Dear Readers,
Today I have the second part of the segmented prose poem in which I attempt to portray an adoptee’s complex emotions. Hearing and reading the words of adoptees and first mothers, their emotional accounts of the effects of severance, how separation has wounded and reunions have relieved, I see how our stories evoke a healing heroine’s journey, the aura of myth, the lessons of fable, or magical sentiment of fantasy or fairytale. I’m delighted by your comments — thank you for reading, sharing, and your subscriptions. Welcome, all! 🤗
To Sing Her Own Song ~ Part Two. The Search
“The child separated from her at or soon after birth misses the mutual and deeply satisfying mother-child relationship, the roots of which lie in that deep area of personality where the physiological and psychological are merged.”
—Florence Clothier, 1943
Coming of age, Questa comes up short when she tries to form the story of who she is, the daughter she is, of parents not of her blood. Not from them, she knows for sure. At sixteen she wonders about differentness and likeness, the ones her parents mentioned when she was six, the ones who were missed— who aren’t in her life — and she’s the misfit in her body her face, the missing piece. With every transfer, and every move she must force-fit for friends to survive. Mostly, she’s the misfit. Questa keeps her story and imaginings to herself but doesn’t stop wondering about the missing ones.
If she says she’s someplace and isn’t there he drives around and checks, traces, pulls her away when he finds her, finds her with friends and again he’s angry. “Those friends are not good for you!” She has struggled to have friends. No one is good enough for her. He hits. Doesn’t have time for this, he says. She’s not fooling him, he says. He’s busy. Doesn’t have time. It’s punishing she needs. Discipline. Restriction. Constraints. He hurts her with his hand, and the heel of his shoe, and his belt flies, but a deeper pain, she can’t identify. More than longing, guilt, contempt, and dread?
She was relieved, she could breathe, could breathe when he was sent overseas when she was sixteen. He was a wartime officer and it was a year. There was conflict, war, and the draft, but she hated to have him home. When she was a teen, her mother didn’t intervene. Questa pleaded to leave private for public high and her mother relented. “Why did you let her get away with this?” he replied to his wife’s letter, to the news she’d allowed their daughter to transfer. Yet, Questa’s life had been full of transfers. School changes. Loss of friends. She resented being sent to that school, and she wanted to choose. To decide for herself. Now she was spiteful and had the power when he was away. She manipulated her mother. But she fooled herself and now she was stuck. It was even harder to fit in.
Struggling. Sinking in the mire. Floundering in the muck she made, the mess o' lies, turbulence, rebellion. She was fragile. Fragmented. A foundering ferry in a storm of confusion. Lost. Missing. Adrift. Wrote sad, lonely poems. She wanted mystery, to be hip, with her peace sign ring, love beads, weed, cigarettes, candles, psychedelia, incense, bellbottoms, and her spiral notebook of poetry, with guitars, mikes, amps, thin boys, making out, and Siddhartha, she was free of father's beliefs and authority, got away from what he made her be, someone — not herself. But it hurt to be alone, and she pined for the cool clarity of a mountain stream, she wrote, to gaze into a candle flame and ache to know herself. An adolescent without direction, like a would-be rolling stone, with no advocate, no guidance no direction no home. She thought, no one knows who I am, what I am, where I came from, and no one asks me what I want. What do I want? What do I need? Help. Approval. Understanding. Tenderness. Love. But she is alone in her head. Fumbling in the wilderness, the deep forest of confusion, with no light or hand to hold. She searched inside for her missing ones, her ghosts. She came up short, with only phantoms, and voices. A child, she was still the child who sang and wondered why the first mother went away. Why did she leave me? Where was the love? Phantoms hovered.
It was loss that Questa grieved, and longed for an unknown place. Hiraeth, home of the heart, a place in a wish. She must myth-bust, must suss her origins. The fairytale bedtime story of how she was loved and left behind, the birthplace of fable somewhere in South Carolina. Somewhere. Don't lie. Don't fabricate. She wanted more. She was pulled to learn the truth but didn’t know how to ask. It was taboo. To ask. Maybe, don't ask — we don't know — and if we did, we couldn't say. Not proper to discuss. It would remind them of their infertility, his weakness, their worst loss. Their decision to adopt is a source of pain. Then how? How could she search for the unknown woman for whom she had nothing but a fairytale, a birth fable?
Even as an adult, she couldn’t get answers. Court papers that made her another couple’s child referred to as Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann! Now, at forty, she wrote, called, and pleaded for an original record of her true story, a certificate with her baby feet imprinted in ink. The hospital said they were burned. A fire. Incinerated. A lie, Questa thought Who is my birth mother? The records of adoptees were locked away in a steel safe, sealed from all but the authorities. Her letters, returned with regrets of we can't don't give that information can't do that and you can't have those left her with fading hopes. Until, one day, Questa’s wish came true, like a dream, and her story was unlocked. A sage revealed the key: her birthplace and her mother's name, Leila. A wizard conjured ancient maps with rivers, boundaries, farms, churches, cemeteries, mills, trails, routes, and roads. A crone led Questa to the home of her heart.
Leila accepted Questa forty years after she left her behind at the hospital, but as a young mother without dreams or means, she could bring her home had no home to bring her to — had left her two-year-old daughter with her parents. Before the reunion, one family was known to Questa which provided for her as they had learned from their families and tried to love her as they would have their natural child. She now realized they were as honest and faithful to each other as they were to their commitment to a foundling child. Reunion with Leila stirred that realization. Childhood songs of trust and wonder engendered in the womb by Leila's voice were amplified by her adoptive mother's nursery songs, the radio, and records Questa played. Her search yielded new kinship, restored identity, and lifted her songs into full harmony.
In that year-long moment, before Leila died, Questa and she warmly embraced their unfathomable wish. The unknown unmentioned unnamed woman in her late sixties had wondered and hurt and wondered, just as Questa wondered and hurt. Their shared fantasy was fulfilled when they met in October 1993. Alike in ways, brown hair, brown eyes, pealing laughter, and a melodic voice, although Questa lacked a drawl, both were 5’7”. Their traits of sadness, sensitivity, anxiety, and wanting in self-esteem were more subtle. The wizard granted them three favors: Restore Heritage, Gather Love, and Glean Stories. Vague stories had slipped into the gap of life's trials and uncertainty and memory fell into the well of loss in the sorrowful deep valleys their pioneer ancestors had long before traversed by wagon from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina over the Blue Ridge into Greenville, South Carolina, Leila and Questa’s birthplace.
© Mary Ellen Gambutti 2024
you are a touching writer,i can feel the stream of emotions in your stories