I originally began writing this post on Tuesday, April 16, 2019. It quickly became a case of having too many words in my head to be able to type fast enough to keep up, which led to something that needed a lot of editing. (Not for content, but definitely for form, grammar, and general readability.) Although it begins with musings triggered by the April 15th fire that nearly destroyed the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, it is actually very much an essay on a particular aspect of adoption that I have seen come up again and again in articles, essays, interviews, and YouTube videos. With apologies for both the length and lateness of the post, here are some of my musings on the feeling of loss (or at least the absence of something important) that I have heard expressed by so many adoptees.
This isn't the post I had been preparing to publish here today (you'll see it in a few days); this is a post born of watching Monday's news and thinking back over decades from the perspective of an adoptive family... and the resultant new insight into an often-overlooked aspect of adoption.
Some may find it laughable, but the news reports showing the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burning on Monday left me with a deep sense of personal loss. I'm an English-speaking American, at least nominally Jewish, who hasn't set foot on French soil since the early 1980s... and yet the partial destruction of this Catholic place of worship & French national symbol touched me in a personal, intimate way I was unprepared for.
We lived just outside Brussels, Belgium from 1981 until 1983, and quickly came to enjoy the fact that one could literally eat breakfast, drive to Paris for lunch & some touristing, and be home in time for a late dinner. It wasn't just Paris, either -- swathes of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxemburg, and the Netherlands were easily reachable in the same timeframe that it would take to drive from here to visit family in the New York metro area; the kind of drive that once took us to an uncle & aunt's house in Topeka would add another half-dozen countries to that list.
But, much as I loved traveling & the many hours I spent wandering in downtown Brussels, there was always Paris. I mean, c'mon -- who doesn't think of that city when they hear "Europe"? It was almost a second home to me; I had adventures there (some of which, decades later, remain unknown to my parents), I made friends there, I climbed the 670+ steps to the 2nd level of the Eiffel Tower... I could easily write several thousand words about my Parisian experiences, but looming large in my memory is Notre Dame (visited several times over the years).
The last time I was in Notre Dame, the building was well into its seventh century. It's hard to explain, but there is a certain gravitas to a place that has been in constant use for that long; one needs merely close their eyes and concentrate on the sound and feeling to become aware of the experiences stored in the wood & stone, of the myriad ways generations of human spirits have left an imprint, of the stories one would hear if only the not-quite-inanimate walls could speak. Like most cathedrals of the period, Notre Dame was not so much a building as a work of art itself comprised of multiple smaller works of art, into which generations of humans poured their deepest spiritual beliefs along with their literal blood, sweat and tears.
And now a large part of that is gone.
Yes, the cathedral can (will) be rebuilt to look much as it did before Monday's fire consumed its wooden framework -- but the original 13th & 14th century beams and walkways are gone forever, along with the newer but still ancient roof & spire and parts of the stonework. Yes, a rebuild will give the cathedral a unique character, making it possibly the only building still in continuous use with a span of roughly seven centuries between floor and ceiling... but it will be a reconstruction, a new babe of a building that will need more centuries to pass before some of its lost gravitas can be reclaimed. The reconstructed & repaired Notre Dame is likely to be a beautiful, beloved spiritual center and French national icon (and yes, tourist draw), but the spirits within the original had-worked wood & stone will remain irrevocably missing.
Now hang on, because this post is about to make a hard turn onto a very twisty road.
Thinking of my visits to Notre Dame led to revisiting memories (some rarely touched upon) of my travels & adventures in Europe... which led, due to the lack of sleep at a very late hour and the nature of some memories, to reviewing a sense of personal loss.
I hope to someday take my niece to see the places that were my stompin' grounds as I grew up. Despite the many changes in the intervening years, I'd love to share with her some of the places that marked milestones in my life, or that I think she would simply enjoy for the history. (Miri has said she appreciates the love of history that Grandpa has given her.) Unfortunately, some of those places have changed so much for the worse that I cannot, or will not, return; others are just... gone. The knowledge that I cannot share those places, those experiences, with her as I want to, generates a real sense of loss and missed opportunities, a feeling of being denied something of importance through no fault of my own.
Google Maps' street view tells me there are enough traces of my home and school in Chile that I could give her at least some sense of the experience I had growing up there; it shows me that the changes to our house, the dance studios where AJ spent so many hours, and other sites of personal importance in Belgium are minor enough to allow an easy "mind's eye" view of how they were; and it shows me that some of the important historic sites that played a large role in our formative years are still there waiting for her to share a similar experience.
But they're not the same... and now even something as massive, iconic, and unchanging as Notre-Dame de Paris is going to be different, making that sharing all the more difficult. Maybe diminishing it somehow, or making it simultaneously complete and incomplete, leaving a disquieting sense of something missing even when it looks like everything's there. I headed upstairs to my bedroom while trying to get a firmer grasp on an odd sense of loss over something that in many ways hadn't been there in the first place, the sadness of losing something that until I heard it was lost had barely touched upon my mind for many years.
By chance, as I got into bed with these thoughts rolling back & forth in my mind, I stubbed my toe on one of the several books on the bedside floor. After saying a few suitably impolite words, I picked up the offending tome and found myself holding the revised edition of Adam Pertman's Adoption Nation. I'm sure he doesn't remember, but AJ and I have met & spoken with Adam twice -- once at a Harvest Moon Festival dinner back in 2008, and again at a similar event (in the same restaurant!) three or four years ago. Each time, he gave a talk on the ever-changing landscape of adoption in American culture that touched upon increasingly-familiar aspects of our personal lives.
And as I stood there nursing my sore toe, somewhere in all those twisty little passages in the back of my mind something went click...
I have tried to express (badly, I must admit) in a few scattered posts how being adopted is different, somehow, and how those of us who have a direct link to our biological parents take an awful lot for granted. We grow up hearing, "Oh, you have your mother's eyes," "You sound just like your father," "Mommy did the same thing when she was your age," and so on. We can sit down and draw a family tree secure in the knowledge that we are linking the names of people who literally share a part of ourselves (no matter how miniscule), whose every cell carries at least an echo of the same mold we ourselves come from -- we might even be able to see ourselves in portraits of preceding generations of our family. As we grow older, we can confidently fill out paperwork at a medical facility knowing if our personal genome includes a proclivity for this, that, or another trait, knowing if there is a history of particular illnesses or developmental timetables that can give us insights into how "normal" our own health or development might be.
You don't have any of that if you are adopted.
Aside from the relatively infrequent cases of "open" adoptions, in which the biological parent(s) play(s) some role in the adoptee's life, adoptees don't know who -- if anyone -- they look, act, or sound like; don't know if there is even one other individual anywhere on the planet who shares at least some tiny bit of direct commonality beyond species; and have at best miniscule knowledge of their genealogy and usually no knowledge of their actual genetic medical history. And they have to deal with those absences, those holes in the record of their existence, in a society where such knowledge is so much taken for granted that it usually only comes to mind in "Which box do I check on the form?" situations.
When AJ or I look into a mirror, we know who we look like, and know we can observe similar physical and behavioral aspects in our relatives. We can sit down with cousins X times removed and talk about Great Uncle Joseph Unprounounceablename[1], and know that good ol' G.U. Joe's story belongs to all of us in a very direct way. I've been able to document a family tree so large & detailed that I named it the Family Forest. We know the dates of our births with no questions attached, we know the locations of our births down to the floor of an individual building, and we know the times of our births down to the minute.
When Miri looks into a mirror, she can only guess which of her physical attributes comes from a parent, or is an expression of genes from a previous generation. She knows absolutely no one with the same eyes/nose/ears/chin/whatever. She is listed in the Family Forest with a different type of link than all but a tiny percentage of other family members. She has only a rough idea of where she was when her existence was first officially recorded, and her official birth date is essentially an educated guess. (The first time she tried to wrap her head around that fact, some of her stress was eased when Grandma pointed out that when she & Grandpa were born, no one bothered to record the time either.... Left unmentioned was the fact that we have photographs of the actual buildings where each was born, along with official records of the specific day.)
Even after going so far as to have a very detailed 23andMe genetic analysis done, we keep finding the lack of context for that data keeps it merely "data" without ever graduating to the level of "information" or "knowledge."[2] I can tell you that, genetically speaking, my niece is the healthiest member of my family... but we still have no way to know if the various aspects of her physical development as she grows are to be expected with her genome or should be the source of some worry.
So, to (finally) try to wrap this up...
Several paragraphs back, I used the phrase, "...a real sense of loss and missed opportunities, a feeling of being denied something of importance through no fault of my own." I know I'm only brushing the edges, and remain on the outside looking in, but now I think I can better understand what adoptees are talking about when they say, "Something is missing" or "But I don't know." I, along with the vast majority of people in society, know without question from whence I came along with the when, where and how of my arrival -- and that knowledge is so integral a part of who I am [we are] that it requires no conscious thought to retrieve it, review it, use it, appreciate it. An adoptee has only questions, assumptions, and guesses to form a poor substitute for that part of themselves, and the very structure of society reminds them of that on a (likely) daily basis.
And now, thanks to a series of very odd wibbly wobbly timey-wimey links in my memories and emotions brought to my attention by a fire in a cathedral in France, I've gotten a taste of what that might feel like. It's sad. It rankles. It leaves you missing something you really don't want to be missing. It's like your emotions have a bulky, pointy object in a back pocket but they can't stand up to move it to a more comfortable spot. It gets in the way in the most unpleasant manner that it can.
So... I've always thought adoptees had a hell of a hill to climb, but now I realize it's a lot more like a mountain, and itt can make you sad or angry or both at the same time. And from now on I'll try to remember that all those things that I take for granted as making up "me" cannot, should not, be taken for granted.
Because sometimes they are lost, and there's no getting them back.
[1] The only great uncle that I know of was named Hyman (and known as "Harry")... but you get the idea.
[2] To very simplistically give context to that statement... If I say "red," you have a datum (the singular form of the word data); you probably recognize it as a color but you have no way to know what the heck I'm talking about. However, if I say "red light" you'll have some kind of information because it now has some actual real-world meaning in your mind, and if I go further and say, "The traffic light up ahead is red" you will have some kind of knowledge because the simple datum "red" is now associated with an object, a space, and a situation that your mind can make easy use of.
