the storm and the wind

Kelly. Twenty-five. New Yorker currently living in Chicago. Writer, activist, theatre person. "You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.” - Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.

[stormandthewind]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Adoption

I don’t know what to call her when I have to talk about her. Biological mother seems so clinical; it makes me think of the papers that were signed, the arrangements that were made. Sometimes I feel like a product that was purchased. Still, mom isn’t right. Mom is somebody who sends birthday cards in colorful envelopes and tucks the tag into the back of your dress and tells you that things are going to be okay even when she has no way of knowing that they will be.

It’s at the doctor’s office; it’s always at the doctor’s office, when they ask about my medical history. It is approximately the five hundredth time I’m asked when I actually do something about it. I have to request this information from a court, there are forms, there fees, and there is a lot of waiting. Mostly, it just makes me wonder about the information you can’t request.

I can only get an incomplete medical history. It takes six weeks before the envelope comes from the Gladney Center for Adoption in Fort Worth, Texas.  There are the names of four dead grandparents, all with unidentified types of cancer. Under “special notes”, under “birth mother” it says ‘history of addiction, alcohol, methamphetamine’. I am unfortunately addicted to information. I spent four hours watching Intervention episodes about meth addicts. I wonder if I would have been that child, taken away from her mother. I wonder if I wouldn’t have been.

Having a photo would be nice. An answer to the question ‘do you look more like your mom or your dad?’. I imagined it stapled to the rest of the papers. I imagined it being satisfying, imagine her being pretty. But I remember the meth and imagine her as gaunt and unattractive, refusing to smile. This is when I started to rethink my belief that answers are always better than no answers.

There was a day in 7th grade science class when Mrs. Gray showed everyone how to draw Punnett squares. She said things like “fill in your parents’ hair and eye color” and used the words “dominant” and “recessive” a lot. When she asked why my paper was blank, I said I didn’t have anything to fill in. Jaclyn DiParto, whose mother played tennis with mine, started a rumor that I grew up in an orphanage. I explained the difference between orphan and adopted for the hundredth time to high school students who do not care. Miss Gray said: “Just make it up. It’s really not a big deal.” I have been just making it up for a long time and it is a big deal.

It really started at that age where you think you’re an adult but no one will treat you like one yet. I asserted myself with questions no one had answers to. I complained about going to family functions with the refrain, “They’re not my family!” My dad hated this. I still did not get out of going to Easter at your Grandma Roni’s house. She has a thick Eastern European accent that she never lost after emigrating here from Poland. Because of her, I can count to ten in Polish and was always told to do it when I was mad. I sat in the corner watching the tight circle my blonde-haired, blue-eyed relatives sharing hugs and stories and DNA. I like my dark hair. I sat in the corner, I watched them let me sit there, I began to count.

Jeden, dwa, trzy, cztery, piec, szesc, siedem, osiem, dziewec, dziesiec…

After the doctor’s visit, I had coffee with a girl from a writing class I was taking, and we’d been there for an hour or so already, and we were talking about our families. Her father was an alcoholic, and she was explaining to me how she’d figured it out. She’d always known he had a problem, that something was wrong, ever since she was a kid, but she didn’t really understand what any of it meant until much later. She’d asked me “the question” already. “How did you find out you were adopted?” and maybe I should’ve told her it was the same as how she figured out her dad was an alcoholic.

I remember being told stories about my adoption when I was a kid. I remember being told about coming home from Texas with my new family, and about traveling first class on an airplane before I could even talk, and about meeting all my new relatives and how excited I was. But I don’t remember anyone ever saying the words: “You’re adopted” to me. You grow up, you know something’s different, and eventually, no one has to actually say it.

I remember we drew houses in my kindergarten art class. As everyone colored in their purple houses with pink cars and blue little people standing on the lawn, I sat there, staring at the white construction paper, tracing and retracing my initials in the corner. I kicked my tiny legs under the desk, and looked around. I remember not knowing why everyone else was having such an easy time with this assignment. I drew a golden retriever because I think every family needs a dog. Seeing my kicking legs and my conspicuously empty sheet of paper, save for my puppy with her pink tongue hanging out, my art teacher approached me. I don’t know if she was actually tall or if I just remember her tall because to a five year old, all adults are tall.   

“What are you doing? You’re wasting the entire class, you realize this is graded, right?”

She had on what I used to call the “mean face”.

“I don’t know what family to put in my house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m adopted. I don’t know if I’m supposed to put my old family or my new family.”

“That means your first family didn’t love you, that’s why you have a new family.”

My heart felt like a rock, heavy and sinking in my chest. My little feet pounded on the cheap linoleum all the way down to the principal’s office, where they sent me to “private study” which is really just sitting in the library by yourself until you could get on the bus home. I wonder if it would’ve helped if my five-year-old self knew that Ms. K, the art teacher, was drunk when she made the comment and would soon be fired for keeping a bottle of whiskey in her art cabinet.  I’m not sure if it would have made me feel better.

When people ask about my being adopted, that’s always the moment I go back to. It’s the first time I can remember in my life where being adopted was important. It’s the first time I learned that being adopted meant “different”, and to some people, meant “worse”.

I remember when I was eight years old at a barbecue in honor of my birthday, real barbecue not just hot dogs and hamburgers. I saw my mother and my aunt having a heated conversation. I ran over to eavesdrop, my body pressed against the rough bark of the pear tree in our backyard, my feet unwittingly planted on an anthill.

“I’m so happy for you that you got to have a daughter, I really am.” My aunt said, bearing all of her very large teeth. Her mouth was still tight, not like it is when you really smile.

“I just wish you could have a child the real way, you know? It’s so much different, you really bond so much with a baby during those nine months.”

The rest of the memory isn’t as clear, minus that I remember screaming and fleeing when I noticed the ants on my shoes. No one put headphones to their womb to play me Bach in-utero hoping I’d come out a prodigy. No one read stories hoping I’d recognize their voice when I was born.  I didn’t know who to be angry at, so I decided on everyone. I sat in my bedroom, door locked, as the people who didn’t really consider me family celebrated my birthday without me.

Jeden, dwa, trzy, cztery, piec, szesc, siedem, osiem, dziewec, dziesiec…

I remember the answers had never been satisfying. In 5th grade English, I wrote about a lot of monsters. I wrote sad, dramatic poetry and left it in places I knew my parents would find it. The first time I heard my mother crying, it broke my heart. I apologized the next day and wrote her a poem. I used words like “love” and “family” and “best” a lot. There were hugs and keilbasa and pierogies that made it better. My mother said no when I asked if I was also Polish like the food. I asked what I was. I cried when she said “I don’t know.”.

At some point I settled on calling her my birth mother. It doesn’t sound as brittle and unfeeling as “biological mother” but it still has an adjective before mother, which my adopted mother likes. She wouldn’t like me putting an adjective before mother in reference to her, but there is nothing I love more than words and I need them to figure things out in my mind.  It’s hard to understand anything unless you start with a definition.

Birth moth·er (noun) - a woman who has given birth to her child, as opposed to an adoptive mother.

A·dopt·ive mot·her (noun) – a woman who adopts the child of other parents as his or her own child. One who nurtures and raises a child, who plays the role of a guardian.

“So, when did you find out you were adopted?”

Once when I was younger, and then over and over again.

[stormandthewind]

How Does a Bastard, Orphan, Daughter of a Whore and a Mexican...

Or: the brilliant double-entendre of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "history" musical. 

My friends are probably pretty tired of me talking about Hamilton by now. And I can’t blame them, but I also can’t remember the last time I wanted to talk about a piece of theatre so incessantly. There was something about Alexander Hamilton, about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s specific rendering of Alexander Hamilton, that drew me in and I wasn’t entirely sure why at first. I am a history nerd of the most obnoxious sort. I make esoteric puns and then explain them to everyone who doesn’t get them, like I feel the need to prove that these are things I understand, I freaked out over learning about the early use of convection in Roman bathhouses, I lost my shit when I realized that Ajax cleanser’s motto, “Tough on grease”, was a reference to the Trojan War. And so even the idea of a hip-hop musical (though billing it as that seems to reductive to the variety of musical influences in the show) about the Founding Fathers was enough to get me to spend a very rare 120$ on a ticket (and now, I think I would’ve felt like I got my money’s worth paying twice that).

So, I started to unpack why. There are facts in my life that sometimes, I forget. I forget about them, or at least put them in a corner of my mind that I don’t use every day, because on some level they don’t feel relevant. Here are a few of them:

I am an orphan.

I left the unremarkable place I was born at an early age. 

The little I know about my biological parents involves things that surely would have given me a disreputable reputation in a time when we weren’t so able to edit the way our own history was presented.

I am a person of Latina descent.

I am, above all things, a writer.

These are simple facts about the person that I am. And seeing Hamilton forced me not just to remember those things, but to feel them as relevant to my identity in way I hadn’t before. Growing up and trying to understand what it means to be raised by people who aren’t your biological parents isn’t easy, especially in school when you’re assigned to do things like use your parents’ physical traits to understand Punnett squares or make a genealogical chart of your ancestry. But without any information to go off of, it’s easy to turn things like that into a series of jokes, designed to make the people around you comfortable instead of having to access any kind of real emotion about your situation.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t curious, but the only place I ever felt comfortable exploring what was going on in my head was in a little black leather journal, and one of the things that I did, regularly, was create a thousand identities for my parents, ones that I felt explained some part of why I felt different from my family or why I “was the way I was”. Why I was the kid who couldn’t sit still in class, who would’ve rather eaten lunch with my social studies teacher and be assigned extra books instead of arguing over who the captain of the basketball team was looking at with those vaguely flirtatious glances at the girls’ lunch table. When one of your earliest experience is knowing nothing about something most people know everything about, it creates a hunger to know everything about other things, so that’s what I occupied my time with. I tore through books and felt like I needed them on some kind of survival-based level. I won “reading contests” at my local library and happily proved that yes, I had read all fifty-two books that I checked out that summer by recalling every detail about them that I’d committed to memory.

Still, there was a limit to what a person can “learn” about themselves through the lens of fiction. I couldn’t find a book that explained who my parents were, or find an article about my humble beginnings on my copy of Encarta (remember THAT?). Those facts didn’t need to be dealt with until much later, when I turned 19 and was legally able to contact my adoption agency to release the information they had about my parentage and medical history, with personal and identifying information redacted. I learned that my biological mother had a series of ongoing issues with addiction that continued throughout her pregnancy. I learned that her relationship with my biological father was tumultuous, violent and decidedly unhealthy. I learned that my biological father was Mexican, which made me decidedly of Latina descent, something that I hadn’t been exposed to at all in my upbringing with adoptive parents who were so deeply Anglo-Saxon Reagan republicans. In a home where casual racist jokes were tossed around at the dinner table. That kind of thing had always made me cringe, but after reading that, the sting was more pronounced. And there were all these facts that I now knew, and I didn’t know how to process them.

I had created an identity for myself, an origin story, to fill in the blanks and that was how I knew myself, but now I had information that tore all my fantasies into pieces. My mother was not, as I had previously speculated, a groupie for a famous rock band who inspired all kinds of songs that I probably listened to without even knowing they were about her, my father was not a prolific academic writer whose child of an affair would have ruined his career, my parents were most certainly not double agents who helped to end wars and capture criminals. They were flawed, common, uneducated people. It was a deeply unsatisfying piece of news for a girl who spent most of her life believing that she could have only been created by “special” people, by the kind of people she idolized and wanted to be. So, much like Hamilton, I left those parts of my narrative out of the story. I debated the objective advantageousness of them, realized that they were more liability than benefit, and pushed them into whatever place in my brain stores the inconvenient things that you don’t want to be important but are.

And then I sat in the Newman Theatre on Lafayette Street (and isn’t it just perfect that the theatre is on Lafayette Street) on a snowy night in January, having been able to snag a ticket for what was becoming the hottest show of the season, after the final number, I felt oddly unable to do much of anything for a few minutes. Being jostled by the people around me reminded me that I was being that person I absolutely hate, a true New Yorker am I, the person who held up other people who had somewhere to be. I walked the entire way home in the blizzard from 8th Street to my apartment on 37th Street and 10th Avenue and tried to explain to my best friend, and to myself, why exactly it was that I hadn’t felt that way about a show before, even though I had no clue what “that way” even meant.

I saw the show again, I had to, and immediately started reading the Chernow biography that I haven’t put down since. The opening lyrics were enough for me that time to start to understand.

“How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman/dropped in a little forgotten spot in the Caribbean/in providence, impoverished in squalor/grow up to be a hero and a scholar.”

I felt like I was thinking about myself, about the list of facts that I didn’t feel like reflected the witty, funny, hopeless showoff, and lover of words that I’d made myself into. And don’t misinterpret me, I in no way have accomplished what I want to accomplish. My laundry list of goals is embarrassingly long and there are far fewer that I’ve already achieved than what I wanted to by this age (24, but sometimes I feel twice that), and thinking about what Hamilton had done by this point in his life is enough to make even the most ambitious person feel a bit like a slacker. But the repeated lyrics, “there’s a million things I haven’t done”, “I am not throwing away my shot” tapped into the my unrelenting belief that I had the skills, I had the tools that I needed, to get there, to “beg, steal, borrow, or barter” until people were writing blog posts about what the stories I told meant to them, like I’m sitting here now and writing about how the story Lin-Manuel Miranda is telling helped me to understand my own narrative.

So now, I can’t stop thinking about stories and who is telling them and who decides what’s relevant and who decides what isn’t and that, ultimately, the only person who I can completely edit my history to is myself, and I know too much to be able to believe it anymore. What people will say in the future about Hamilton isn’t for anyone to know now, but in my small, low-circulation estimation of this show, it is a history musical. No, not a musical about the 18th Century, but a musical about the intersection between factual history and personal history, and the fact that’s hard for any writer to accept, that there are parts of your story that you have no control over, and all you can do, and HAVE to do, is to give people the best, most honest material to work with, and hope that someone else with a pen understands.

[stormandthewind]

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.