Mar 21, 2012

Twenty Years Later

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I was 30, married, the mom of two little boys, 14 months and almost 6. It was Christmas, and I had bronchitis, and the doctor prescribed antibiotics, and they made me sick to my stomach, but even after ten days had gone by, I still felt sick.

You’d think I would have known by then, after two children and two first trimester miscarriages in between.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Psalm 51:1, NRSV)

You’d think.

But it didn’t seem real, quite, until yet another week went by and I still felt nauseated.

This is the year it’s been twenty years since then, and in some ways it feels like it all never happened, and in others it feels like five minutes ago.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. (Ps 51:2-3)

I was a funny bird in those days. I had lived a very clean, straight life. Really, I was a professional good girl. I put being good ahead of most everything else. I had two or three college stories about drinking a little too much, had only smelled pot from a distance and had absolutely no sexual history outside of marriage, which believe me was unusual for someone who graduated from college in 1982, all of it, even among “nice” and “Christian” young people.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. (Ps 51:4)

I worked hard at being good to compensate for feeling I was bad in every way.

It’s possible we can blame Calvinism for this, or Southern Baptists, or Southern culture and its emphasis on feminine purity, or my mom, or just my innate personality. I’m not sure where the fault actually lies; I only know I was conditioned or wired to take the responsibility on myself, whatever befell.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. (Ps 51:5)

Ah, well there’s the key, perhaps. I had two mothers, the one who conceived me, and the one who raised me, and that’s where it gets complicated, which is to say, right from the beginning. Because the mother who raised me never seemed to be able to forgive me for coming from somewhere else, from someone else, from a mysterious past that could not be controlled or known. I went into my teenage years terrified of repeating what my birth mother had done, even though I had no idea of her circumstances, the underlying understanding being that if she couldn’t keep me she must have been some kind of a slut, and that wasn’t what I was going to be, even if and maybe especially because the mother who raised me was so afraid I would.

I realize this is a charged word, especially now, but it is the word I had in my mind then, and it shows the kind of world in which I lived, full of judgment of women and their sexual behavior in particular. It’s different in my mind now, but the world hasn’t changed as much as one might hope.

I was determined to overcome that expectation. I had to overcome it. It seemed like the only chance I had to live the life my mother taught me I ought to want: to achieve the successful marriage, which was the only validation any woman needed to have.

(Brutal. It was brutal. I hope no one taught you these lessons. I do everything I can to teach my daughter something different.)

You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Ps 51:6)


I was in high school and started college in the 1970s. Young people were having sex, lots of it, in those days before we knew about AIDS, and girls were getting pregnant. Nice girls, Christian girls, all sorts of young women were having sex and getting pregnant. In my neighborhood outside Williamsburg, Virginia, we whispered about the family that paid for three abortions in the same year: one for their daughter and two for girls their son had gotten pregnant. I took the unsurprising attitude for an adoptee that this had to be a bad thing. After all, would I even be here if abortion had been so readily available in the year I was born?

I took that attitude, but when my friend, S, needed a ride to the clinic in college, I took her. She was afraid a pregnancy would crush her parents, who were already having a tough year because her father had been laid off.

And when my friend, P, who was if anything a good-er good girl than I, more pious — she even became a charismatic at college!! — when she told me about her multiple abortions, which she had because she never planned to have sex and therefore never had protection available, she told me her mother said to think of it as making a blood sacrifice.

Some mothers will tell us anything to get the story to turn out the way they want it.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. (Ps 51:6-7)

Wash me clean.

Well, if you don’t get dirty, you won’t need to be washed clean. That seemed to make more sense. If I could only be good enough, truly good, more good than P or S or the family down the street in the upscale suburb, no one would have to talk me into anything.

But in 1992, no matter how good a wife and mother I tried to be, nothing about the pregnancy felt real to me, except that something felt wrong. We couldn’t figure out when the baby was conceived; the predicted due date was a shock. Then prenatal tests pointed to a problem and more tests confirmed a genetic abnormality. I didn’t expect to be talking to my trusted doctor and hearing him say I had a choice about whether to carry to term.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. (Ps 51:8-9)

I believe we made the best choice at the time. That does not mean I felt good about it, or that I regarded the life lost casually, as some people think women who terminate pregnancies must.

Most everyone close to me (parents, in-laws, spouse) felt ready to move on, relieved that the procedure was safe and legal, that it could take place in a fine hospital in my own city, that I received high-quality medical care.

Oh, it pleased my mother!  (I believe she feared her impaired grandchild would survive. This, too, was brutal.)

Meanwhile, my milk came in.

I grieved. 

I felt guilty, though I did not regret the decision, and I wondered, unsurprisingly, why this terrible choice had to be part of my life, why God’s eye had been off the ball when I was clearly such a good, good, good girl and such an unlikely candidate for an abortion.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
(Ps 51:10-11)

When you’re hoping to go to seminary, and you end up in the hospital to have a pregnancy terminated on Good Friday, it’s a dark place to be.

For me, it remained dark for a long time. I felt cast away from God’s presence, and I hated that. Later I was angry. My pastor assured me that God was big enough to handle my anger, but that made me madder! Surely there had to be a better way for God to run things than to let misery occur and then be receptive to our anger?!?!!

I concluded, eventually (and this is good news for everyone to whom I ever have or ever will be a pastor), that sometimes bad things happen and those bad things are not a judgment on the people who suffer them. And where God is at those moments remains a mystery, although I will say that when I have been at my lowest, God has reliably provided the help that I needed to get from one day to the next until I could do it by myself again.

In 1992, that help took the form of an older friend whose own history contained abortions she didn’t really want to have. She sympathized with the complex nature of my situation, and instead of trying to redirect me to the relief felt by my family, she said, “Why don’t you pray Psalm 51?”

I remember reading it for the first time — well, it probably wasn’t the first time ever, but it felt new — and thinking, “This is not me! I didn’t do anything wrong!” Holding that thought was making it possible to get up and get my boys ready for the day. Holding that thought was crucial.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. (Ps 51:12)

I kept going, barely, but I was still bone-crushingly sad. It really didn’t get better until I was able to hold both the relief and the sorrow together, to know in my marrow that I could feel both at the same time. Then I began to feel restored.

God did not do this thing to me. God did not condemn me for making the best choice I could knowing what I knew then, and although my life has been personally complicated and not even close to what my mother would have deemed successful, I do not feel punished by God.

And I am grateful for and to the friend who knew, from her own hard experiences, how much a psalm could mean, those old words forming a ritual expression intended to bring us back into relationship with the God we blame when the fault is really in the frailty of humankind, in our complicated bodies that don’t always work perfectly, and in our striving minds that don’t always reach the right conclusions, and in our broken and breaking hearts that don’t always give the love we want to receive.

I continue to struggle with taking the blame for, well, almost everything, but twenty years later, I don’t feel I was at fault for what happened in my life that winter and spring, and I willingly take responsibility for the choice I made, and although I still feel sad about it most every Lent, I do not regret it.

And if there are parts of the story for which I needed to be forgiven, rest assured, it has all been asked and answered, long ago.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

Filed Under: Abortion, Adoption, Lent 5B, Personal History, Psalm 51, Sex, The Inner Landscape ·
Feb 29, 2012

Suppose God Named You

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I’m not sure why God felt the need to give new names to Abram and Sarai. I sometimes wonder if it’s just that there were two sets of stories about them, with two sets of names, and someone clever made the difference in names a shift in names instead, and connected that difference to the change in circumstances that led to a new reality for Abraham and Sarah.

God remade their future. So I suppose it’s possible God named them for it.

This doesn’t begin to answer the question “What’s my excuse?” It’s almost comical how many names I’ve had. Marriage and divorce and return to my maiden name. Lather, rinse, repeat. But even before I had that “maiden” name, I had another one, the name given to me by my birth mother.

Martha is … Martha. Plain. Simple. Maybe she bakes, or is a competent needlewoman. You trust her with the silver, or to make sure the children stay out of trouble.

Surely she is neither dashing nor intriguing.

Read about her. Amazing.

Or she’s awful. I just read an article saying pastors shouldn’t make out-of-date cultural references, but honestly, growing up when and where I did, I couldn’t help hearing stories about Martha Mitchell, a “political prisoner” of Watergate. That voice, that hair, that name…yes, I was a Washingtonian political child, if not prisoner, and I hated sharing her name.

Seriously.

She was a Republican, to boot.

This isn’t really about me, of course, although it’s certainly true that in childhood I found my name dull. Someone once thought my name was Nancy, and that was probably the only time I preferred Martha over every other possibility in the world. Not that there’s anything wrong with being called Nancy. (Please, no letters to the author.) It’s just that every now and then I identify with my name, and that’s a relief.

But other times I wonder what it would have been like to go through life with a different name. This is probably the fantasy of most adopted children. What was my “real” name? Who gave it to me? What were those people like?

I’ve written about this before, I think. The name on my first birth certificate is Elizabeth, and in a strange set of coincidences, my adoptive mother was a former social worker and had been friends with the social worker named Elizabeth for whom my birth mother named me.

Tasha Tudor’s take on Martha (l.), The Secret Garden

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to go through life as Elizabeth instead of Martha. They’re both Biblical names, and both those ancient gals had important proclamations to make.

They’re both names you might hear in a British novel, although Martha is surely more likely to be the housemaid than the lady of the manor.

Elizabeth, Lizzie, Libby, Betsy, Beth — they all sound pretty, don’t they? Elizabeth is one of those women who can manage anything. Lizzie is fun and funny, with a wit that sometimes makes you want to take a step back. Libby attracts attention whenever she walks down the street. Betsy wears a ponytail and climbs trees. Beth is kind and quiet and plays the piano sweetly, and everyone who takes the trouble to listen loves her.

Some of those impressions come from literature, and some from the memories of girls I knew growing up. Some of them come from the fun of a name that has so many possibilities. (Eliza, Liz, Libba, I could keep going…)

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be one of those girls.

I can flirt sarcastically like Elizabeth Bennet (and on those Jane Austen quizzes, I always come out as Lizzie), and I have moments of being as sweet as Beth March, sometimes, and I used to climb trees just like Betsy Ray.

But that’s not me.

I’m Martha.

That’s the name I was given, a family name, the middle name of a treasured grandmother who was a political and religious leader in my hometown.

And it affiliates me with the woman — hear that! the woman!!! — who made the Christological confession in John’s gospel, the woman who said out loud who Jesus really was.

It affiliates me, too, with her bluntness and bossiness and short temper. (See Luke’s version.)

That’s okay.

Suppose God named me?

Maybe it wasn’t family heritage that mattered, really.

Maybe that’s the name I needed to be fierce and fabulous for Jesus.

Suppose God named you?

(It’s a bit of a walk around the block, but I did start somewhere in the neighborhood of Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16.)

Filed Under: Adoption, Family History, Genesis 17:1-7 and 15-16, Lent 2B ·
Feb 1, 2010

Orphans

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Growing up, I had a pretty clear idea of what it meant to be an orphan. You were a child, and your parents were dead. I'm not sure I differentiated between biological and adoptive parents. Certainly, had  something happened to my Mother and Daddy, I would have considered myself orphaned, despite the fact I occasionally day-dreamed about the other mother, the one who met up with me one block over, wearing a trench coat, just like a spy.

A great episode of This American Life from 2007, "Missing Parents Bureau," explored the attraction children feel to the idea of being an orphan. This may have been reinforced by the popularity of the musical, "Annie," or for the young boy actors in my house, by the appearance of one of them in "Oliver." Oliver lives in the workhouse because his mother is dead. That's clear. But Annie is a different kind of orphan, the kind dropped off by her parents, who never return.

An orphan is a child "deprived by death of one or usually both parents," according to Merriam-Webster.

Arrogant white people An orphan is not a child whose parents are still living, swindled out of their child by some "well-meaning" white Southern Baptist from Idaho. An orphan is not a child whose parents are still living.

It's easier to say orphan than some of the other words we might use, because it sounds pitiful and charming and even picturesque. And it disentangles a child from ties to adults, from heritage and habit, from possession by another.

It frees a child up to be what children are in the worst adoption stories, a commodity.

If families in Haiti need help, for Christ's sake, help the families stay together. Don't steal their children. Don't tear apart their families. Don't treat them like rescue dogs being moved north after Katrina.

For Christ's sake. In Christ's name. What right do we have to march in and claim to be rescuing children from their own parents, simply because there has been a natural disaster? 

Bentrott family  Sometimes an orphan is a child whose parents have surrendered him or her, because it seemed like the best thing to do. If those parents understand what's happening, if they consent to relinquish their children, God bless everyone involved. It's hard. It's hard whether you're an American college girl letting your baby go to a professional man and his wife or a poor woman entrusting your child to an established religious agency. I'm reading the continuing story of the Bentrotts, now in this country with the Haitian children placed with them after a long process–no cowboy adoption! As angry as I am about the Idaho Southern Baptists, I am glad to know there are Americans working for and with people in Haiti, who love people in Haiti, who are suffering over their (temporary?) absence from the country and people they want to serve, still. 

For Christ's sake. In Christ's name.

Filed Under: Adoption · Tagged:
Jul 11, 2009

Adopted By God

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(A sermon for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost    July 12, 2009    Ephesians 1:3-14)

On the news last Tuesday night a short piece of video played over and over, a little girl saying how much she loved her father, her voice breaking as she began to sob.

“Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine, and I just want to say I love him so much.”

In the midst of a dubious spectacle, the memorial for a weirdly private yet thoroughly public man, an event featuring people who had never even met him, love broke through in the form of an eleven-year-old who identified herself as his child, who knew Michael Jackson as “Daddy.”

This girl and her brothers are only at the beginning of what will be a complicated life. We can imagine the struggle that lies ahead over their custody and their father’s estate. And we probably cannot help but wonder how or whether they are actually related to him and to each other. In this era of DNA tests and scientific proof, we want to understand the connections. We wonder what prompted this man to have or acquire these children, and we hope for the best yet fear the worst, and we feel both relieved and surprised to see three fairly normal looking kids dressed appropriately for a funeral standing in the midst of a family they seem joined to by bonds of love.

Were they his biological children, or his adopted children?

And does it matter, as long as they knew him to be their daddy?

Once upon a time, when I was trying desperately to uncover the meaning of my life, I went to see an astrologer. My chart was drawn out beautifully by hand, a picture of the sky at the moment I was born. It was the one thing about my birth that seemed certain. I didn’t know the names of my birthmother or my birthfather. I had many questions. Were they like Romeo and Juliet, with families that kept them apart? What was the reason I was given away?

The astrologer said, “The parents who raised you are the parents you were meant to have.”

From anyone else, I might have taken that as a platitude. But because I knew she took a cosmic view, it sounded different coming from her.

In this passage from Ephesians, a similar cosmic claim is being made for all of us. We are destined to be adopted by our Heavenly Parent, through Jesus Christ. It’s an immense concept that suggests a well-executed plan from before the dawn of time. But not everything can be expressed in a spreadsheet or a file folder, and sometimes we feel inklings and urgings we cannot explain.

At 24, I had a son. When he was placed in my arms for the first time, he didn’t cry, but looked solemnly into my eyes as if he had done it a thousand times before. I felt with him a bond older than the Earth, newer than the morning, deep as the center of all things.

I could not help wondering about the woman who had given birth to me.

I discovered that it was possible to read the Social Services file about my adoption. A copy was made from microfiche; then the identifying information was removed, literally cut off the page. It told me my birthmother’s age, that she had come from another state, and that she liked to read. I learned that my birth father had been in the army.

It wasn’t enough. I had to know more. I contacted the Social Services department and asked if contact could be made. My file was still there. On the folder was a hand-written phone number.

I learned later that in the final months of her pregnancy, my birthmother moved in with an aunt and uncle, in the city where my adoptive parents lived. The phone number had been theirs in 1961; it was still theirs in 1986. They agreed to call her, and a week later, I was talking to my birthmother on the telephone.

There was another person who helped my birthmother at the end of her pregnancy, a social worker named Elizabeth. This woman wrote the file I read 25 years later, and I learned from my birthmother that Elizabeth visited her in the hospital the day after I was born, telling her she had the right to give me a name.

And so, although I would not keep the name very long, my birthmother named me Elizabeth.

In that same town, a year earlier, the people who would be my father and my mother sat together at their breakfast table. They had been married for ten years. He was a lawyer. She had begun a career as a social worker but given it up to be his wife, to be the mother of his children. There had been years of tests, prehistoric infertility treatments and hospitalizations for endometriosis. He would soon turn 40. That morning he said to her, “Why don’t you go down to your old office and see if they can get us a baby?”

When I told my mother the story about Elizabeth, she drew her breath in sharply. You see, she knew Elizabeth. Elizabeth had been her co-worker and her friend.

Elizabeth was the hinge between my two mothers, just as Jesus is the hinge between each of us and God. We are destined for adoption, destined to be God’s, as surely as I was destined to be held for just a moment by one mother and passed by Elizabeth to the care of a new mother and father. We read in Ephesians that God intended to adopt us even before Creation occurred, and perhaps because of my own story, I do believe this. I believe that whatever the circumstances of our lives, God’s care for us began before the beginning.

We have a place in God’s family; it is God’s pleasure to make a place for us.

At the time this letter was written to the church at Ephesus, adoption had a common meaning different from the assumptions we might make about it. In 20th century America it became a means of rearranging the fates of children whose biological parents were unmarried, and to place them confidentially with unrelated families. In more recent years, we’ve reinvented adoption to incorporate more openness and communication, and we’ve widened our scope to include international adoptions.

But in the 1st century, people understood adoption differently. In the dominant Roman culture, adoption served a dual purpose. The Pater Familias stood at the top of the pyramid of power, the Father of the Family, able to define and redefine his family and who might be part of it. If a family lacked an heir, the Pater Familias would seek a child to elevate into the family. The child’s family could gain the advantage of having their child become part of another, while this served the needs of the richer or more important family by providing an heir.

This is the way the Ephesians would hear the claim being made on their behalf. The Heavenly Pater Familias, the Cosmic Head of Household, wanted them to be part of the Ultimate Extended Family, with all the rights and privileges and inheritances of a natural Child of God.

What an immense assurance of God’s love for us!

1:5 He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will,

1:6 to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

The trouble with this passage is the way it has been used to limit who is in the family. Some interpreters use it to say that only a select few are adopted by God, but I would argue that such a limited definition fails to take Jesus into account. This whole passage hinges on the Christ who existed with God before it all began, but we meet him in Jesus, the teacher who left behind an assortment of lessons in his parables and in his healings and in his choices in this life. Our Savior sat down to dinner with lepers and tax collectors, protected working girls, was no respecter of human authority for its own sake and sent his disciples out to bring the Good News to the whole world.

Whether or not we want to accept the evidence of the astrologer in my case, and I realize that telling the story may make me sound as quirky as Michael J
ackson himself, there was a morning the man who would become my Daddy spoke up at the breakfast table and suggested adoption. He wasn’t a person who put feelings into words easily, but I gather that he had a feeling they ought to do this thing, a feeling that they had a lot to give and a lot to gain from making room in their lives for children.

He took an expansive view, my Daddy. When he learned that I wanted to find out more about my origins, he helped make it possible. Although he had adopted me at a time when it was common to blame the birthparents for the flaws in a child, he told me, in his deep and gentle drawl, “I’d like to think I’m willing to take credit not just for your good qualities, but for your bad ones, too.”

Maybe this is why Paris Jackson’s words have so much resonance for me: “Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine, and I just want to say I love him so much.”

On the day my father died, when I had to tell my young children, we sat right down on the kitchen floor together in a little huddle and cried.

We are all adopted by a loving Parent, who wants us to find a new identity as God’s children, no matter where we came from, no matter who we are. It’s the most inclusive idea ever, really, because this Pater Familias has the resources available to elevate everyone into his family. This Mother Eternal has the arms wide enough to embrace every kind of person, the patience to accept us with our flaws, the heart of healing love we all need so deeply. It is very good news, for all of us: we are adopted by God. Amen.

Filed Under: Adoption, Sermons · Tagged: ,
Apr 28, 2009

17 Again

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First of all, I don't want to be 17 again, not for anything. Okay, maybe for one evening, knowing what I know now, it might be fun to go back, and that's one of the things I loved about the new movie, "17 Again." The idea that a person could re-enter the adolescent world and yet be as smart as a person twenty years older–

But wait.

If you've been reading my blogs for a long time, you will know why teen pregnancy makes this story more complicated for me. My birth mother was just a little older than the parents in the movie, at the end of her freshman year of college when she became pregnant. Her story–well, it's her story, and not mine to tell here.

Let me just say I had a fantasy about my birth parents that began like that of the couple in the movie. I imagined high school sweethearts, too young to marry, giving in to the desires of their parents.

Later, in high school myself, as part of a theatre group writing a One Act for competition, I explored the idea of a girl who gave up a child for adoption, a good student, in love with a boy who had an athletic scholarship to college, a boy who broke her heart when he did what his parents wanted and broke up with her.

Parents mattered to me a lot, so it's interesting to me that the teen parents in this case did not consult their parents at all. The young father committed to the young mother, twirled her around romantically and off they went.

To be miserable together.

Then to figure out they would be miserable apart.

I appreciated the young again dad's efforts to discourage his own daughter's classmates from having sex, but I found it discouraging that this movie, one which will be seen by lots of young girls who love Zac Efron (who is young enough to be my son, but yes, he's pretty, and I like him, too), did not name any other options beyond teen marriage and parenthood.

I guess that wasn't the point. But these things are on my mind. There are other choices. You don't have to have unsafe sex. And even if you do, you don't have to get married because you get pregnant. You don't have to push aside all possibilities for yourself in order to raise a child, when you are still a child yourself.

And a boy, no matter how pretty, may not be the answer to everything, whether he's 17 or 37.

My 13-year-old, who is smart, thinks I should not be worried that girls will get the wrong idea from the movie, because at the beginning the parents are both miserable. I suppose that might be the takeaway; only through magical intervention in the person of Brian Doyle-Murray did they figure out they had what mattered.

But I still want to write these things.

My story began with being given away to parents who were already 37, taking an approximate average of their ages, parents who had everything except a child, who had everything except the ability to become biological parents. I'm formed as much by their nurture, the noble and stable as well as the eccentric and neurotic, as by the nature of the young people who made me physically. From the latter I received a slight gap between my front teeth and big brown eyes and hair that curled late and fair skin that burns easily except on the front of my legs. But from my parents I learned about Jesus and Benny Goodman and Louisa May Alcott and which fork to use and how to introduce people to one another in social situations and when to pick up the check and how to say what needs to be said in the nicest possible way without sounding the least bit like a pushover or a steamroller, either.

If I could be 17 again, I would like to see the boy who took me to my Senior Prom, one more time, to figure out if he really was as nice as I remember. I would like to be in my young body and sing with my whole voice, playing Lucy opposite his Charlie Brown. But I might discover that my version of that story, one that ended a few years later when he, under pressure from his father, decided to "date around," is just as artifically sweetened as the fantasies I had about my birth parents, whose imagined heartbreaks made me want to be as good as I could be, to avoid their imagined sad fate.

The truth is seldom as romantically lit as a movie.

Now that I am 47, a whole 30 years past 17, my parents seem more human to me. I have more patience with their foibles, more appreciation for their graces, more nostalgia for our time together. I've always known in my head that I landed in a good situation, but there's something about being where and who I am now that finally allows me to know it in my heart.

I really wouldn't want to be 17 again.

Filed Under: Adoption · Tagged:
Jan 28, 2008

Juno (Spoilers, no doubt)

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I tend to protect myself from movies I believe will upset me. If it’s about an animal likely to die, for instance, I don’t go to see it. (And believe me about this, too: if something bad happens to an animal in a movie, that *is* what the movie is about for me.) If I know it will be violent, I’m not going. There are very few exceptions (I really like Denzel Washington, for instance, and he is in a lot of violent movies, so I’ve seen some of his, but due to my propensity for picking up his colorful expressions in those movies, even jokingly, my husband has banned going to Denzel’s movies in the theatre. Naturally he can’t do much about my Netflix list when he is out of town. (I really hope this reads as funny, because it is.))

Anyway, and if you think I’m on some level avoiding writing about the movie I actually saw yesterday you may be onto something, I went to see Juno yesterday, which was a bold move, because I do not like to watch movies about adoption.

Let me sum up first, then describe later. I will never hear "Sea of Love" the same way again. The sequence in which it is played (this is a spoiler, so look away and if you don’t, you clearly aren’t paying attention to me now or to the title of this post, so that’s no longer my problem) begins with Juno in her hospital bed, her erstwhile boyfriend spooning with her, with a voiceover about how neither of them wanted to see the baby because he didn’t feel like theirs, with a transition to a bunch of babies lying in their little Lucite bassinets? That killed me. I was already tearful, but that killed me. I began to sob, noisily. Good chance it was embarrassing for my daughter, but since she talked me into going to the movie all of a sudden without proper prep time, she may have brought it on herself.

Also, thanks so much, scriptwriter, for giving the baby a due date that is my birthday. Just sayin’.

On a more sane note, here is what The Princess said about it. "It’s a movie about how things happen to people and you shouldn’t judge them just because of those things. It’s a movie about accepting people for who they are."

She told me that ahead of time. And I agree, it’s pretty much about that, when it isn’t about ripping Songbird’s heart out of her chest and stirring up all her abandonment issues.

And because that is what it’s about, it’s really a movie about a girl who sticks out (figuratively, although of course literally, eventually, too), and the way she becomes more individuated, and the relationships that matter to her along the way.

It’s not much of a movie about adoption. Adoption is a plot device, just as the pregnancy is. Both raise the stakes for the heroine in her journey to know who she is and who she loves.

As her father says:

In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you
for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome,
what have you, the right person will still think the sun shines out
your ass. That’s the kind of person that’s worth sticking with.

Much as I love that line, I have a lot of problems with the script, aside from the adoption stuff, about which my friend Lisa V wrote eloquently, and so I’ll let her say it for me, because that’s the part I’m having a hard time focusing on, so go here and see. Well, go anyway, but let me just add this. I am so used to thinking of my conception as a mistake that the whole mythology of mistakes and deserving adoptive parents is woven into my guts. In my sane mind, I know there is more to it, but in my belly, I’m right there with this whole concept and just want some parent, somewhere, to want and love me.

Ugh, that hurt and sounded way unevolved. That’s how deep this goes.

Back to the script:

 

First, do you know teenagers who talk that way? All the time? Maybe I am sheltered, or spoiled by children who have absorbed all the Highbrow Family Values around here.

Second, as a person who is pro-choice, I was really disappointed in the portrayal of the women’s health clinic. I mean, maybe I am just under the influence of living in a liberal haven of women’s health care, but boysenberry you-know-whats?

Third, this is not about the script, but about the acting that overcame it. J.K. Simmons and Alison Janney are way too big for this little movie, but I loved them anyway. I loved how they talked to Juno and to each other. Don’t get me started about how unrealistic it was for the dad to go and visit the potential adoptive parents and be so blithe about the whole thing. On a related note, I adore Jennifer Garner in this part.

Fourth, the few non-emotional moments of film enjoyment for me were provided by Jason Bateman in that blue sweater. Then he turned skeevy, and that was disappointing.

Fifth, the one thing I did like in the script was the father grasping for the right word to describe how wrong it would be for Juno to date while pregnant.

Sixth, Ellen Page and Michael Cera were wonderful.

And seventh and last, I loved the music. I sort of want to hear it all again, but I don’t want to cry like that anytime soon.

Your comments welcome.

Filed Under: Adoption ·
Nov 12, 2007

For My Mothers

By · 31 Comments

To my mothers~

Today is your birthday.

One of you, if still living, would be 82. I wish I could imagine you at that age, but you have been gone for 14 years, and you are imprinted on me at that younger phase of life, the mid-60′s, a time when I wish you could have been enjoying your grandchildren rather than succumbing to cancer.

One of you, wherever and however you are, turns 66 today. I don’t know your health, or whether you have retired from your work, but I know there’s an equal chance of hearing something this Christmas or never hearing anything again. It’s been like that between us.

I used to wonder if maybe a Scorpio was just the worst sort of maternal match for this Taurus. I looked for excuses everywhere I could find them to explain my apparent inability to please or communicate with either of you. I’m doing work I love, work of which both of you, for your different reasons, disapproved.

For 46 years, I have been carrying the grief of one of you and the shame of the other at the core of my being, in my bones and muscles, in the cells of my body. I don’t believe that either of you meant to lay those burdens on me, but I carried them, and until recently, no one invited me to remove them and leave them behind.

It seems I have a choice. Those deeply sad feelings have been a powerful connection to both of you, one that stretches across time and in one case, beyond life. Those feelings have at times fermented into hopelessness or resentment or self-recrimination. I have felt it coming for almost two years, the need to cut those particular cords, to stop feeding on the shame and letting the grief breathe for me.

Such a change feels drastic and unsettling, but ultimately it feels necessary.

I have compassion for you both, so unreachable and remote in your different ways. I’ve been trying to form relationships with distant, inaccessible people all my life, your grief and your shame, carried so unconsciously, creating barriers to those connections I so dearly wanted. I could not see the difficulties emanated from me.

So today, on your birthdays, I choose to put down these burdens, gently and with respect. I am a mother myself, a mother of a daughter, and I want to model consciousness and clarity for her. I want to mother myself, giving myself the same permission I would give my daughter: to be herself, to walk her path, to recognize any heaviness she might carry that really belongs to someone else. Our own burdens, our own losses, are enough.

With love,

Your daughter

Filed Under: Adoption, Mothering, The Inner Landscape ·
Jul 5, 2007

After Lunch

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I ate my carefully prepared and appropriate lunch at my desk, working to finish up a few things on my last day in the office before vacation begins on Sunday. The door buzzer startled me twice, first bringing a delivery from UPS and then bringing the voice of a young woman over the intercom.

"I need to speak to the pastor," she said. "It’s a personal matter."

Out of the elevator they tumbled, a tall slim woman in her mid-twenties and her stockier husband, obviously the father of the two little girls who came in with them, smudge-faced and barefooted. The young mother spilled out their story while the little ones touched everything they could find. This never bothered me, but it worried their mother. The older girl, almost 3, went straight to the little stuffed animals on a shelf, a white cat given to me by The Princess and a lamb I received at my ordination.

I could see that the story she told held truth: too many hours in the car on a trip to research her biological family, a broken transmission that took all the money they had as a cushion to replace, no more money to get home, a 4th of July night spent in that same car when no help proved forthcoming.

Mother and father seemed sober and embarrassed by the situation in which they found themselves. It would take a lot of gas money to get home to South Dakota.

So many people sit in the pastor’s study, asking for help. These two could meet my eyes. These two could shake my hand. Her story held echoes of mine.  She asked me about the reunion with my birth family and told me a little about hers. I went to foster care for a short ten days and then to my adoptive parents. She spent half a year being passed from one member of her birth mother’s extended family to another until finally other arrangements had to be made.

We can’t know what happened to us in those weeks and months, not really. Certainly I will never know. Is that ten day void the source of the hungers I have never been able to satisfy?

They are driving now, with the first tank of gas provided by Salvation Army, and the diapers purchased with a grocery store gift card from the Catholic church, and the cash I managed to round up to get them going. They will drive in shifts, these two young people trying so hard to find the place and the people that birthed her, perhaps learning that the real home is the one they are making with the two little ones in their car seats, holding on to a kitty and a lambie while their parents drive through the night.

Filed Under: Adoption, Ministry ·
May 25, 2007

A New Friend

By · 8 Comments

Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver and the other’s gold.

One of my tasks on behalf of RevGalBlogPals is to check the blogs of new applicants to the webring. Some need help adding html code, and others apply but never add the code or respond to offers to help. Some do it all themselves and are such a clear fit for our ring definition that I simply click on the button that makes their membership official.

As is true everywhere in life, some seem like perfectly nice Gals and/or Pals who I am happy to welcome. But there are others with whom I seem to "click" instantly. Something in their stories sounds familiar, or so different it’s intriguing, and I want to go back and get to know them better. It doesn’t become a connection unless that feeling goes both ways, and as many of our new bloggers are, well, new bloggers, they may not yet have learned that visiting back and forth and leaving comments is part of developing blogger relationships.

Recently I’ve met someone through the ring who you may have noticed has left some comments here, RevRosa. Rosa is having surgery this morning, and I hope you will think about going over to her blog to leave good thoughts, wishes and prayers.

Rosa is one of a number of adoptive moms, both in RevGalBlogPals and not, who have become my online friends. In the past month or so, I have begun to feel the depth and breadth of healing of some old wounds related to my own mother and the way my adoption affected the mother-daughter relationship. I am grateful to all these friends, and to the spirit woven through the connections made with St. Casserole, Preacher Mom, Lisa V, Susan, Alex and others who may not even know I’m reading their stories.

This morning I’m thankful for friends, new and old and in-between.

A circle is round, it has no end.
That’s how long I want to be your friend.

Filed Under: Adoption, Friends, RevGalBlogPals ·
Jun 13, 2006

Strange Doings

By · 10 Comments

Last week I went online to order a copy of my birth certificate. Somewhere I have an old copy, but I have squirreled it away so carefully I could not find it. Perhaps this is a sign of age. Perhaps this is a sign of being ENFP. Perhaps this gives off a whiff of chaos.

I decided that the surest way to find it would be to order a fresh copy. I sent off for mine and for #1 Son’s since we were both born in that far away Southern Commonwealth and need them to get our passports.

After a lot of befuddlement, I ended up on the phone with the service that arranges quick shipping of vital records. I gave them my date and county and town of birth. I gave them my father’s name and my mother’s maiden name.

As an adopted person, I really have two birth certificates, one from before the adoption, and one adjusted after the adoption was final. I remember when I was seeking my birthmother almost twenty years ago, I wondered what it would be like to see the other certificate. What names would have appeared? Would my birth father’s name have been on it?

When I opened the package this morning, I had a shock. Everything on it was as I expected, with one exception. My mother’s name was given as “First Name, Middle Name, Maiden Name Not of Adoptive Mother But of Birth Mother.”

Now, I know my birth mother’s name already, so it is not new information. But what an odd sensation to see the two names in combination. And what if I hadn’t already known?

I guess I will call and insist that they send me the legally correct birth certificate. Meanwhile, do I dare go and apply for a passport with this one?

It’s an odd feeling to have a document that is yours, but is not yours, all at the same time.

Filed Under: Adoption ·
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