - that came from him. She was a fast girl. He was her rock. They experimented - more a Bob Seger song than Barry Manilow. It was the seventies, and they were working on their night moves. And then...me. They were dealing with the fallout and leaning on each other. And then...Luke.

I have known my father less than a week; twenty-four hours now, and a few days in the hospital before my parents came to pick me up. I love him already. He's lovely and amazing. I wish I could take away his pain, which is real. I wish I could convince him that I love him as he is, and that I don't blame him for anything. He is very present. But he's hard on himself. I'm like him that way. First mothers say that they don't tell them what it will be like. That you look at the tiny faces and love them instantly. They don't tell us that we will look at their mature faces and love them instantly too. They don't tell us that it will be another family member; that their burdens will be our burdens, and their joys our joys, and that a connection can strike like lightning.

They don't tell you the things that you will hear that will break your heart won't be cruel, but kind.

• Sweetheart
• You're beautiful
• You're amazing
• I always wondered and hoped for you
• You are my daughter
• I want to be your son's grandfather, too
• You will live to be ninety
• Your great-grandfather was...
• You are just like me

I am processing, processing. I am grateful. My brother has finally broken out of his shell. It took seeing a picture of our father...

Life is lovely and amazing.