Mother's Day 1996--Thank You Birthmothers

I recently came across this piece I wrote some 17 years ago. I didn't have any way of publishing this then, there were no blogs in 1996, but I strongly believe it is still relevant today. I don't think adoption has changed much in the past two decades for birth mothers. I am pretty sure making the choice to place a child for adoption is not any easier now than it was then.  I know that adoptees still cannot access their records if they were adopted before open adoption became commonplace. I know gays and lesbians still cannot adopt children in many states. I appreciate how fortunate I was to be able to adopt my daughters in the early 1990s.

I am no longer in a relationship with my partner and co-parent--we split up in late 1996, just a few months after I wrote this. 

Mother’s Day 1996

As we celebrate Mother’s Day at our house, we also celebrate our youngest daughter’s second birthday. The irony is, that two years ago on Mother’s Day, we did yet know that she would even be a part of our lives. Two years ago, her birthmother was in the hospital alone, making a decision to place her fourth child for adoption.

As I look forward to celebrating my sixth years as a mother, I cannot help but think of several mothers who have made such an impact on my mothering.  I would not be a mother at all were it not for Deidre and Cheryl. I would not be a sister except for a woman who made an unselfish choice nearly thirty years ago. Much in my life would be different if it were not for a woman whose last name is Wilmuth who chose not to parent her daughter, my mother. I may not be a good mother or a mother in such fortunate circumstances had it not been for my biological grandmother.

In essence, much of my life is the culmination of the decisions of several mothers whom I do not know, women who gave life and gave life away, trusting more than I know I could, in the kindness of strangers to do what they themselves, for whatever reason, could not do at the time. While I know the circumstances and a bit about the women who gave birth to my daughters, I know very little about the women who bore my brother and my mother. And if I as a daughter and a sister feel this void on Mother’s Day, what must my mother and my brother live with every day? What will my children grow to feel and believe about their birth mothers? And what can I do to facilitate their questioning and understanding of their adoptions and families of origin?

This year these questions seem particularly poignant as Mother’s Day comes on the heels of major adoption law reforms: tax credits for families who adopt, removal of racial barriers in adoption. These laws, like so much about adoption, fall short of doing justice for those who really make adoption possible—the birth mothers. As so often happens, the lawmakers are approaching the issue sideways, at an awkward angle, seemingly unconcerned about the birth mothers and where they will go and what they will do after placing their children for adoption. With the noble intention of placing as many kids as possible in permanent families out of the chaos that is foster care, or leaders have inadvertently promoted adoptive parents as saviors worthy of reward and blatantly disregarded birthparents, especially in cases of transracial adoptions. I often hear from people how lucky my kids are to have us as parents, read these kids are so much better off with us than they would be with someone whom they could only imagine as an impoverished, unemployed, welfare-scamming, drug abusing, teenaged illiterates.

Well, maybe and maybe not. We cannot place a value on knowing our families of origin, of knowing where we came from, where we got our eyes, our funny feet, and our predilection for taking risk in whatever form it comes.

I rarely pause to consider my mannerisms and preferences because I know exactly from which parent I acquired each personality quick and physical characteristic.  From my mother and my father both a love of reading, from my mother my brown eyes and auburn hair, thin wrists, and a tendency to sometimes overreact.  From my father a disdain for the mundane, my spelling and writing abilities, a preternatural aversion to authority in all forms, and naturally curly hair.  Sure, my kids may learn to love to read because I do, and they may become avid gardeners because my partner is, but in the battle for control of the self, nature wins out over nurture 70% of the time. Where will my kids turn for answers when they excel in science or develop a completely un-nurtured talent for music, a dangerous attraction to alcohol?

How will my kids cope, not just with unanswered medical history questions, but with the color of their skin, the kinks in their hair, the rich and painful history of their (unknown) ancestors? The partial understanding of their backgrounds, maybe the knowledge that their birthfathers abandoned them, their birthmothers kept some of their siblings but not them? I hope than an open adoption and an ongoing communication with my children’s birthmothers will facilitate an increased understanding for each of my kids of where they came from, from whom they got their talents.  

But who is going to make sure that the birth mothers survive, grow up, get their lives together? If we are going to reform adoption law, we had better start with nurturing the connections between birth mother and adoptee, we had better start honoring the difficult, no wrenching, decisions birth parents make when they plan an adoption for their child.  We had better put out a safety net for those who can’t pull themselves up and carry on.  We had better think about offering something to the women who can’t afford to keep their children rather than to adoptive parents who have the wherewithal and resources to negotiate the adoption process and to afford agency and lawyer fees.

Just yesterday we received our first ever communication from our two-year old’s birth mother. For two years we have been sending letters and pictures off into space, an act of faith that imbues the postal service with godlike qualities. Yesterday came the confirmation that our faith was well placed. Yesterday too came a whole new conundrum and set of questions when we received two letters: one was very sweet, telling us how much se enjoyed the pictures we have been sending, how she is still glad she chose us to raise her baby, that she and our daughter will talk one day, that she is a good mother. The other letter asked for money so she wouldn’t lose her house.

Thoughts on Mothers' Day

I've put up a new blog on my other site pamelahelberg.com, some thoughts on Mother's Day and how I didn't know then how I would make it to now.

Shopping in the Boys' Department

Check it out over here, at my website,

http://pamelahelberg.com/2013/04/30/waffle-stompers-or-how-i-came-to-shop-in-the-boys-department/

Just a few thoughts on gender and clothing--the politics of what we wear (only not very political, mostly ruminating and wandering).

See you over there . . . and while you're there, would you mind liking and following me on that site?

Thanks ever so much!

Pam

Simply a Love Story

One of the giant, impossible, gnarliest questions nearly all writers face is how to handle the people in their lives, particularly the people who might people their stories.  Of course this is a theoretical question at first.  And is handled as such in writing classes and groups and in discussions with writing gurus.  Sometimes the fear is simply dismissed as a worry for amateurs. If we don’t write something, anything, nothing will ever be published, rendering our worries moot.

Published writers have expounded upon this fear in encouraging fashion, and I’ve long been an adherent to Anne Lamott’s pithy comments on the subject: “Write as if your parents are dead” and “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Because if I didn’t believe this while I’m writing, I’d be paralyzed with anxiety, even more paralyzed than is normal for a writer.

At some point, if one is a serious writer, this concern blithely traipses across that line from theoretical to real. And this is what we serious writers want, what we yearn and ache for . . . that our work, our words, our views gain traction in the world and have lives of their own. Writing is not unlike having kids—we nurture, feed, hone, discipline, stay up at night, worry, fret, and finally let them loose to have lives of their own, and nothing prepares us for what comes next because we just don’t know, we no longer have control.

We celebrate. Publication parties, excited phone calls. Flowers. Like a graduation, an 18th birthday. Ours but no longer ours. Reflections on us forever it seems. And so.

I have always wanted to be a writer, but for many years did not write due to fear, fear that my words would be misunderstood, misinterpreted, used against me; fear that my words, my experiences would wound, maim, alienate, damage. I can trace that fear back to a specific incident, and what I learned then was this: I am not okay. Who I am, my deepest most intimate thoughts and experiences, the ones I dared to commit to paper are all wrong. Wrong, bad, evil even.

I hadn’t written a Unabomber manifesto or a hate-filled credo, simply a love story, a story between two teenage girls, the thralls of first love, the whispers, the profound moments of stolen passion, found time. The untimelydiscovery of this story scrawled in my loopy teenaged hand set me on a path that has led me directly to this day, yesterday, and the day before that. The past month, the last two years when I started taking my writing seriously again.

That story, the one that launched me into a world of trouble and onto the path that found me here, found the light of day again in a recently published anthology, and then again as it was reprinted by The Friendly Atheist Blog at patheos.com which is where I think my mom must have read it. She’s known for a good while now that I had an essay that would be published, and she knew the general context of the story, but she wasn’t prepared for the reality of my words. This time though, she’s not mortified by who I am or the story I am telling, but by her actions at the time, the beliefs she (and my father) held then, the ways in which these beliefs colored and shaped my life.

She emailed me a couple of weeks ago after I’d blogged about being raised Christian fundamentalist and the resulting damage to my psyche. She emailed to apologize and to beg forgiveness. I wrote back easily, telling her that forgiveness had long ago won out, that I no longer held that anger. We’ve been close in the past twenty some years, my mom and I. She’s been my biggest champion.  I think I can write now about what happened then because I know we have a good relationship.

So I was sad when she emailed yesterday, telling me she wouldn’t be able to come to my reading and the book launch party for Beyond Belief on Sunday. She thought she might cry and be embarrassed and she still felt really awful about all of the Christian craziness of my childhood. She asked for my forgiveness, again. I reiterated what I’d said a few weeks ago: We are good. We have come to this place from those times. I forgive you. I love you.

My mother has her own stories. We all do. We own them. We can’t let fear in any of its guises (shame, guilt,vulnerability, martyrdom) silence us because then fear has won.

The First Time

Beyond Belief Contributors:  Cami, Pam, Susan, Colleen, Elise

So, Readers, the reading at Elliott Bay Book Company was fantastic! The first time was all I expected it to be ~ magical, terrifying, exhilarating. Every last one of us did ourselves proud—Cami, Susan, Colleen, Elise, me. At first, I didn’t think anyone was going to show up, and I wondered if we’d still carry on with the reading for a crowd of six, five of which were us, one of which was The Little Woman. 

But then Greg—our Elliott Bay liaison— told us to wait til 10 after the hour and sure enough, next time I looked up, the place was packed. And while I definitely know that a full house is the better than an empty one, I had a small moment of panic.  That panic I wrote of last week—the fear of being seen.

I had practiced my reading the night before with TLW who told me that I needed to be more passionate in my delivery.  So, I had that in my head as I stepped up to the microphone there in the basement at Elliott Bay Books (what is it with basements as reading areas?).

I intro’d my reading with the story of the Jehovah’s Witness flyer with its metrosexual Jesus that arrived on my doorstep the same day I got my copies of the BB anthology in the mail.  That got a good laugh—a good sign.  And I tried my darnedest to read with passion.  (TLW reported later that I nailed it, passion-wise). Still, I was nervous, nerves that come from the fear not just of being exposed, but of being misunderstood by strangers and misinterpreted by those closest to me.

Anne Lamott advises to “write as if our parents were dead” and that seems good in theory, but it’s scary in reality.  My story paints a rather unflattering portrait of my parents, and this is one of my primary anxieties—both that my parents will be hurt/angry/sad that I wrote so honestly about what transpired AND that the audience will think they are bad people with whom I’ve severed all ties. 

That's ME! At Elliott Bay Books!

So, it was with great relief that an audience member asked The Question—the one question I hoped hoped hoped someone would ask:  “How is your relationship with your parents now?” I’m happy to report that I have solid relationships with both of my parents and that we’ve all come out the other side of this crazy religious nonsense.

And really, that’s the best part of my story. 

Writing is Daring Greatly (thanks Brene Brown)

Dear Reader—Tomorrow night is my debut as a published writer—my first reading of a piece of writing that is actually in a book.  Not on a blog, not off my printer, but there on the printed page amongst other pieces in a collection of published writing.

Pretty sweet. I have to say that it is about damn time considering I’m closing in rapidly on the big  Five Oh (mere months away) and considering I’ve wanted to be a writer for, oh, all of my life. So what conspired to keep me silent and unpublished all these years?

Fear. Fear of being known, of being vulnerable, of being reviled. Shame. The certainty that what I had to say didn’t mean anything to anyone else. The terror that what I thought made no sense to anyone else. Scared that if I committed the thoughts in my head to paper that I would be forever judged by what I wrote down, by the ink stains.

So, what changed? What enabled me to throw caution to the wind, to finally put pen to paper and let the world in on my innermost thoughts? Fear. Ha! How’s that for irony? But seriously, the fear that I might never realize my dream of being a writer impelled me to write.

What if suddenly I were unable to write tomorrow? What if I’d played it safe all these years, thinking I had unlimited time ahead in which to overcome my fears slowly, always confident there would be time later to pen my memoirs, and suddenly I found myself incapacitated? I’d be pissed—angry that my fear of vulnerability, the shame of being thought less of had kept me from sharing my most authentic self.

I didn’t write for so many years because I thought that a) I would be laughed at or, more likely, told my ideas were heretical and would ultimately land me in hell (seriously) or b) I didn’t think I had anything worthwhile to say, that my ideas weren’t universal enough to catch on with anyone outside of my own head.

I realized, in small, baby steps, however, that people did listen when I read, my words did resonate, and slowly, I found a writing community, a group of other writers to cheer me on and for whom I could root. As Cheryl Strayed told us at the Wild Mt. Memoir retreat a couple of weeks ago, we should write from a place of abundance, that is sharing our joy and passion with other writers and cheering them on because there is plenty to go around.

I’ve been reading a lot of Brene Brown lately, and if you haven’t had a chance to catch one of her TED lectures, caught her with Oprah on Super Soul Sunday or read one of her books, make the effort. She’s got some amazing research to share, some great life lessons about living with vulnerability, abundance, and passion.

So, tomorrow. That’s it. Tomorrow I lay myself bare in front of complete and total strangers. Wow. That's daring. Greatly.

Mawwage . . .

After much internal deliberation, I changed my Facebook profile picture this week, going with the Peanuts version of the red HRC equal sign (gotta love Peppermint Patty, Sir).

I’m not usually one to jump on such bandwagons—I don’t know if I’m trying to remain hip and aloof or if I’m apathetic, but I’m not a joiner.  Typically.  My whole life has pretty much been about not belonging, not joining, being outside/other. I’ve been going back and forth on gay marriage . . . not that I don’t believe that gays and lesbians should have the right to marry—we definitely should have that right.  

I’m just not quite sure why, exactly, we want it.  Oh, I know, I know—it confers upon us the rights that every person in an intimate partnership should have.  I get that. I do. I want those rights, too. But do we have to get them through the institution of marriage?

Think about it. What’s so great about marriage? Besides the rights, I mean. And why should we have to rely on marriage to confer upon us basic human rights? Marriage is both a religious and a patriarchal institution. The fact that we have to buy into it in order to share birth, life, and death events with our lovers/partners/co-parents is just plain ludicrous. Insulting.

When I was in graduate school way back in the mid-80s, my girl friend at the time and I had a commitment ceremony.  We planned to raise a family together. So we sat in a circle with some close friends, cast a pagan circle to the South, North, East, and West and promised to “love and honor each other’s growth and change.” A friend of mine at the time, a lesbian-feminist, a dyke if ever there was one, asked me why I wanted to get married. It’s just mimicking the patriarchy, she told me. Marriage is about women as property, she said.  Women as chattel. 

I saw our commitment ceremony then as sort of a fuck you to the patriarchy—which is sort of how I saw myself as a lesbian as well.  As painful as being closeted and as hard as it was to be invisible as a lesbian, I got a charge from being a stealth lesbian, from flying under the radar. I feel kind of the same way about marriage now. I didn’t ever see myself as buying in to the patriarchy because we weren’t.  We were taking a hetero ritual and turning it on, if not its head exactly, at least on its side, an action that felt subversive.

So much of my life has been lived subversively, on the down low. Under the radar. And for good reason—life above ground could be dangerous: emotionally, physically, psychically. I’m having some trouble letting go—I feel a bit like a mole just coming to the surface. Kind of pissed off about all of the noise and that it’s so bright up here, and annoyed that the rest of the world has decided that we are worthy of the attention.

I feel like “you know what? We’ve taken good care of ourselves so far, no thanks to anyone else. We’ve come together in crisis, we’ve marched bravely in the streets in spite of what the rest of the world might think, enduring shame and refusing to take it anymore. Who are YOU to think you can even debate my most basic rights?”

We have all the paperwork we need to guarantee our future together: powers of attorney, wills, joint ownership of the house. We have taken it upon ourselves to ensure our future, as much as anyone can ensure the future. So why, I asked myself, do we need to be granted the right to marry?

Why do we need a law? I have to say, it’s hard for me not to feel like straight and privileged culture is deigning to let us in, saying “oh, well, I suppose, if you insist, you can come and sit at the adult table with us grown ups, us normal people. Just, you know try to behave while you are here.”

So, I changed my Facebook picture to the red equal sign because, even after I had this internal rant with myself (now external—I know, I couldn’t keep it to myself, it needed air), I think that we need equality. Period. We are all different, but we are all equal and deserving of the same basic human rights, and apparently, we are going to have to continue to legislate the obvious because no one seems to be giving this shit away.