Dear Fellow Writers and Readers,
I hope you're having a beautiful early summer weekend. I’ve experimented with form again, calling this piece an auto-fictive lyric essay. I'm grateful for your subscriptions, comments, and shares. Enjoy a safe holiday!
The Lost Ones: A Lyric Essay
How Not to Tell Your Child She's Adopted
…When she reaches the age of reason (the Agency might have suggested) tell herq as a fairy tale. A fable. Tell it as a bedtime story, when she's in her pajamas. Go to her bedroom, Mommy and Daddy, together. One will do the talking — one voice from the dominant parent. We advise you to keep the story vague. Just a few points are needed — a few facts to make her aware, and to satisfy her curiosity about how she came to be available. How you chose her. There was an accident, you'll tell her, she had nobody until you saved her. All the others are lost. Dead. The whole family died. It won't be a lie — they are as good as dead to you. Her mother will never see her. So tell her they’re dead. Out of the picture. They are not in her life, nor will they ever be. She has no past. No mother. No family, except for you. Tell her, "We wanted you and picked you out at the nursery. We took you home to love you and take care of you." The worst that comes of the story is she may think her family left her by the side of the road. For all we know. For all you know. She'll never know.
No hug to go with: “We loved you and wanted to take care of you so we took you home.”
Awake, she wonders: Is anyone sad that someone died? No one cried and someone died. Someone was lost and someone died. No one cried. Isn’t it sad? But she doesn't cry.
Father in living room to Mother: "It went alright. She's not sleeping, but she’ll be fine. No more attention. (He calls out) Good night! Go to sleep!”
Under the covers, eyes wide open: We are a put-together family, that’s how Mommy and Daddy got me. I don’t like to talk about it. I don't know what to ask. I was quiet, played with Betsy-Wetsy when he told me. I feel funny and don’t look at his face when he tells me things. When he talks.
Mommy isn't mine. I had a different mother first. Is there a father? Other lost ones? I have a mother, a different mother, another one first. And she is gone.
The next day on the playground, she tells her playmates. She tells the first-graders the secret, “I'm adopted. My mother is not my real mother. My real mother is dead.” After days and weeks, she still wonders, and it goes deeper. Do they understand?
They will move again and again. Friends will come and go with new schools. “Friends don’t last long”, her father, who is Air Force, says. “They come and go with every move.”
She isn’t happy to leave. She needs to tell the secret. The secret of who she is. Who else is there like me? Who do I look like?
Teri in high school ~1965
In Sears.
I’ll recognize her, she'll look like me. I might see her in the crowd! I’ll see her shoulder-length, brown hair, like mine, her brown eyes, a young teenager like me. What is her name?
While Mom and Dad shop, I’ll stand here, by the candy counter, the roasted peanuts, by the popcorn machine. Maybe she’ll see me. She may be coming down the escalator and recognize me. Sister!
Phantoms, Maybe.
The phantoms and ghosts were my lost ones. Warriors, fearsome Valkyries -- awesome female saviors who shock and protect. I suppress a shout. I hear you, but can’t see you! A waking dream, in a mist, a haze, my ghostly, brave sisters were there to save me. To stop my descent into panic.
Let’s say they are ghosts from the past, from the road crash where I was rescued. On the roadside, I wandered into the woods. I had a family and no language. Even now, as a teenager, it's better not to raise the questions. The feelings are not to be mentioned. It all must be kept submerged, just below the surface, under my skin. Not out of danger, the present danger, the danger is present, and I could be pulled down. I'll drown if I face them. If I think about them. My sisters!
Life “before” has been erased. Isn't meant to matter. All in shreds, erased, effaced, destroyed, no trace, can't trace. Erase the name, the family. The mother — especially the mother. The child. Features -- her features. The adopted daughter's facial features, their adopted daughter in myriad photos. They say, “She looks like her father” her adoptive father the only father she has. Her photos assure them she is theirs. Assure them she is nothing like her first mother. Will not be the mother who has no image. The mother who disappeared. The father who disappeared. Their daughter's name and image are erased and replaced with a new name and many poses, portraits of their fantasy. Their dream. They had to erase the last trace, the last vestige of her origin. She was a gift upon which to render their image. A blank slate.
They loved their perfect imperfect replacement but expected perfection and needed gratitude, their reward for protection. Wanted appreciation for the life she would not have had.
Mirrors of Loss: a Haibun
I can talk about abandonment now. I know how my mother left me behind in the hospital. Two months later, when tracked down by the agency, she signed the relinquishment papers. I knew, but without language, I only could feel. I grasped the separation with a flood of finality, the inevitable, cruel, deepening fault. I'd later know the most fearsome flaw; the panic of ultimate loss. Identity formed through the unknown without an image to mirror is wanting. To recognize, to be amazed stirs the wanting, and I realized resemblance, my first mirror, my daughter. I was twenty. How long until this adopted person's integration follows her fraught self-birthing? Semi-sheer -- the scrim of longing ripples across the screen of self
Thank you so much for reading! ☺
love,
You have a brilliant way of luring the reader in to the scenes you create. Your story resonates with me, especially the "died in an accident" part and all of the wondering about that for the remainder of my life.
Thanks so much, Mary, Ellen. Thisis great.
My birthmom adopted 2 kids 10 and 12 years after I was born, but she and her husband never bothered to tell them. About 12 years later, however, the family was on a trip and my sister (her adaughter) was reading a book in the backseat and came across "adoption." She asked my bmom to explain what that meant, and was told "that's what you are. Don't evee ask about it again."