Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

As a child, I fantasized that my real parents would search me out. Some days, the only possible explanation for the ever-widening gulf between me and the rest of my family, and the sheer impossibility that I could share any genetic material with the boy I was told is my brother, was that I’d been switched at birth. Despite physical resemblances, I have doubted my blood ties; our differences were too great, left a breach too wide to cross.

But I am not adopted.

I’m a biological daughter with a biological brother, both of us clearly (just look at our faces) the genetic offspring of our biological parents. Who I seem to know so little about. I lived with them. For 18 years. Have stayed in contact for each of the 33 years that came next. We have shared everything that people share when they grow up in the same household – daily meals and chores and the routines of getting up and going to bed. We have shared holidays and over-long family car trips for which my parents still are upset that I have so few memories. They paid for my college and much of my grad school. I speak to them weekly. We visit twice annually, once there, once here.

So how is it that a late middle-aged guy describing his five-year search for the woman who relinquished him at 6 months of age seems to have pieced together a story of his biological mother and father that holds more data points than the story I could tell of either of my parents? I know their census data – dates of birth, where they were born, the names of their parents and siblings. I have some of their stories in my memory, but they don’t coalesce into a narrative. My Mom is an only child born in the 1930’s. Why? Did my grandparents want more children and weren’t able to conceive again? Did they have miscarriages? Did they break the social norms and only want one child? What kind of child was my Mother? Happy? Did she like to read? Sing? Dance? Was she quiet or outspoken? Was she a Daddy’s girl? Popular at school or a bit of a misfit? What were her dreams?

My Dad is the eldest of three, and I haven’t managed to learn much more than that. I don’t know what he liked to do as a kid; as a grown-up he’s had no interests or hobbies, no leftover pleasures he continued. He never threw a ball to us kids, never taught us how to whittle or box or fish or golf or take photographs or play an instrument or cook . . . he had no favorite home team for which we were indoctrinated to be fans. His presence is gauzy and ambiguous, despite the fact that he is college educated, worked hard his entire professional life. His pharmacy career was a respectable choice, but what small boy dreams of becoming a pharmacist? What did he dream he’d become before he foreclosed on that dream?

I learned last summer that my Mom’s relationship with her high school sweetheart, a guy who was quite handsome and successful in the community, ended in a mere misunderstanding: he was late to pick her up, she thought he wasn’t coming, my Dad showed up instead. She married my Dad.

There are a lot of holes in this story.

If I’d been adopted, perhaps I’d have felt more pressure over the years to learn about my parents. Instead, I had the privilege of ignoring the personhood of those who were physically present before, during and after my birth. Of treating them like fixtures, furniture, cars, and wallets – objects whose purpose was to support, provide or transport, whose continual presence was a truth so fundamental it remained unacknowledged. They existed for what they could do for me, not as people for whom my life was just one chapter in a story that began before me and will end with me as a fully launched individual who doesn’t need their physical support any longer.

Oh, the arrogance. As they approach their 80’s, I have very little time to make this right. But how do I make yet another demand on them? Not of money or a place to stay, not of advice, gosh no, our world views don’t overlap enough for me to value all they’ve learned and experienced over the decades. Now I want their stories. Their histories, their narratives, their willingness to open to me so that . . . so that, what? I can feel less empty when I think of them?

No. If I go on a search for my biological parents, I have to be willing to show up and share with them who I have become in the 51 years since I was born. It would have to be a two-way sharing, a two-way opening and meeting. We could meet for lunch at Denny’s, over endless glasses of iced tea. We could even bring photos. They could tell me about themselves, and I could tell them about me. We’d marvel at the similarities. The ways in which their ways of doing things have, indeed, lived on in me. The way it turns out we like the same things, crave the same foods, have the same taste in music, the similar way we pronounce certain words. The way we used to live so close to one another without really ever bumping into each other. The way we’ve wondered, all these years, if it was worth it to start the search, overwhelmed at the enormity of the task, not knowing where to begin. We’d be so happy, we three, to find each other. To close the gap of not knowing for all these years.

After lunch, we’d promise to stay in touch. Maybe we would.