Recently the New York Times’ Modern Love column featured an essay by a young widow who met the daughter she had relinquished for adoption seventeen years earlier, and just one year after her husband died.
When I reached the end of the column, I was totally rankled.
Not because I didn’t think the writing was good. It was, actually, and of the style I prefer: clean, plot-driven, saying only what needs to be said.
So why was I rankled? There was the Modern Love envy, the sting of my past rejection, sure. But I read the column every week, usually without that degree of rankledom.
What bothered me was that he writer was telling a Hallmark-like adoption reunion story that I’d heard about a million times before. The story started out like mine and ended as many of them do, at the beginning.
Just before things get interesting.
The writer’s story was just as I remember of my first year with my birthmother. It was the adoption version of a new marriage: a honeymoon with two people living in what seems to be a perfect reality but is really a fantasy.
Married life, like post-reunion life, gradually evolves into a genuine meeting between two people. There are the disappointments, the dislocations, the jolts of I-don’t-know-who-you-are-and-now-I’m-not-sure-I-like-you. There is the grinding against each other, not of the sexual kind, but of the sort that happens in a relationship if it’s going to become real.
A relationship that can only begin when the honeymoon has ended.
Sometimes these disappointments mark the end of the relationship. And sometimes they are the very things that propel a relationship into the evolution it requires to keep going in a healthy way.
Here is my bias. We are not meant to be soulmates, to be joined at the hip. We are not meant to complete each other. We are meant to bump against each other and realize our separateness. We are meant to tolerate things about the other person that make us angry, or lonely, or scared.
The judgments. The interests we don’t share. The oh my God, how did I not see this before, you are just like my mother/father/sister?
What I have come to believe, after 50 years on earth, after 30 years in reunion with my birthmother, after ten years spent as a therapist, is that a healthy relationship is about being oneself while being with another.
My honeymoon with my birthmother lasted one year. At least for me, it was marked by blind love, an almost manic elation, a thrill at being superficially like someone for the very first time: Look! We have the same freckles, the same long fingers, the same upward tilt of the eyes! We both love purple!
But the high eroded as the anger I didn’t know I had bubbled up and pushed us apart. The next seven years were filled with silences, judgments, bitter conversations that made us feel like strangers.
How could I have loved someone so much, yet now feel mostly anger?
And then, after years had passed, and I got engaged the first time, my birthmother and I slowly came back together. We weathered milestones from different coasts. She was there during my two marriages, two babies, two divorces. I was there for her life changes.
Maybe it was the passage of time. Maybe it was life hammering me into a grown-up. I don’t know when it was, exactly, but there came a point when I stopped being so dependent on her acceptance of me, and my fantasy of what our relationship should be.
Being okay with who you are in the face of someone else’s differences is the gift of a genuine relationship. Allowing the other person to have a reaction, a reaction that you perhaps find objectionable, without hours, days, or years of bitterness, is the hallmark of mental health.
It means you have found yourself.
The author of last Sunday’s Modern Love story is a fine writer. She told the only story she could, the story she has lived so far. It’s a feel-good story, the kind that people want to read, or watch on TV.
But I don’t trust any adoption story that doesn’t involve anger and disappointment and abandonment.
Being in reunion, as I know it to be for me and for others, inevitably crashes. It’s the work of the birthparent and adult child to make sure it doesn’t burn.
And that’s the story that, one day, I’d like to read in Modern Love.
My birthmother and my daughter
You are so right! Everyone loves a happily ever after reunion story, but as you say.. it takes work. Years of work to bridge the years of adoption separation. To get back what was lost or at least to feel comfortable with what is there now.
As a fellow adoptee reunited 20 years I can totally relate.
Oh my goodness, yes! As an adoptee just 4 years into my own reunion, I read her story about a year ago & was rankled, without knowing exactly why. I suspected it was just *too* Hallmark-y, and somehow plays into the narrative that adoptions all work out “for the best” that society seems hellbent on preserving, without critically examining the dark, hurt places. Thank you for articulating some of the thoughts I couldn’t.
While I love your blog and always enjoy reading your entries, I don’t agree with this one at all – I sense your own life disappointments in it. As someone who works with adopted kids (and whose best friend is adopted) I’ve come to realize that whether or not this Hallmark-y reunion IS a honeymoon period destined for a fall actually depende on 2 crucial factors:
One, whether or not the adoptee was lucky enough to feel totally secure with her adopted family (as is clearly the case in this Modern Love column: the daughter is one of three, and all are adopted). From what I have read of your own personal story, you yourself were not that lucky.
And two, what perspective and attitude the birth mother has at the time of reunion, and beyond. In the case of this ML story, the birth mother seems a totally together person, despite her sudden and early widowhood.
I am sure there are exceptions. I work with adopted kids too, and I haven’t seen any exceptions there, however. As for the ML column — my point was it’s really too soon to tell what will transpire between the BM and the adoptee. But even if the honeymoon doesn’t end with them, I think most reunion stories don’t work out that way. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a plethora of books and web sites devoted to the difficulties of being adopted/in reunion.
As a birth mother, I feel such compassion and sadness for what adoptees experience. As a birth mother, in communication with many other birth mothers, I also know what grief and lifelong anguish birth mothers feel and how much they yearn for reunion. It’s loaded, but it’s also a miracle which provides opportunities for healing, along with a lot of work and mutual understanding.