Day # 257: Segment three of my birth story

#257

I am not sure I would call the second half of this story a recovery story because I know recovery isn’t what occurs.  Learning to live with and beyond the trauma is what happens.  In order to do this one must recognize and call by name the issues confronting them.  This process did not begin for me until her 16^th birthday.  In 1983 I co-founded an adult literacy program in the poorest county in Massachusetts.  I placed all of my energy into building a progressive community oriented educational program and by 30 was the Executive Director of my own program.  It was extremely stressful.  I was in a doctoral program and I was entrenched in the life of my co-founder.  Life was unrelenting. 

I became ill in 1987.  An anaerobic bacterial infection in the wall of my abdomen took over, creating a tremendous cyst which just grew larger and larger causing terrible pain and eventually high fevers.  This was not diagnosed for almost a year, and not until May of 1988 was I rushed off to emergency surgery under the eyes of a team, my GP, my surgeon, my mother, and my therapist.  

The infection source was never discovered, but what was known was that I had been abusing my own body for more than 15 years.  I had lost and gained over 110 pounds three times, I was a heavy smoker, and I was under an incredible amount of stress brought on by my being an intellectual over achiever with an  amazing ability to wrap myself up into bad romantic relationships.  The building of the literacy program  was again the creation of a metaphorical baby brought into the world in an abusive stormy relationship with an alcoholic.  It was high drama.

One evening a colleague and I went for a cup of tea, I have no memory of how the subject of being a birthmother came up.  It happened and we both disclosed to each other the experience.  Annie was much more conscious of what role being a birth mother played in her life and had done some work around her health.  She had begun to search, something I found unimaginable.  Maybe I didn’t think it was wrong, but I felt I was supposed to believe it was wrong.  We’d made our choices; we’d made our beds.  But Annie made sense and it was so relieving to have someone to talk to freely, openly, someone who’d done it.  I was captivated.

On December 13, 1988 Annie invited me to her house for dinner.  She had baked a cake and got a balloon and invited me to tell my birth story openly, like Mom’s do, recalling their pregnancies and labor and first sight of their newborn.   So many times I had heard my own mother tell all of her birthing stories.  And even though for many of us original mothers the story ends there, our stories still bring the same smiles and tears to us, the ones we are not allowed to share, the ones we’d signed away along with our mother-hoods.

This dinner party for two opened the dam for me.  It connected the dots: the large infection that almost took my life, the one that  caused Jason, then in his early 20’s to exclaim, “You look pregnant, are you sure you are not pregnant?”  He wasn’t the only one whose mind went there.  Several doctors double checked.  Somehow I was infected in the place where I had my biggest secret, the place where by trauma had sat in my body and seethed, making poisonous pus that built up into a tumor 5x3x3 and produced a fever and excruciating pain that wracked my body and forced me to turn the running of The Literacy Project over to one of my colleagues in March of 1988. 

With the help of a support group in Northampton called Today Reunites Yesterday (TRY), I began a search, hiring a private detective in Connecticut.  My flood gates were opened by the experiences of 1988 and I was ready to at least find out that she was alive, that she was not in a Department of Youth Service’s program like so many other adoptees, and that she was loved.  This produced amazing anxiety in me, not knowing if I was a worse person for searching than I was living with the unknown.  But by then I was haunted by the desire to know her and for her to know I loved her from the beginning. So I just went on with it.  I received in the mail my baby’s name, given to her not 3 days after her birth, and I learned she spent her first Christmas in the arms of her family.  At the time of relinquishing, I was told that her new family was artistic, lived in Northwestern Connecticut and had a 3 year old adopted daughter, who was healthy and stable, and that the state was sure she had been passed on to a good life.  Now, her birth certificate was matched with hospital adoption records and her name was produced.  Her name was so unusual that I thought I would find her immediately, but that was not the case.  There was no evidence that anyone was alive with that name.