A Borrowed Life

Until I was 45 years old, I did not have a past. My ancestors were all borrowed from the family who adopted me when I was three months old. If James Agee lived so successfully disguised to himself as a child, then I lived not so successfully disguised to myself as part of a family. From the time I became self aware, I had the feeling that I somehow was not quite connected to the world. Despite all the love and devotion of my sainted mother, the idea that I was adopted made me feel disconnected to her stories and those of my father, my grandmother, and countless other relatives who thought they were passing down the tradition to me to pass on to my children. But I never got the chance. I had no children of my own to pass anything down to, and if I had, they, too, would have had a borrowed history. The idea was reinforced by well meaning relatives who found it necessary to introduce me as the adopted daughter. My grandmother, when counting out her grandchildren, would say, “I have eight grandchildren and two adopted.” My father, after announcing to us at the age of 76 that he had had a daughter out of wedlock before he married my mother, afterward started introducing me as his adopted daughter.
I was officially told that I was adopted when I started grammar school. My mother rightly guessed that someone’s child would let me know it if she didn’t. This fact set me apart from the other children. If there were another child in that school who was adopted, I never knew it. I seemed to be the only one. Having red hair and freckles did nothing to help me fit in either. I also had no siblings to defend me. I longed for a big brother. The fleeting friendships I had with other girls came because they were “lonely onlies” like me.
Another reinforcement of the feeling of otherness came when I had to go to a new doctor’s office and fill out the medical history forms. Large blank spaces where family medical history was supposed to go glared up at me. Doctors who only fleetingly glanced at the chart would ask me if there were a family history of this or that disease. Then I had to say that I didn’t know. The doctor would look puzzled for a second and look at the chart again. “Sorry, “he or she would say.
I also felt the lack of history at parties and family gatherings when the conversation inevitably turned to family illnesses and the aunt with breast cancer, the uncle who is an alcoholic. Someone would say gravely that he or she was always on the lookout for the signs of the family affliction. I felt a little comfort in not knowing those details, and then someone would ask, “I guess you don’t know any of your medical history, do you?” and the conversation would just stop. It is a distinct handicap to grow up in the South without information about your people. I can’t discuss in detail how Great Aunt So and So “is eat up with it” without feeling like a fraud or a merely a gossipy neighbor watching from behind the drapes to see who leaves the house next door feet first.
Then came the question I always dreaded, “Aren’t you curious about your mother?” Not really. I did not look for my birth mother until I was 45, thinking she must be far away in another state, perhaps happy that I never arrived to throw her life into chaos. I subconsciously feared a second rejection, a common feeling among adopted children. Oh, I had romantic notions about her noble sacrifice for my welfare. I was told I had been starving and that she could not support my half brother and me. I always wondered about him, the one she kept. I worried about him, wondering if he had gone to Vietnam, his name carved on that long, black wall. I wanted to find out, but my mother either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to remember his name so that I could check the list of the dead in that horrible war.
Then in 1999, an enlightened legislature opened the adoption records in Tennessee. I decided it was time to find out some information, mostly for medical reasons. My husband and I drove to Nashville from Knoxville with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. He has always been supportive of anything I needed to do, but this trip might mean some painful revelations for me, so he was worried. He had reason to be. The yellowed pages of the records from 1955 told me more than I ever wanted to know. I didn’t have just one half brother. I had three siblings, maybe full siblings, one of whom had cerebral palsy. My oldest brother, Steven, was described in the documents as “spastic,” a term which made me think of the old grammar school taunt directed at less than graceful children. My oldest sister, Carol, was barely mentioned. She would have been 52 at the time I saw the records. The middle brother, Jim, she kept for fear the State would make her take back the “defective” child. I was put up for adoption privately in order to avoid the Department of Human Services entirely.
My birth mother sounded like a classic case of either physical or mental abuse, drinking and wandering from man to man. One in particular was described as the married man with whom she had been having a twelve-year affair. Other boyfriends were mentioned. She, herself, was described as attractive but with bad teeth, which the caseworker said detracted from her looks. My own teeth had all come in rotten and had to be capped when I was five. But that could be attributed to the neglect that lasted for three months before I was adopted. My first doctor’s visit when my adoptive mother took me to him a day after I was adopted merely said one word, “hungry”. The words on the adoption pages did not describe the noble woman that my adoptive mother believed had reluctantly given up her child. The worst news the adoption papers revealed was that she had tried to give me to the nurses the day she gave birth to me, as she had done with the rest of her babies.
I left the Child and Family Services offices stunned and angry. I read the pages to my husband as he drove us home. As we drove, I couldn’t stop talking about it, getting more and more distraught as we went along, so he took a detour to Fall Creek Falls State Park in order to calm me down. We walked to the falls, and the insistent beauty of them helped somewhat, but soon after we got home, I started having nightmares. One dream caused me to cry out in my sleep. A hooded figure in black seemed to loom at my side of the bed. Others had various threatening images attached to them. Many nights my husband had to awaken me to see why I was whimpering. These subsided when I received a call from Tennessee Post Adoption Services to tell me they had located one brother, Steven.
Before I met him, I had visions of him in a wheelchair and severely mentally challenged. The man I met was very much not that person. He was sweet and intelligent, but mildly challenged by emotional and mental delay. His loving parents had adopted him when he was five years old. They took him to doctors who straightened his twisted legs and corrected his strabisimus. He attended regular school through high school, but that was as far as he could go. He lives with his parents now because he can’t live on his own. He’s a delight to have as a brother, though, witty and a character, who often surprises me by what he does know and perplexes me by what he doesn’t.
They found my other brother, Jim, shortly after that. He was the one my birth mother kept and then abandoned cold and hungry in her apartment. Our grandmother took him home and raised him after that. He’s done remarkably well for having such a confusing childhood. Our mother would show up sporadically and stay a day or two, have her picture taken with him and then disappear for months again. Ironically, when he was about 11, he was cast as one of Rufus’ friends in the movie, All the Way Home, the screen adaptation of James Agee’s A Death in the Family. He lived on 11th street with our grandmother. Where was “home” for my brother, really?
Our family history was almost complete when TPAS found my sister a year later. She was very difficult to find. Apparently, an elaborate fairy story had been devised for her by some well meaning social worker so that the right Carol was hard to find. She lived here in Knoxville for most of her life, just as the others had, a fact I still find hard to accept. Carol and I have become very close.
As for our birth mother, when she was contacted about approval for me to contact her, she “accepted” it by not sending in a refusal. Birth mothers have the option of signing the acceptance form or the refusal form, or accepting it by just not sending either form back. That pretty much set the tenor of our later meeting. I talked to her for about two hours in her apartment. She was pretty much in denial about Carol and Stevie but knew she couldn’t deny Jim, so we talked about him a bit. I asked her about who my father was, who Carol’s father was and who the boys’ father was. Oddly, she told me that Carol and I were full sisters and that Stevie and Jim were full brothers even though she denied remembering anything about Carol and Stevie. That was all. I never talked to her again. She died not long afterwards. My adopted mother went with me to the funeral. It was a surreal experience, to say the least. It seems no one in her family knew any other children existed. I thought Jim had told everyone, but the looks on the faces of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc were looks of pure shock. I sat in the service not knowing what to feel and finally just burst out sobbing. My poor adoptive mother didn’t know what to do other than just hold my hand. This has not been easy for her either.
In the final analysis, the experience has taught me the importance of including an adoptive child as one would a birth child. Well meaning as people think they are being, calling attention to the status of adoptive children, even calling them “special” puts invisible barriers around them and makes them feel their sense of otherness.