How to be a Good Little Orphan III, Part the First: Bears, Wrestling, Looming Untimely Death

I am forever bound to a tall male nurse with a honeyed voice -- not because of our time together in speech and theater, or because I care even one whit for his beloved Cubs (I do not), or even because he was with me for my mother's death, but because he understands me without interrogation and conjecture; I am an open book to my friend Mark in part because Mark is also adopted. At the time I met Mark in a gym-class softball game, I was only fifteen; I had no idea he too was adopted, and that he would ease me through my mother's death -- and who else out there in the wide world lived under continual interrogation and conjecture.

In 1997 -- while I was moving and Chloe was beginning and Tracey was returning and Beck was marrying -- Mark was living in an apartment at Irving Park Road and Halsted. Mark was not long out of the Army, and tended bar at the Dave and Buster's near the Newberry Library. I lived on his couch for a few days when I relocated north from Carbondale. Before winter set in, our lives just got too busy. We talked not enough. We drank Red Stripe at Exedeus II not enough. Soon I was getting remarried, buying a house, moving my re-wife and my re-life back to Lansing, preparing for Chloe's arrival. Soon, Mark moved to an apartment at Sheffield and Waveland; although his apartment was in the basement, he was still entitled to his spot on the rooftop and the view into Wrigley Field across Waveland.

My mother's name was Waveland -- as far as anybody ever knew. My mother's name was actually Wavelene, although no one ever called her that. She was most often called Waveland, Waverly, or Maybelline. My mother hated bastardizations of her name -- with the exception that she used the truncation Wave, going so far in her last years as to sketch (rather than write) her name as a series of pointed squiggles such as a child might draw to indicate the surface of a body of water.

Chloe was drawing near. or Edmund. Tracey and I really thought that Chloe would be Edmund. Edmund if it were a boy and Bellatrix if it were a girl -- later, Chloe Bellatrix if it were a girl. It were a girl. It was EdBell while it was still gender-neutral to us. While Tracey was ready to drop EdBell, Michael Jordan and the fellas were wrapping up the double three-peat. This big straight bear -- sports hater and all-around anti-athlete -- had to wrestle with the pandemic of Bulls Fever, but eventually I succumbed to my inevitable infection. It had happened with pro-basketball before -- with Dr. J and the ABA.

I was just a little feller when the ABA was around. The Harlem Globetrotters were popular with us kiddies in the 1970s, and the ABA looked like a whole league of Globetrotters. Dr. J made the finger roll and the slam dunk look like astronaut moves on a spacewalk. These were the Apollo program days at NASA: everything -- even professional basketball -- was better with a touch of outer space. The end of the ABA brought an end to my interest in pro basketball until Jordan and Pippen. I never had any interest in the college basketball that was and is such heroin to my Dad. I was always more interested in outer space.

I would escape monotonous winter evenings of UK Wildcats basketball by literally staring off in to space with my favorite volume of the Childcraft Encyclopedia to guide me around the circumpolar sky. On the top floor of my childhood home on Locust St. was a north-facing window; it stood unshaded next to the top of the upper stairs, like a giant's peephole onto I-80 and Chicago beyond, like an eye on the Great Bear chasing the Little Bear around the the top of night.

Night after night I would stare up at Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus. My mythology was a little fuzzy when I was young, but I knew that Cassiopeia and/or Cepheus pissed off the powers that be and were pressured to give away their kid, Andromeda, to the Kraken (Cetus). I suppose that means Children's Home and Aid Society is the Kraken. The natural extensions of metaphor seem obvious, except that there was a consonant in the ointment.

W.

No, not Dubya. W.

The constellation Cassiopeia looks like a big W. W for Wavelene. So, Mom was Cassiopeia which meant Dad was Cepheus. I was indeed Andromeda. That rock in Jaffa Harbor (to which Andromeda was chained) was my upbringing as an adoptee. Cetus/the Kraken is the wide world and its attitudes about and toward adoptees. So, who are those two bears right in the middle of this Ray Harrihausen movie? The Big Dipper or Ursa Major was my birthfather. My birthmother was Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper -- stuck in one place, anchored to the north celestial pole by Polaris, the Guiding Light.

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight

The level of sticky-sweet sentimentality is so staggering here even Don Bluth would go into insulin shock. If he were here, my friend Mark would make some non-verbal "Mah" grunt of not-havin'-any-of-it. Mark's voice is very smooth and low, with just a tad of the Charlie in a Box from the Island of Misfit Toys - easy to listen to, hard to dismiss. Mark turned some GI Bill funding into school and more school and finally into nursing. Meanwhile, I was wage slaving for this young family I had made. Over the next decade, Mark and I, our world's diverged and our infrequent contact became less frequent still.

Simultaneously, my birthfamily and I stopped speaking so much. After we all survived Y2K unscathed, contact dwindled. God knows what meanings were ascribed to those silences. If the members of my birthfamily are something like me -- and some of them are more than something like me -- those silences were seldom interpreted favorably.

My Mom, my adoptive mother, Wave, was interpreting nothing favorably thanks to her prescription-induced personality disorder. I will never be certain how much of the problem was due to the side-effects of the drugs, but I am going to blame the meds anyway. We had relocated back to Lansing, in part, to give my ailing mother aid and comfort; Mom now made it difficult to be around her for longer any amount of time.

By the summer of 2007 and inordinate amount of time had passed since I has spoken to anyone in my birthfamily. Every relationship there had been dependent on the relationship between me and my birthmother. Naturally. I thought I should contact her first. I remembered when her birthday is in late July. A simple birthday card would be a nice re-entry. A card would parallel how the original reunion process through Children's Home and Aid Society was conducted mostly through the mail.

Next time: watch the orphan wrestle the bear.

How to be a Good Little Orphan II: Filling in Some Gaps

When I was a kid, I had braces. I also had an addiction to Cool Ranch Doritos, so I popped lots of braces off, which means that the process took extra long. I had braces for a long damn time.

When I met my birthsister Beck, she had braces. I can't remember if she had braces at her wedding. I wish there weren't so many gaps in my memories from back then; September of 1997 was the tipping point of my life. I remember that in Beck's photo on her wedding invitation, her lips were very consciously together. I remember Beck being self-conscious about her diastema -- the gap between her two front teeth. I suppose she saw how much a diastema hurt the careers of Lauren Hutton, Kate Moss, and Madonna.

If a gapped-toothed smile is a common trait within my birthfamily, then I am an exception. I have a small gap between my two front teeth from a childhood injury to my gums (I can spit a thin jet of water Super Soaker style). Apparently my orthodontist thought my mouth was too full, as he had four of my permanent teeth pulled. I had one more pulled because of a cracked root. Oh...and all four of my wisdom teeth were cut out -- which may explain the gaps in my memories. I am down nine teeth already. I feel like such a stereotypical hillbilly.

I was raised by hillbillies (hillbillies with teeth, though). My Dad is from western Kentucky near Ft. Campbell. My Mom was from eastern Kentucky in the mountains. Growing up in Lansing, most of our neighbors were third and fourth generation Dutch. I think some of those neighbors were puzzled that we weren't obliged to live in Black Oak or Lake Station -- but I have never been a Hoosier. Lansing is my hometown. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. So, I left Lansing for Carbondale -- southern Illinois, hillbilly country.

While living downstate, I began to worry about my birthmother whom I did not know. It seemed like every Lifetime movie in the 1990s starred Melissa Gilbert (a fellow adoptee) as a young mother who gave a child up and then spent her life trying to fill that gap -- with booze, with men, with pine cones and hot glue. If there were I gap left in my birthmother's life, I thought I should at least preheat the hot-glue gun. I searched for my birthmother through Children's Home and Aid Society...and quickly found her. Surprise, my birthparents raised five girls an hour north of Lansing.

I originally sought my birthmother to let her know that I was okay, to tell her that I did not begrudge her anything. I let her know. I told her. Then what? I had sought and found and filled in what gaps I could, but had scant idea how to proceed. I didn't just have a birthmother, I had five birthsisters. Six women, familiar strangers, came slowly toward me like a horde of loving zombies.

I let my Mom and Dad, my adoptive parents, know that I was doing a search for my birthfamily. Growing up, they had asked me numerous times if I was interested it finding my birthmother. It seems they expected me to do it sooner or later.

Mom said she was glad for it, glad for me.

Lie.

Dad said that once the newness wore off of the situation that he wanted to get everybody together for a barbecue -- my birthfamily and my adoptive family.

Complete insanity.

Extended analogy? Don't mind if I do. Let's say I had a girlfriend who left me (although she loved me) because, for one legitimate reason or another, she did not think she could stay with me. She even went so far as to leave me in the hands of a matchmaker. In short order, the matchmaker set me up with someone else and I married this someone else. Years later, I reconnect with the ex-girlfriend and it is obvious in hindsight that she could have indeed stayed with me and that she never stopped loving me. Am I going to invite that ex-girlfriend to a barbecue thrown by my wife? Nuh-ho Wuh-hay. After that, I tried to avoid talking with Mom and Dad about my birthfamily.

I was in Carbondale then. The 340 miles between Six Corners and SIU hindered relationship-building somewhat -- but slow and steady as she goes.

Then, in the fall of 1996, Mom got sick -- my adoptive mother, the mother I grew up with. She had a heart condition called cardiomyopathy, a weakening of part of the heart caused (in her case) by a viral infection. I didn't come see her when she was first hospitalized. She told me not to. She told me she was fine, just a little wake-up call.

Lie.

Mom got sicker. She had to take IV treatments of dobutamine for several hours at a time several times a week. Angioplasty didn't help. A stent didn't help. A permanent port for the IV that was put under the skin of her arm didn't help.

Multiple drugs used in combination helped -- but those cocktails had side effects. The drugs made her loopy-headed and paranoid.

At this same time, my marriage was on the skids. I withdrew socially from just about anyone I couldn't go have a drink with -- even my new-found birthfamily somewhat, even my adoptive family somewhat. When I called my Mom to tell her that my marriage was on the skids, she absolutely shredded me. She was sure that I had violated my marriage somehow. I had not. She was sure that I had stepped outside the marriage to fill some petty imagined gap in my sex life. I had not. Mom set fire to a heap emotional trash and dumped it in my lap. She pushed every one of my buttons that she could. I froze -- too shocked to hang up, too shocked to cry, too shocked to even breathe.

Eventually, my wife Tracey and I fixed our relationship -- but right then, at that moment, during that phone call when my Mom was shredding me, my wife who was packing her shit to move out took the phone from me and explained to my Mom that I was a faithful husband. What was Mom thinking? Why was Mom so angry with me? Why couldn't Mom see the gap in her reasoning? Why could Tracey (who was only in my Mom's life because of me) convince Mom, when I (her own son) could not?

I met Tracey about a month after her mother died. Tracey took to Mom right away, and Mom took to her. I understood this. Still, I was family, goddamn it. This was a matter of family, of real family -- not an add-on who was soon to be a used-to-be. I couldn't figure Mom out.

I didn't speak to Mom for a long time after that. I barely spoke to anyone for a long time after that. Dad -- with the look of Norman Schwarzkopf, the diplomacy skills of Bobby Knight, and the voice of Strother Martin -- made a sincere effort to patch things up between Mom and me. It never really took.

Within a year, my wife and I had reconciled. My Mom was still sick, but was acting as if she had never shredded me. I was still gun-shy. Mom had blown a big hole in our relationship, and done nothing to mend the gap.

By September of 1997, my wife Tracey and I wanted a fresh start together, but the culture gap between our student lifestyle and and our professional lives was a problem -- as was having professional lives in Bumfuck Little Egypt. We decided to move back to Chicagoland. Every week of September of 1997, something momentous happened. Week one: I accepted a transfer from the Kinko's in Carbondale to the Kinko's at Ashland and Clybourn via teleconference from St. Louis. Week two: Tracey's amazing grandfather Walter died, so we went up to Chicagoland and back. Week three: I headed for Chicago alone while Tracey continued at SIU Press until she found a publishing gig up north (our goodbyes conceived our daughter Chloe). Week four: Tracey came up from Carbondale to go with me to my birthsister Beck's wedding to a bass player -- where I met my birthfather. After Beck's wedding, there were only a couple of days left in September, yet Tracey and I managed to squeeze in dinners at two of out favorite local restaurants -- Cafe Borgia and Mario's Tacos.

Last month, my birthsister Beck and I met up at Mario's Tacos. I think we had only seen each other a couple of times since her wedding. I wish there weren't so many gaps in my memories from back then; September of 1997 was the tipping point of my life. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Here I was, trying to remember whether or not she still had braces for her wedding -- trying to remember details of all the important events of that month. September of 1997 had obviously been a huge month for Beck as well, yet there were some gaps in her memories from back then. I wonder if she's had her wisdom teeth cut out? I'll bet it's genetic.

Next time: more hi-jinx, and I will try to wrap up this orphan business John Irving style.

How to be a Good Little Orphan I: Like I've got any freakin' idea

We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing.
-- Beck, "Orphans," Modern Guilt

Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?

-- They Might Be Giants. "Ana Ng," Lincoln

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. If you know either of us, you probably already knew that we are adopted, or guessed it.

I resemble the world's largest leprechaun;

Sheree looks like a bit player on The Sopranos.

Growing up, our adoptions were never a secret from us or anyone else. I don't know when I first knew. I always knew. In the I'm OK, You're OK 1970s, adoptees were told to take cheer, because "you weren't expected, you were selected!" More on that in future installments. In 1968, Children's Home and Aid Society couldn't keep white orphan babies on the shelves, especially boys. Even though demand outstripped supply so much that most prospective adoptive parents would have gladly said,"White male hegemony be damned, give us any ol' newborn," I was a spot-on match for my family -- my adoptive family. My mother's red hair and my father's straight-across front teeth garnered them a lot of he-looks-just-like-yous.

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. Notice the use of the present tense. I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. For me, adoption is perpetually in the present tense -- less like face-painting, more like a tattoo.

In my mid-20s, I went through the typical life events: I graduated from college, I got married, I planned out my life's paths. The older generation of my family began dying off. For a while, I was losing grandparents, great uncles, and aunts at a pretty brisk clip. I suppose that all this death sparked something in my back-brain. It burned at the base of my skull for years before it found language: I'm OK. Somewhere, the woman who gave birth to me needed to know I'm OK -- while there's still time left, if there's still time left. I never gave this much thought while I was growing up, but suddenly I felt that she needed to know that I'm OK.

That's not to say that I didn't think about who my birthparents were. I thought about that often. In bad movies-of-the-week, adopted kids are ever running away from their street-urchin existences to seek out their "real" parents who are always successful and rich. This is ridiculous -- not as ridiculous as that piece-of-shit movie August Rush -- but ridiculous nonetheless.

I often felt presque vu. If you were one of those stuck-up bitches who took French in high school, you may remember that presque vu is French for "almost seen." Presque vu can refer to any one of several of related phenomena:

• feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue.
• feeling that you are about to come to some grand realization or epiphany.
• feeling that you just missed something or someone important by mere seconds.

This last sense of presque vu pervaded my youth. If I were in a movie theater, sometimes I would get the overwhelming feeling that my birthmother had been in that same theater (or, even, that same seat) for the previous screening. If I walked up to the counter of a fast-food restaurant, I might get the feeling that my birthfather had just gone through the drive through. Hollywood does it all the time - the departing elevator closes just as the arriving elevator opens. The connection is just barely missed. In the mid-1990s, I made the connection.

This is not the story of the process of my reunion with my birthfamily. Suffice it to say that I reunited with my birthfamily about 13 years ago. Reunion. Sometimes people say reuniting with the birthfamily, sometimes people say reunion. There is no good word for it, because it is not a re- anything for me. I was adopted in infancy; I have no old memories of my birthfamily at all.

I was able to find my birthfamily rather quickly and easily through Children's Home and Aid Society -- the agency through which I was adopted:

From L to R: Beck, Cindy, Wendy, Sally, moron choking on estrogen, Barb, and Abbey.

This was taken at Beck's wedding, back before the turn of the century. The twenty-first century, you meanie. Barb is my birthmother (and look, she put me at her right hand...no symbolism there). Beck, Sally, and Abbey are all younger that I am and are technically my full birthsisters. Cindy and Wendy are both older than I am and are technically my half-birthsisters. They all grew up together with my birthparents. I grew up as the older of two; in my birthfamily, I am the third of six. I am my birthmother's only boy. Do I act like an oldest child with the family I grew up with, but act like a middle child with the family I share DNA with?

Not enough data. Don't bother doing the math, it will only make your head hurt. Besides, there's a lot of unusual math around most adoption stories -- and around this adoption most of that math isn't really my story, that's Barb's story. I exist -- the bathroom scale is the only math I need for that, and that math indicates that I am conjoined twins. Beck and Sally are twins, but not conjoined -- which is lucky since their lives are hundreds of miles apart from each other now. My life is only about an hour from my birthmother's life, and the lives of three of my five birthsisters. Still, I had been almost completely out of contact with them over the last five years , and barely in contact with them for five years before that. About six months ago, I re-initiated contact. So far, there have been lots of warm emails exchanged, a couple of letters, a couple of phone calls, birthday cards, and one face-to-face meeting with Beck (who has outed me to the entire InterWeb as her brother by blogging about it).

Before our recent afternoon together, I think that the last time I saw Beck was at her wedding. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Why? Well, that is a long story...

Next time: more hi-jinx and I will try to fill in some gaps.

How to be a Good Little Orphan: A Primer and Preface

The Coen Brothers made this great movie, Miller's Crossing. For those of you who don't know it, Miller's Crossing is (on the surface) a hard-boiled story about the Irish mob being usurped by the Italian mob in the early days of prohibition. It is full of snappy dialogue like a Dashiell Hammett mystery. As the story-behind-the-story goes, writing the screenplay for Miller's Crossing was kicking Joel and Ethan's butts. The language of Miller's Crossing was a very specific argot, a very specific jargon; it was laborious writing and they were suffering writers' block. They decided to take a break and vent. They vented by writing more, writing something else. They wrote their way through their "issues" by penning a screenplay about a playwright who writes about "the common man," yet is incapable of empathy. This became their their next film, Barton Fink -- unanimous winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

If you have ever seen the Coen Brothers, you may have noticed how much they resemble. They are three years separated in age, but seem as wrapped up in each other as twins in an art-house film. I don't have a twin brother. I don't even have a brother. I have a sister, but we don't resemble and we aren't wrapped up in each other. If you wanted to be shitty, you could say that we aren't even related because she's adopted. Well, she is adopted.

I am adopted.

I have spent the last several days composing my first blog entry about being an adoptee. As I exercised my failing touch-typing skills, everything was going well...until it wasn't. See, the adoption community has some very specific jargon. What's worse, this jargon is hotly contested. I, like the Coen Brothers, need to take a break from my laborious writing to vent -- by writing about what I'm writing about. Confused? Me too.

Unlike Barton Fink, I am capable of empathy. I will try to be fair.

First off, when I say adoption, I am only talking about old-fashioned closed adoption -- where the parents-who-raise-the-kid never know the parents-who-make-the-kid, and all of the records are sealed. My adoption was a closed adoption. Many contemporary adoptions are open adoptions -- there is some level of interplay between both sets of parents. Open adoptions can be much more slippery, but don't really apply to me, so I won't attempt to address them here.

There are three parties to any adoption: the parents-who-make-the-kid, the kid, and he parents-who-raise-the-kid (these are my terms, not terms the adoption community readily uses). These three parties are what's known as the adoption triad. At least we can all agree on that.

The Internet is a great place for people in similar situations to find each other. There are lots of Internet resources for the members of the adoption triad (and their extended families and concerned acquaintances and imaginary friends and pets). Most of these forums are, well, forums -- forums that accept input from anyone involved in adoption in any way. There's not much by way of "Parents-Who-Make-The-Kids United" or "The Adopted Kids Club" or "The Fraternal Order of Parents-Who-Raise-The-Kids." The downside of this inclusiveness is that it creates an environment for bitter philosophical Mexican standoffs among people who could all really use some TLC. We cannot even agree upon what to call each other.

About the time I was born, social workers started using a jargon that is now called Positive Adoption Language, or PAL. I think this was an earnest attempt to be more kid-centered. The parents-who-raise-the-kid (and only the parents-who-raise-the-kid) are called the parents, the mother and father -- the informing logic being that they are the only parents that the adopted kid will know while growing up. The parents-who-make-the-kid are referred to as the birthparents, the birthmother and the birthfather. The changing of custody from the parents-who-make-the-kid to the parents-who-raise-the-kid is called placement.

Those who are offended by Positive Adoption Language are usually mothers-who-make-the-kids, or strongly aligned with mothers-who-make-the-kids. These folks may be proponents of the jargon called Honest Adoption Language, or HAL. Much of the terminology used in HAL has been brought back from the era before social workers began using PAL. In HAL, the mother-who-makes-the-kid is referred to as the first mother or the natural mother. The term adoptive parents is used for the parents-who-raise-the-kid. Surrender or loss is used to describe the changing of custody.

I tend to use PAL in everyday life, such as:

My birthparents went through Children's Home and Aid Society to place me with my Mom and Dad.

When I am writing about adoption issues or when I am talking with other members of the adoption triad, I may say adoptive parents for the sake of clarity. When it comes to which words are appropriate and why, do I have strong opinions and hot rhetoric to back those opinions up? Sure do. I'm going to keep my spittle from flying and my fist from shaking, though. I am not willing to have a Mexican standoff -- that is the stuff of Quentin Tarantino movies, and I have been using a Coen Brothers metaphor. I'll only say that I prefer the PAL jargon because it is, "you know, for kids!"

All this double terminology for double genealogy is taxing. For a more detailed comparison of PAL and HAL, Wikipedia is actually pretty good -- today anyway. Follow this link at your own risk. Now take your flunky and dangle.

Next time: more hi-jinx and the post that was supposed to be this post.