On second thought, she's all yours

The other day my mom talked about making perogies with her friend's daughter. Two hundred of them! All for the friend's daughter, none even for my mom to take home (which if you knew my mom is shocking in itself). Wow. Nice thing for my mom to do, she has never done that with me. It's like pulling teeth for her to cough up a perogy or two for my son and I unless someone special is in town visiting and dinner is at my place. Oohh, sounds bitter, eh? Jealous right? Well, it was. But when I think about it now, the LAST thing I feel like doing is making a few hundred perogies with my mother! Yeah, no, not my idea of fun.

So? Why would I be jealous of something I don't even want? Well, of course it wasn't the perogy making experience I wanted, what I was jealous of was someone getting something I don't have and what I don't have is a storybook relationship with my mom.

I think it's all about desire to have something that's very difficult to obtain. Especially when it comes to mothers and daughters. I'm trying to think of someone, anyone that I know that has the ideal mother/daughter relationship and I'm drawing a blank.

People talk about baggage in romantic relationships, well I think we also have it familial relationships. I think parents bring their own from growing up which is then thrown on to the pile that starts accumulating when they have kids. Why do we expect it to be any different than any other relationships? Sure there is a different kind of connection but the dynamic is the same. In fact, many times we treat our family members with less consideration than we would an acquaintance or a stranger on the street.

Good relationships take effort, by all parties involved. It's my opinion that those special parent/child relationships that do on occasion exist have taken effort and commitment early in the child's life and then an ongoing dedication on behalf of both parties to continue to work things out, to care about how each other are feeling, to really be prepared to apologize when warranted and try to see where the other is coming from.

Just wanting something doesn't make it so. And if it isn't so, let go gracefully. Quit banging your head against the wall. Nothing is automatic, no relationship is effortless or magical.

It's natural to wish something were a certain way, but it's important to have the strength to recognize when that's all it will ever be, is a wish. I'm not saying jump ship necessarily, that's for us all to decide as individuals, but let go of the fantasy. Stop setting yourself up for failure and disappointment and try and see things as they really are.

You never know, maybe what actually is will be a hell of a lot better than continuing to hope for something that never will be.

You're just like your mother

I think the majority of women fear dread becoming their mothers and/or are determined not to be like them, obviously some have more reason than others to fear dread it.

Am I wrong?

Fair weather daughter

I've decided to share a search experience. It's important to understand my intent in sharing so I'll first explain that.

I believe that adopted people think about how it would feel to find their biological people. They wonder if it's what they really want. I think the search itself can become a challenge, a quest. That the ramifications of success are impossible to know. Results are unpredictable, as are the ultimate feelings and effects on the adopted person's life as they know it.

So, the intent of this post is to share my feelings and reaction in an attempt to supply a known. To offer one small experience that was enlightening to me. There is no need to read into this post as what I plan to say is what I felt and am feeling, nothing hidden, nothing deeper.

The day before yesterday I was alone in my home. I got thinking what a perfect time it would be to call my biological mother (yes, I have her phone number as well as her address) so after writing a list of what was important to me to say to her, I started trying to call. I say "trying" as I must have partially dialed the number about 10 times and hung up before actually connecting to her number.

As I made these failed attempts I asked myself why. After much thought, I decided it was fear but first I debated with myself about why I'm afraid. Am I struggling because I don't really want to call? Because I'm worried about someone else answering? Am I afraid she'll be mean? I decided it was just plain fear, that I did want to try calling but was afraid. Knowing this gave me courage and I dialed the whole number and let it ring.

When I got the answering machine I was a little surprised as in my mental preparation for the phone call this likely scenario had eluded me. Out of instinct I left my first name and number asking her to call me when she had time. That's it. That's all, it was done. -Side note, she sounded younger than I'd expected.

But, now I'd left a message for her to call. And, I needed a shower as I had an appointment in a couple of hours. Ok, off to the shower I go, phone within reach. As I wash I contemplate what I'll do if she returns my call with my head full of soap, how it will be better if she calls while I'm on the conditioner stage. I ponder if she was really home and had decided not to answer, had screened my call and was listening to my message. What would she think I sounded like? I think I'd sounded upbeat and normal. I thought about how I'd forgotten to add to my written list of things I wanted to say that I was fine with her keeping me a secret, that physically meeting wasn't that important to me. That correspondence via email was perfectly acceptable as was snail mail although I'm really, really bad at mailing real letters.

Ok, out of the shower and ready to dry my hair. Will I hear the phone ring while my blow dryer is running? I stand the phone up so I'll see it ring, just in case. Hopefully she doesn't call before I'm done though as it will certainly be a bad hair day if I don't get it dried enough before she calls.

Ok, I'm all ready, but now I have to leave in a few minutes. I enter her name and number in my phone so that if she calls while I'm out and my husband is back from golfing he'll see the name and not ignore the call thinking it's just another long distance call from some phone center.

Off I go to take care of my errands, the last one being meeting my mom at her apartment to take care of some travel arrangements for my nieces. All thoughts of bio mom calling back are gone for the majority of the time I'm out, although I did check my voice mail at home once while I waited for my mom to meet me.

The travel arrangements and errands I took care of that day were a real load off my mind so I returned home quite pleased with myself and enjoyed the coffee my husband had ready for me when I got there. I listened to him talk about his day, he listened to me talk about how relieved I was to have gotten these "chores" done.

Eventually I check my call history and see there's been no return call as it was obvious no message had been left in my absence. There's a bit of thought about this, of course. Did she get the message? Is she maybe out of town? Has she not had a good time to call back yet? Ahhh, who knows, but what I do know is I want to just stretch out, watch tv, maybe have a nap, and relax. My brain is little fried from all the travel planning and it'll be great to do nothing for the evening.

As I veg out on my bed, flipping through channels, half dozing, the phone rings. Damn! Oh crap, I hope it's not her, I don't feel like talking on the phone. I grab the phone and check the call display and it's my mom, but not the bio one. I'm slightly relieved because since I'd just spent three hours with my mom that afternoon I felt no guilt in not answering, opting instead to check the message she'll leave just to make sure this time it's not something important.

And then it hits me. After all my trepidation, curiosity, speculation, anticipation and excitement, when it came down to it, I had dreaded the call when it wasn't convenient for me. When I didn't feel like being curious, didn't feel like talking, her call became just as much of an annoyance as anyone else's would if I wasn't in the mood for a chat.

This experience has been enlightening, a validation of the concern that my curiosity is fair weather. That my consideration of her circumstance is warranted. That my decision to value her privacy is a good one. That for me it would be selfish to push things further than I have because what I want is frivolous in comparison to what she doesn't want.

I still wonder, don't get me wrong. I wonder how she can not call back, because I'd not be able to resist. I wonder and worry if she walks around in a constant state of dread or fear, because I think if I were her I would.  I wonder who my paternal people are, because I don't know. I wonder what she's thinking, because I always wonder what everyone is thinking.

Thing is, I only wonder when I feel like it, and to me, that's not enough to alter other people's realities forever.

The ABC's of mom and daughter....starting with Z

I really like my post from yesterday.

This morning while I had my coffee, ok well first cup, I got to thinking about it and how it's amazing that something that can really make me nuts (I'm talking knots in the upper back in between the shoulder blades and stomach pains) was able to give me some tears in the eyes, belly laughs when I thought/wrote about it in a humorous sense. I'm not kidding, I've reread it several times and got at the very least a smile upon each read.

There's a guy who has a twitter account called shitmydadsays. He has 1,322,011 followers....and I'm one of them. Justin, the guy, has a book out now with shit his dad says, called, Sh*t My Dad Says. Now, in Justin's Twitter description he says he lives with his dad and his dad is awesome so, in comparison to my mom and I, that's a huge difference in itself. I won't live with my mom or have my mom live with me. Oh I'm not opposed to some short overnight visits for a good reason and have done it, but never anything permanent. I just couldn't and remain the sane same person.

Now, before you think wow, what an ingrate! what kind of daughter would not let her mom live with her? there's something special my mom has done for me regarding this. See, my mom's mom, my grandma, used to ask my mom repeatedly to live with her and my dad. Thankfully, for me, my mom always made it quite clear that there was "no way in hell that she'd ever have her mom live with her". Ahhhh....just writing that gives me a sense of peace. It lets me so off the hook, gives me a pass in a sense. I mean, what else could be more absolving of guilt than that?

But, I digress. What I'm trying to get at here is that perhaps the key to a difficult parent is to try and see some humour, or if I'm being truly honest, take a hammer and pound some humour into our relationship and our interactions. Obviously it can be done, I did it with our pre MDay outing. I didn't come home that evening laughing and feeling all "oh, mom, you silly bird....the things you do just crack me up". In fact, I drove home kinda grouchy and shaking my head in annoyance, all ready to moan and bitch to my poor husband.

Fortunately for both him and I (especially him) the look on his face when I shuffled out of my car with those big, dumb, disposable sandals had us both laughing and thwarted me poisoning him with my rendition of shit my mom says.

Yesterday was one of those visits that went pretty well. There were moments of near derailment, like when the topic of computers came up. Mom announced how she'd had the poor IT guy from our local internet provider on the phone forever with him attempting to help her get her address book back in alphabetical order. Just her mentioning the word "computer" is enough to make everyone in the room turn and look at me in anticipation of what might happen next. It's like, uh oh, here we go again....

As mom went on to explain how the guy was so great to help her and that what a shame it was that he'd gone so fast that she'd not gotten a chance to write it all down so she'd know how to fix it herself next time I reminded her that I'd been there done that at least once before and showed her how to deal with an address book gone wrong. She wasn't having any of that, nuh uhhh, anything she's ever been told about the computer she writes down and then is able to not bother anyone, just fix it herself. Like the other day, when she lost her "tool bar on the top" she was able to figure out all on her own how to get it back.

Umm, mom? Don't you mean all on your own with me on the other end of the phone for half an hour while my dinner waited? C'mon, remember? Remember when I kept saying, well, sorry I guess I'll just have to swing by and fix it, this isn't working over the phone...no, what? what did you just click? ok, so where are you now? what do you see now? Mom, what do you see now? K, do you see the X in the top right of your screen? Is your email open? No, not is your computer turned on, I'm assuming it's turned on, I mean is your email open? Your email...the thing that says outlook....the place where your address book starts Z...

Same shit... different pile

The following is a guest post from my sister. We are both adopted into one family but have different biological families.


After a long conversation with my sister about adoption -- a subject of mutual interest, obviously--I agreed to write something for her blog. Then my brain froze. Do I argue about psychological implications? Debate opinions? Offer up my “what ifs” along with other adoptees and birth parents who wonder what other turns life could have taken? Finally, I decided to tell my own story.


Like my sister, I always knew I was adopted. I had always been told that I was loved, but that my birth mother couldn't look after me or keep me, so she gave me away to my adoptive mother and father, who loved children very much, but were sad that she couldn't have any herself. As a generous-minded child at four or five, always happy to share my toys, that made sense to me, and I accepted it happily. I was told that my arrival was a dream come true, and I had been chosen from among all those other babies in the hospital. Whether or not parents really could choose their adopted infants like you choose a new pair of shoes isn't important—what matters is that's how they told the story to me, and that's how I felt.


In my late teens and early twenties, I became more aware of the social issues of the late 1950s that would have been part of my birth mother's situation, including the challenges and pressures faced by an unwed mother with no family or financial support. I wanted to be able to tell her that I was fine, grew up loved, happy, educated, and bore no resentment. I wanted to reassure her that I was okay with her decision.


When I decided to search for my birth mother, I chose to use the official channels of Child and Family Services. Bureaucratic, yes, but providing a layer of privacy and protection for both sides, in case my birth mother didn't want that part of her life revisited, or in fact, if she turned out to be someone I didn't want in my life! Through a couple of astounding coincidences, CFS managed to contact my birth mother quickly and easily, even though she wasn't registered for contact through CFS. The first “supervised” exchange of letters was wonderful, and soon, on our own, we were talking on the phone and writing to fill in details.


Eventually, I traveled to the US to meet her. It was a short, intense visit. Part of it felt like meeting family—our shared tastes and interests and activities. Part of it was dull and felt like visiting someone you didn't know well—waiting, trying to figure things out, and feeling left out. But it answered a lot of questions for me that I had carried with me for a long time. Who did I look like? Because she had few family ties, we couldn't go back very far into her family, but I look a lot like her (for better or worse) and share many other characteristics. How strange that even as “responsible adults,” many of us look for an answer to “where did I come from/where did that trait come from?”


I was also able to hear about the first few days of my life before my adoption. I had read the literature, and knew that being unwanted, unloved, unconnected to a mother's warmth during those first few crucial hours and days could lead to unresolved feelings of abandonment, of unworthiness, of not belonging--although what child growing up didn't encounter those at some point, at some level, as passing fear or a deep conviction? I, too, had struggled with these feelings growing up. But I couldn't blame my birth mother, who could not keep and raise me in spite of her love for me; or my adopted mother who wanted to bring me home and cuddle me the day that my parents learned I had been born, but couldn't because of the adoption process of the time, requiring a few weeks in hospital, as well as time for the adoption process papers to become finalized.


After meeting my birth mother, I learned that the reality of my first few days contradicted any trauma-inducing circumstances. I had been born with a name; it was on my certification of adoption. My birth mother had me named for her sister, and her one close friend at school. I was born with connections and history. And contrary to usual practises of the time, my birth mother was allowed to hold me, and cuddle me, and no doubt whisper things into my baby ears. I was wanted (I had two mothers), I was loved, and had been since before I was born. So much for my “abandonment” being the source of my insecurities growing up, as I tried to do no less than understand the world.


Another step on the evolution of my view of adoption was acknowledging the other half of the argument of “you're not my real parents”--because, of course, my real parents would have a house in the country with horses, cook gourmet vegetarian food, play the harp, and paint, and write beautiful poems all day. (Instead, my adoptive family lived in the suburbs, ate Sunday roast dinners, tuned the radio to middle of the road pop music and gave each other Hallmark birthday cards.)


One day, I looked at the woman who had been my mother since she first unwrapped the bundle that would need feeding and cleaning for so many years, and I realized the dreams of delicate femininity she had held for me, her first daughter! I would be graceful and ladylike and maternal, and we would shop for clothes together, and have facials and beauty treatments, and fuss over our hair, plan a lovely wedding one day, and choose names for her grandchildren, and I would cherish all her family recipes. Instead, I live “unmarried and childfree” nearly fifteen hundred miles from home, a tube of mascara lasts me for two years, my favorite shoes are all-weather, no-nonsense walking shoes, she is finally admiring my very grey, undyed long hair, and I have kept two of her recipes. When I compared her ideals with the reality of what she unwrapped that day so long ago, I laughed out loud. Although I failed to mesh with the plans she had for me, she never declared, “you're not my real daughter!” How lucky for me! She got what she got, and I got what I got, and we worked it out from there.