Family Preservation

Today I was lucky enough to be part of a day-long fundraising event Hailey Radke and her team put on for their organization Adoptees for Family Preservation whose goal is to help biological families stay together. Hailey, Lora, Lilly, and Sullivan worked tirelessly to have 32 adopted people read their work for 8 minutes each. They also organized an auction so people could bid on donated goods and services. What a hopeful act of generosity on all their parts. Hailey’s podcast Adoptees On was a life changer for me. Before this show, I did not know that adoptees talking about adoption was a thing. I can’t even begin to count the number of people I’ve met through this podcast. Now Hailey and her team are creating a second podcast, On Adoption, which will focus more on the adoption industry and how it affects the biological families as well as the adoptees.

I found this essay incredibly difficult to write. After countless drafts, I realized I had to write from my heart instead of my head, and then it all poured out.

On my screensaver, I have a picture of me and my two brothers having a picnic in our backyard. I realized recently it’s possible this was the day Sam came to us, but I don’t know. There’s no one left to ask.

Trying to write about family preservation while in the thick of grieving the loss of the family I had has proven a challenge. I’ve written 24 pages so far of not it not it not it. 

Generally, I live with a confidence that there isn’t anything I can’t write about these days when it comes to adoption. The mental blocks I had for all those decades before writing You Don’t Look Adopted are gone. I feel fearless and clear. Or at least pretty fearless and clear.

But every time I work on this one, I have developed a fever and a headache and can’t seem to keep track of what I’m writing or trying to say.

Here’s to persistence.

I have wholeheartedly pursued the questions of how mother loss and adoption have affected my mind and body through my writing for the last ten years. I have worked with hundreds of other adopted people and have had the incredible privilege of hearing their stories as they, too, write to find their voice and stories and place in the world. I have said over and over again on my blog and on Facebook and on Instagram some version of, Adoption as it is commonly practiced hurts people.

But I’m not sure how much I can talk about that here.

I am still too sad that I lost my family.

Much to my shock, when my dad died three years ago, it felt as any life beauty I had carried in my body dried up and disappeared. I found myself signing a book for Haley Radkey at the post office and being unable to write letters. It felt like I’d had a stroke. I sent her the book with its crooked message, partway scribbled out like a drunk child had done the job for me. This scribbly brain went on for almost three years. I mostly listened to Martha Beck and Joe Hudson and others talk about the power of the mind. I felt as if I was an empty vase and was trying to reprogram my brain. How could losing my father, a man I believed I’d be relieved when he died, affect me like this?

I did not know. I just know the grief did not ease up.

When my brother John went into hospice this spring, I was sad he was suffering, but I wasn’t sad he was dying. My parents had brought him home a week before my third birthday, and our family had gone from being as normal as a family with one adopted kid can be to being a home in near-perpetual crisis. I tried to call John almost every day he was in hospice because I wanted to be the good sister I hadn’t been before since his voice alone made me unbearably angry and anxious.

But then, out of the blue, Sam died.

Sweet, sweet Sam.

Once I dated a guy who had no passenger seat or backseat in his car. I don’t remember how this happened, but Steve, Sam, and I went out to some bar in Binghamton one night. We played pool and got drunk, and then Steve drove us home. We were singing loudly to AC/DC when the lights started flashing behind us. Sam looked over at me as we tried to find seat belts in this weird husk of a car. “This is your life,” his look said to me. “Your boyfriend is about to get arrested and we’ll probably have to walk home.” Sam had brown eyes that sparkled, even when, especially when, he was drunk. “And,” his smile said to me, “this is awesome.”

Sam was the only person in our family I felt I could be myself with. He made the world a good place to be. He was a miraculous human being. I’m not going to say more right now because I don’t feel like proving it. He just was.

Here’s what I’m not sure I can talk about, but I will try. Part of me is afraid of poking at soap bubbles and making them disappear, but this feels important. I think some part of me knew Sam was going to die. How else can I explain the need I had to rent a house a handful of miles from his the month before he died in the effort of proving to him how much he meant to me? How else do I explain the compulsion I had the last night we saw each other to list all the things I loved about him? He had looked at me, bewildered, a little drunk. “You make me feel so good about myself,” he said. “I love you,” he said. “I love you,” I said, and we got off the bar stools, hugged in the snow goodbye, and drove our separate ways, me to the rental house, he to his wife and kids. What I’m saying is that I was connected to Sam in ways I can’t explain but that felt like blood.  

That’s one reason writing this all has been so hard. I am grieving people that could, in a simple sentence, be taken from me all over again, But they weren’t your real dad or brothers, right?

If they weren’t real then what is left?

So, yes, I am all for family preservation, 1000%, but since my family had already been created through adoption, I want to ride this one out to the end. I want to own this family and the grief I now carry because I have lost them all. I want to say I am grateful for the life adoption gave me. Even while having all the other thoughts. Even while knowing the atrocities Sam suffered as a little kid, a brown body in a white family in a white town, I still am holding on to him while knowing he deserved so much better. He deserved safety, at the very least. Maybe he would not have had a heart attack at 56 if he’d been raised by the biological aunt and uncle who had been robbed of the chance to adopt him by the agency who preferred to take my parents’ money. But then I would not have had him as a brother, and so here I am, loving what really should not have been mine. 

A month after Sam died, I had what turned out to be my last call with John. He was on a  morphine rant about the terrible care he was receiving. It was 5:30 in the morning in California, and I was on the toilet. “Are you taking notes?” he asked with that voice of his. “No,” I said. “I’m going pee.” “Your loss,” he said. It had been a lifetime of John’s voice going on and on and on, and while I grieved for the hard life he’d had, I was happy to be done with that call and to think that maybe I would never have to talk with him again. Two days later, he died the way so many people with COPD go. He drowned in his own fluids, medicated enough, hopefully, not to know what was happening.

I don’t miss his voice. I do carry a heaviness that I was one more person who did not show him the love he so craved.

When I was young, my mom used to say, “Can’t you be nicer to John? He loves and admires you so much.” This would both rip my heart out and made me furious. I was so, so sorry he was a person who struggled in this world, and, no, I could not be nicer. I loved him because he was my brother, but I also hated him because he made our house feel unsafe. My feelings about John left me feeling trapped and ashamed. My mom wanted me to be someone else around him, but I was me, and I could not be nicer because then John would follow me around more, talk to me even more.

When I look at this photo on my screensaver of the three of us that I assume my mom had taken, what I see is Sam in hilarious mid-exclamation looking at who knows what, John with food in both hands looking at the photographer as if puzzled, and me, looking either at John or at the ground, a dreaming face, quiet.

Thank you to the mother and father who created me. Thank you to my parents. Thank you, John and Sam. Thank you, adoption. You sure lie a lot, and I am all busted up inside and hurt, and hurt people hurt people, but I am also full of gratitude, and I deeply appreciate all you gave and taught me.

And I hope every mother who wants to keep her child is given the resources to do so. You have my undying support.