Rene Denfield and the Birth of Love

I read an essay yesterday by Rene Denfield that changed my life. I read it outside bundled up in a winter jacket even though it was not even that cold. I had been writing in my hammock cocoon, and then I checked Facebook and found the essay Born Again: Rene Denfield on the Birth of Love. I read it and then I put my computer aside and looked up at the trees with their falling leaves. A balloon that had been pressing up against my heart for a very long time lifted and sailed away.

I wanted everyone I knew and all the other people, too, to read this essay because something important had happened: Rene Denfield had showed us a new way to love.

This is the third summer I have come to the Vineyard in search of a way to resolve my feelings about my relationship with my mom. Something was left unfinished between us when she died, and I keep coming back to here because this is where I had seen her happiest when I was a child, and I had the idea that I could somehow find here what was missing.

In my book, I wrote that I wished my mom had held me in the field behind our rented house on the Vineyard and that we’d both cried about the fact that I was adopted. Instead, my adoption was, at least for me, an invisible wall between us. My mom was both my mom and not my mom, and this is not something I write lightly because she was my mom. She was the only mom I knew.

But she was also not the mother who gave birth to me, and this is a horrendous thing, to love your mom so much and to also know that technically, if you had to go before a judge and prove that your mom was in fact, 100% your mother, you would lose the case because the judge would call for a DNA test, and that thing would show the lie.

This made me hate my mom a little. The hate come out in subtle and not so subtle ways. I stole money from her, repeatedly. When she had cancer and I was in my twenties, I was not always kind because I was so afraid she was going to leave me so I was going to leave first. This was not an awareness I had at the time. All I knew was that I hated the sickness in my mother’s eyes and body, hated her sticky need for me, and I wanted to push her off a cliff so she would just get it over with and be dead. I felt awful about myself, sick with self-hatred as I hated her. If I had known about my limbic brain, if I had known baby me had lost her mother before she was prepared to handle such a shock to her nervous system, I would have gone to a therapist. I would have talked to my mom and cried and told her about how scared I was to lose her.

My mom didn’t like to talk about the fact that I had another mother. I mean she didn’t talk about it. We shared an unspoken, unconscious terror that the other would disappear, and this bound us in complicated ways. I dropped out of college three times because, in part, I couldn’t imagine my mother thriving without me in the house. I was always so confused when I’d arrive home after leaving school to find my mother upset and heartbroken that I’d quit, yet again. She would remove herself from me, hide in her room, while she processed her disappointment. I would act out and find ways to try to throw myself away. I’d drink and drive. I’d have stupid jobs I hated. I’d spend all the money I made on things I didn’t really like or need. If only I had known that I was trying to have my outer world mirror my inner mind that was telling me I was a true fuck up, if only I’d been able to talk to my mother about the awful confusion that was my brain and body, maybe then I would have been able to walk into love instead of so consistently running away from it.

These are the lines that quieted my soul in Rene Denfield’s essay as she wrote about her relationship with Tony:

“He’s afraid we’re going to give him back,” said his new big sister.

“We’re not,” I said. 

I’m still afraid my mom is going to give me back, and she’s dead.

Rene Denfield’s essay is so magical that it’s hard to write about it without cutting and pasting the whole thing, so here’s another piece I love:

After work, school, and therapy, our nightly routine was dinner, then storytime. Every night we finished with Goodnight Moon and then walked outside in our jammies to wave goodnight to the moon itself. 

We were poor, but the kids didn’t know it. They thought the shabby toys from the thrift store were filled with magic. They had a safe bed every night and a sky filled with majesty. 

“The moon will never go away,” I told them as we waved. 

It was Tony who turned his alert, watchful face to me. “Like you,” he said. 

“Like me,” I answered. “Like us. You too.” 

I could tell he thought about that for the longest time.

This is a piece of the puzzle that many people miss when talking about foster care or adoption. The issue of real goes both ways: the child needs to know that he is real while at the same time knowing the parent is also real. When you lose the person who gave you life, it’s easy to feel the entire planet also disappeared and that you are a martian—only because no one else seems to see you as an alien, you become an underground one, a confused, heartbroken, furious stranger in a strange land.

So now we are getting to my favorite part of the essay. One day, five-year-old Tony asked Rene if he could climb up under her shirt, and she cradled his big body under her shirt tent, limbs dangling.

“Take me outside,” he said, his voice muffled. 

I carried him outside, holding him under the fabric. “Walk me up and down the street,” he said. 

I did. 

“Tell everyone you are going to have a baby.”

I walked past our neighbors, out gardening on this beautiful spring evening. 

“Guess what!” I announced. “I’m having a baby!”

Bless their souls, they responded well. “Oh, that’s great news!” They shouted back. 

It became our tradition. I wore a big tee-shirt, and Tony climbed up underneath. His big sister walked proudly next to us. 

“Guess what?” I called. All the neighbors came to know this game. “I’m so happy for you,” they called back when I announced my news. 

When we got back home, Tony jumped out of my shirt. “I’m here!” he cried, his cheeks flushed pink with pleasure. 

“You’re here!” I clapped for joy.  

When I read this, I realized on a gut level what I was looking for: my mom’s acceptance of all that I am. While it is true that she loved me what felt unconditionally with that sweet heart of hers, it is also true that there were conditions, and this is so confusing, not seeing the difference between unconditional and conditional love. Any time I mentioned the fact that I had a mother out there in the world who had given birth to me, my mother would tear up and leave the room, and when she left the room she also left me, and in that way I got to relive the original trauma of mother loss and the belief in my brain that there is something wrong with me because even my mother left me. Both mothers.

The truth is, I’d had this realization before, but I’d never been provided a narrative that showed exactly what it was that would have answered my call of Help! I don’t know what to do with the fact that I don’t have a mother I can 100% call my own.

I love that it was Tony who claimed Rene. She did not force herself on him as his mother. She just kept showing up and giving love, and so then he had the amazing opportunity to stake his claim, to create real in his life. I would have loved to have claimed my mom in this way. I would have loved to have climbed up under her shirt and for her to proudly tell the neighbors, after I had asked her to, that she was pregnant. I would have loved to have fallen out from beneath the tent of her and to claimed her as my own.

This is all so tricky to write about because if my mom had tried anything like this on her own, it would have felt fake and gross, and I would have been angry that she was trying to claim something that wasn’t hers. I was, remember, the child of another woman. Having one mother is complicated enough. Imagine having two! Or three!

Growing anything is messy business. Just planting a seed gets dirt under your nails. Raising a kid that is not biologically yours is one of the messiest businesses of all. Adoptees and foster kids are speaking out in ways that are unprecedented, and the world is getting a crash course in the side-effects of trauma. We are learning; we are teaching ourselves and each other.

Rene said, They say you have to love yourself before you can love others. I am here to say this not true. I loved my children long before I loved myself. The act of loving when you are not sure you are loved in return is tightrope business. The fall of I gave all that I have and I got nothing but anger in return and I am still so alone is long and deep, and yet the commitment to walk the walk of love is, in my mind, the most heroic thing we can do as human beings for it is what saves others, brings them back to life, lets them know they are real. It is the thing, also, of course, that saves ourselves.

The beauty and gift of writing is that people can make our lives so much bigger by sharing theirs. When I read about Tony’s re-birth, I felt it happen in my own body. I claimed my mom. I climbed under her shirt and I let myself imagine the heat of her skin, the complicated business of one body pressing against another.

You are my mom. I love you.

And here’s where I have to tell you something: I’m afraid that if my mom were still alive and that if I had the guts to tell her what I wanted—if I had the guts of 5-year-old Tony—that my mom would say no, and then I would have to live the rest of my life knowing that the person I needed to love me didn’t love me enough.

Loving is such a dangerous, wild endeavor.

Because here is the other part: if I had been able to claim my mother, that would have meant I would have had to live with the knowledge that I had two mothers, and that because I had two, truly neither were mine completely. Or, more incredibly, that in fact both mothers were 100% mine and then I had to live a life where I was full of love.

In so many ways it is easier to feel numb than to feel love.

Because to truly love someone, I think, also involves the luxury of hate, of fury, of anger, of disappointment, of honesty. It is possible because I am so afraid I will lose what I love that I have never let myself feel the full range of emotions that result from being in relationship. It is possible I am as afraid of anger as I am of love.

When you have lost a parent as a child, having negative feelings about the ones you have can feel final. To my traumatized brain, if I hate you sometimes, it means our relationship is flawed, is not real, is over. It means love has left the building. But as we all know, this is not true. To love means you can push away and the push away is an action that also involves the ability to pull toward. Our emotions are tidal. We are, after all, more water than flesh.

I have so much to learn about love. Thank you, Rene and Tony for hanging the stars so brightly in the sky.

https://ravishly.com/born-again-rene-denfeld-birth-love