DNA Matches Part 2

Part 1

PTSD blankets my emotions with numbness.  It's hard to feel any emotion, I think them more than I sense them. Unexpected strong emotions tend to cause an automatic whole-body shutdown response.  But this was so unexpected it blew through my automatic defenses like they weren't even there.

It had been a few weeks since I was told that my results would be ready in a month and a half.  I checked the site everyday, but the expectation of seeing anything had long since slumbered.  I almost forgot to check that Saturday when I remembered it before running off to do some outdoor work.

I logged on to Ancestry.com, expecting to see the now-familiar white page with a tiny "come back later" notice.  Instead I saw colors.  There were greens, beige, browns, oranges, blues, pinks, blacks, and even a few tiny full color photographs.  Some of the colors formed words, but I couldn't read them, too shocked to see that there was something -- quite a lot of something -- there at all.

The page was full.  How could the page be full?  My origin had always been a blank page, how could it be full?

How could there be enough to fill a page?

How could there be enough to fill a page and I not know any of it?

Slowly the words started to make sense.  There was one word repeated over and over -- "cousin".

"First cousin."

"Second cousin."

"Third cousin."

"Fourth cousin."

I had never had any cousins before who wanted to do anything with us.  What the hell was a cousin anyway?  At that moment I could not have told you the definition of the word if you had held a gun to my head.

My mind was completely blown. "Come here!" I shouted, "Come here!"  But everyone was outside or playing video games on the other end of the house.

I scrolled to the end of the page.  It said Page 1  -- of 168????!!!

I'd been told most adoptees were lucky to find a single third cousin, how could I have 168 pages worth?

It was too much.  I retreated to the ethnicity page to calm down.  That said British -- a little over half, some Iberian, tiny bits of Scandinavian and Irish -- what would be expected if my non-identifying information of "half English, half French-English" was correct.

So those evil wretches at the adoption agency had told the truth about one thing.  Good to know.

I took a deep breath and went back to the match page.

The first one was a "first cousin/second cousin" match, and listed as being available to help others with genealogy.  Brain go splodey time....

I stopped, pulled up a blank file, and began madly copying and collating.  I had to make my own list in case someone took this one away from me.

Think that's irrational?  Why?  They did it once before.

I had one 1st-2cnd cousin, 1 2cnd-3rd cousin, 6 3rd-4th cousins, 86 4th-6th cousins, and page after page of possible (margin of error here) distant cousins.

I had to look; I couldn't stay still.  I was leaping in and out of my seat like a Jack-in-the-box.  My family finally joined me.  I turned the computer over to my husband.  I ran out of the house, craving fresh air, needing to move.

My five year-old ran after me.  After a few yards I turned around and went back for his sake, but if he hadn't been there I don't know how long I would have wandered the roads in a daze.  I wasn't sure I could look after myself at that moment, let alone him.

I got hugs from my husband.  I went online and got moral support from sister adoptees.  When my nerve was high and before it could crash again,  for the first time in my life I got to emailing my cousins.

The first person I wrote turned out to be solid gold.  A first-second cousin and an experienced genealogist willing to help newbies, he wasn't the least put off by my adoptee status but dove straight in to trying to help me find my roots.  He has a huge tree for me to wander though.  We speak to each other most days, and it's always a pleasure to hear from him.

The second one said he didn't know anything, don't bother him again.  I believed that, until a few weeks later I found out that he is a noted genealogist for the other side of my family who has published a book on the family genealogy.  I guess bastards don't count in his book.

The rest of the people fell in between.  I spent most of the week just prowling around family trees, looking at photographs and learning stories.  The photographs were a revelation.  It took a while before I stopped crying whenever I saw one.

The next Friday I told my therapist what had happened.  He asked me what I was feeling.  I told him it was something big, but I couldn't put a name to it.  It took the poor man an hour and fifteen minutes before I could bring myself to realize it was overwhelming joy.

I spent another week looking and learning stories.  The family had been poor during the Depression, but they had done well for themselves since then, and many of them were now professional class people, lawyers and doctors.  They were doing quite well for themselves.  That tickled me after all the years of being told I wasn't good for anything.

Two Saturdays after my results came in the other shoe dropped.  I woke up in the morning to find one of the analytical insights that I get in place of PTSD flashbacks waiting to slot into place:

They were doing good.  They had some money, contacts, education.  They had choices.  That meant ditching the infant me wasn't a case of them being poor and not having choices.

They had choices.  And having choices, they chose to throw me away.

Oh.

The gentleman's agreement between my mind and my heart that we weren't going to to go there splintered into a thousand shards, and all of them pieced my soul.  The pain hurt like nothing I'd ever dreamed of, like half my body had been sheared away and what was left was one giant aching wound.  I wanted to scream, not just at the top of my lungs but with every cell in my body.  I realized I had been screaming for a very long time and not letting myself hear me.

Bereft.  I used to think I knew what the word meant, but I was wrong.  Now I knew.

I didn't know why they threw me away.  I didn't know the story.  But it wasn't the easily forgivable one of being poor and having no options.  I grieved for the termination of that possibility.  I mourned the loss of the easy answer more than I had mourned any death save that of my son.

I had to go shopping that day.  I walked around town with tears streaming down my face, babbling my story to complete strangers, too wrapped up in agony to care one whit.

But the thing I didn't say, the thing that if it had come out would have been screamed to the heavens so loud they'd have called the police, was, "What the Hell is the point of having resources if you can't keep your family together?"

IDK, maybe I'm betraying my lower-middle class upbringing here, but --- seriously?  Nobody could have used those resources to figure out a way to at least keep me in the family?

They threw me away.  They dumped me before they even had a chance to know me, before they gave me any sort of chance.

I'd been dumped in college.  It was, "Well that stunk, but it's also an (unpleasant) learning opportunity.  I need to find the part of me that's attracted to that sort of person and switch it off so this never happens again."  And I did, and I'm a better person for doing that.

But we're talking about the primal connection between baby and mother, the foundation of our connection to humanity in general.  You can't just switch that off without ended up a psychopath.  Granted, that does explain why so many serial killers are adoptees, but I've no wish to go down that route.  But leaving the connection open means continuing to hurt like -- there are no words for what its like.

But time has applied a local anesthetic to the wound.  It usually doesn't hurt quite so much unless I do something like, oh, rake over the memories and try to write down what I'm feeling.

But better out than in.  The unexamined thoughts and emotions were taking up an inordinate amount of my internal landscape.  Getting them outside makes me feel - empty.  But light.  And I can feel thousands of hairline cracks in my psyche starting to heal.

Which is good, because there were more challenges ahead.  But give me time to recover from finishing this entry first.

Chop Wood, Carry Water -- But Stay Out of the Poison Oak

Searching for my biological family is extremely stressful.  Fortunately this time of  year my garden can absorb all the nervous energy I can throw at it.  But it demands more attention than I gave it recently when distracted by my personal distress I blundered into poison oak and ended up covered in a rash.  The medicine they put me on leaves my too drowsy to write my next post.  Sorry for the delay, will get back to it in a few days.

DNA Matches Part 1: So I Didn't Drop In From an Alien Planet After All!

I took a DNA test to learn about my biological relatives and found out some things.

Let's start with the basics, shall we?  I found out I was a human being, homo sapiens sapiens (at least mostly, I haven't compared it with the non-human samples yet.)  This actually was a concern for my younger self.  There were no people around who looked or acted like me in my adopted family or in the society around us, and everyone was quick to point out how weird and alien I was.  So what's a kid supposed to think?  Where was the evidence I hadn't fallen off a UFO?  I became sensitive to attempts to "other" me or anyone else.

My questionable humanity became a sore spot in adolescence.  I played D&D in my teens and I noticed this huge disconnection between myself and some of the other players.  A lot of players never, ever wanted to play a human character.  They despised humanity.  It disgusted them.  For them, the whole point of playing D&D was to explore the possibility that they were not human.  At least not wholly human, safe within the confines of a RPG game.

I stubbornly insisted on only playing characters who were 100% human, which caused a certain amount of consternation among the anti-human crew.  Everyone else thought I was weird for playing D&D in the first place, and they thought I was weird for how I played D&D.  There was nowhere I felt at home, nowhere I felt safe.

Looking back, I realize safety was the core issue.  They were normal adolescents who felt confident enough in their own identity that they could start to take on and explore other identities.  I wasn't.  They knew where they had come from; I did not.  They were secure enough in their humanity that they could reject it, but I always had this tiny doubt that maybe I really had fallen off Witch Mountain.

Of course they would have been highly insulted if anyone had pointed this out to them at the time.  Daring to be different was strictly a sign of their own courage in the face of overwhelming social conformity, not of any underlying safety net.

And for some kids it was, but not for most of them.

 Just like some teens had these huge fights with their parents over reasons that seemed oh-so-important to them at the time but other people could plainly tell were mainly because they felt confident enough in their parents' unconditional love that they knew they weren't going to be kicked out of the house for it.  I obsessed day and night over telling my abusive adoptive parents off, and day and night I reminded myself that I had nowhere else to go and no way to survive on my own.

I secretly seethed at both groups.  It made me furious that they could get away with doing things like that because they had a safety net and I did not.  I couldn't even tell other people how precarious my own safety was without potentially making the situation worse by calling attention to it.

 And that was the real problem, not the other kids.

So anyway, I 'm glad to have actual confirmation that I really am a human being.  But that wasn't my first thought when I saw my DNA matches.  It wasn't even my hundredth or thousandth thought.

My first thought was utter and complete mindblowing shock.

To be continued....

The Searcher's Two-Step

Y'know this whole adoption searching business would go a lot faster if finding out some little fact didn't leave me too broke up to do squat the next day.

Dear Phantom Birthmother,

We need to talk.

I know you're not big on talking.  You've been the silent ghost hovering in the background all my life, your absence a constant presence.

Frankly, I would have preferred Banquo's Ghost, or King Hamlet.  They were explicable and helped move the plot along.  You have always been a cypher.  What did you want?

Nothing, I was told.  That's why you weren't there, after all.  I was told that I was an impediment to the life you wanted to live, a pothole in the road of your journey that you had sped on past and forgotten.  I was better off without you, I was told.

I really shouldn't spend much time thinking about you, I was told.  And I didn't.  Think about you, that is.  Not much.  As little as possible, and I'd stop myself whenever my subconscious tried to bring it up.

I always tried to follow the rules.  Would you have liked that in me?

But there's more to life than thought.  I didn't think about you, but I missed you with an ache that never went away.

I've heard the line about "real Mommies" and how my adoptive Mommy deserved that title.  Leaving aside all other questions, do you honestly think I couldn't tell the difference?  Sure I shut up crying and comforted myself by drinking myself to sleep, because that's what babies do.

Didn't mean I forgot I'd been snookered.

Thus you were born within days of my birth, a defined void where the other part of me should have been.

I forget that you're younger than me.  I feel so old.

And into that void fell all my love for you, all my anger, my confusion, my sorrow, my grief, my self-hatred, my questions....

So many questions.

No wonder you couldn't fade and blow away, not with all that energy powering you.

That's why we need to talk.  Or if you're not going to talk, at least listen.

I was "good" if you define that as me doing what I was told.  Maybe too good a lot of the time.  I have let you get on with your life without me for nearly 50 years.  I think I've reached the end of any reasonable statue of limitations on the crime of being born.

In doing so I have deprived myself of not just you, but of my -- our -- past and extended family.

And it is our history, our family.

I know you felt justified at the time.  I know the pressure the culture put on you.  However, I do not think it is fair that you decided to disown me before you got to know me.

Nor was it right to cut me out of the larger family.

I don't want money.

I want kin.  If you've never been without them, even if they didn't want anything to do with you, you have no idea what their absence means.

I hope to meet you on this journey.  The real you, not the ghost you.  But meet you or not I am still going.

Hope to see you soon.

Homeless Jesus Statue

I have found the Homeless Jesus statue that's been in the news lately to be an incredibly powerful work of art. For one thing, this is a statue of a God who is needs help. Some people find that very disturbing, but I find it liberating. A God who asks for my help is a God who acknowledges my position as a grownup, an independent agent capable of providing help. It's not a God who sees me as a helpless child or a hopeless sinner. At the same time it resonates with me because of my position as an adoptee. In that respect I am the outsider who needs help. How will others treat me? What are your thoughts on the work?

The Frankenfamily Part 2: The Terror of the 98th Percentile

Part 1

This is so hard to talk about.  I've tried before, but I've never found the right words.  Although as much as it hurt to be misunderstood, at least the misunderstandings helped me understand it better.

I hope that made sense.  It boils down to, "This is gonna be long."  This draft has taken three weeks to knock out, but prior versions have been kicking around for 37 years.

Growing up, I had three problems to deal with:  figure out the world around me, make friends, and since I couldn't "fix" my parents get someone to do something about their disturbing behavior.  By elementary school the first one was coming along nicely, but the other two were stalled out.

I'm not ready to blog about the third one today.  Suffice to say that I kept trying to tell trusted adults that something was wrong with my parents only to be told time and again that something was wrong with me for thinking that way.  Over and over again the adults I considered the best, the smartest, the most reliable, the most admirable, the most trustworthy told me that the problems I saw were not caused by something systemic in my family but were all in my head.  I was the problem, not them.

That betrayal of trust cut to the bone, especially in a child.  Most especially in an adopted child at a time and place where society  automatically assumed adoptive parents to be saints and adoptive children to be genetic "defectives" with sealed records preventing any possible refutation of that assumption.

***break for a bawling-eyes-out crying session***

Anyway, back to number two.

I tackled all three problems with the enthusiasm only a fresh-faced child can muster, but by elementary school it was clear something wasn't working in the "making friends" department.  I talked to other children, but they didn't seem to understand what I was saying.  My pronunciation was good, my grammar was excellent, but my comments only provoked silence or derision.  And nobody laughed at my jokes.  I soon became the object of everyone else's jokes.

And it wasn't just children.  I was starting to get the same response from grown-ups.

Even in my own family.

I tried to empathize with the other children, but that didn't work either.  I couldn't understand why at the time it was so hard for me to understand them and for them to understand me.  Looking back now, I can see that there were two separate issues standing in my way.  I was different from them in some ways, and my abusive adoptive family was different from their families in other, (literally) unrelated ways.  That didn't leave much room for common ground.

I learned not to rely on empathy or trust my feelings.  I learned to live from the neck up.

The people who understood I was being teased mercilessly (nobody used the term "bullied") told me they understood the situation and to buck up, it would get better over time.  But while they may have understood "the situation" they didn't understand me.  They didn't realize, or didn't want to realize when I tried to tell them, that the same thing was happening at home.  I didn't have a safe harbor to retreat to.  And it got worse over time, not better.

It wasn't long before I withdrew into the only place people weren't laughing at me, books.  I pretty much gave up on the rest of the world.  That decision hurt a lot, but I felt like I had no choice.

Not long after that I went from being an A student to being a straight-D student.  My parents didn't care, and as long as I had a fresh book on me I was what passed for content.  Books were my drug of choice to lessen the pain of alienation.  In second grade I started sneaking out of class to go to the library.  Picture books were too damn short.  I craved chapter books.  I needed worlds that wouldn't abandon me in a mere thousand words.

Fourth grade brought some changes.  I was diagnosed as "gifted", and placed in a special class with kids and a teacher I could actually talk to.  I didn't believe it at first, but when it didn't fade away like an illusion I started slowly coming out of my shell in fifth grade.

Mom had an even harder time believing it than I did.  First she insisted for years that the testers had made a mistake, or that actually my sister was the more better student and better child. Then I seemed to graduate into a sort of specialized servant/entertainer role.  I was allowed enrichment opportunities if they would either serve her, entertain her, or grant her social credit.

(Later I realized that she was complaining about me to outsiders who were pressuring her into giving me enrichment opportunities by threatening to withhold social credit if she didn't.  Decades later after I had moved away and had children of my own this dynamic apparently evolved into a vicious sport.  Her peers would threaten to withhold social credit if she didn't act like a "proper" grandmother, she got very good at avoiding doing things with or for my family, and her peers got very good at twisting the knife over her avoidance tactics.  That was pretty much our relationship up until her death.)

But I was still ten years old before I had anyone I could talk to on any level other than the most basic.

Think about that for a minute.  Think about spending the first ten years of your life with no one who would talk to you beyond telling you what to do or caring for your most basic needs.  You can talk to them, but they either don't listen to you or react negatively towards you for saying anything.  No positive reaction to what you say or do unless you're being blindly obedient, and that's just an acknowledgement that you did what you were told.

No one to share with or care about your innermost thoughts, your authentic self.

That sort of isolation, of alienation, is a kind of Hell.  Some say Hell is other people, but that's not quite right.  Hell is other people -- who don't really care about you.

Some gifted kids learn how to  dumb themselves down in order to make friends, but I never found enough common ground with non-gifted children to learn the trick.  I don't know if it was because of abuse issues or if I was the gifted equivalent of the flaming queen trying to pass as heterosexual, but it never worked.  And what kind of friends would they be anyway if they didn't want to know the real me?

After it sunk in that the gifted class wasn't a trick, there were other people out there like me and I was going to be allowed to spend time with them, I was thrilled.  My exile was over!  With the optimism of youth I thought it could only get better from here.

But I only had a few minutes I could actually spend with kids like me, and it wasn't enough time to get to know anyone or make friends.  It was a taste, but a taste is not a meal.

But where else could I find people like me?  I didn't get out much, and the types of places that attracted smart, creative people weren't the types of places my parents would take me.  Still, there was hope, right?

About then we started taking the CAT test in school, which amounted to an unusual but innocuous diversion for me.  Then the results came in.  I scored in the 98th percentile.  Everyone went "Yay!"  I went "Yay" too, because everyone else was doing it.  But I didn't have a clue what it meant.

Turns out it meant I tested out as smarter than 98% of the people who took the test.  Okay, but what did that mean?

If I was smarter than 98% of the population, then only 2% of the population was as smart as me.

That meant there was only 2% of the population that I could really connect with.

Oh.

Shit.

That meant I had to be around 100 people before I could even find one single person to talk to!   Anything smaller, forget it.  And I hated crowds!

And that's just finding a person to possibly talk to.  There's no guarantee that person will be anywhere near my age or have anything like my interests.

And I'll have to actually find them in that crowd of 100 people!  And as a kid I was seldom in any group that size, and when I was I was usually under strict orders to stay with my handlers.

But more importantly, it meant this isolation and alienation were going to stay with me my whole life.  There was no escape, no end to my exile.  I was always going to be alone, with no one around who understood me.

And that's when I became suicidal.
_______

I tried talking about this moment over the years, but other people didn't understand.  "Didn't you feel that way?" I asked a gifted woman my age.

"Nah," she shrugged.  "I just blew it off and went home to my family."

I wanted to smash my head through a brick wall.  She went home to her family.  Her family who were gifted like she was, who understood her, who comforted her and explained things to her, who provided her with a secure home base to strike out into the world from and a safe harbor to return to when she needed it.

I didn't have that.  Not only did I not have parents or siblings like that, I didn't have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins like that to turn to when I needed them.  I had no tribe, and that lack left a hole inside me that nothing could fill.

Eventually I made it to college through brains and determination, but there I found myself handicapped by a lack of social skills.  There were finally people I could talk to, but I didn't know how to socialize.  Somehow with all the "surviving a dysfunctional household that refused to admit it was dysfunctional" rigamorole I never picked up basic people skills.  I didn't know what to do about that, and I was too ashamed to admit it to ask for help.


Once again I was alone.

The other thing that I lacked was trust.  That's common with both abuse survivors and adoptees, but nobody told me this when I needed to hear it.  I didn't realize what I didn't have or what to do about it.

I screwed up a lot of potential friendships.

*deep breath*

If there's one complaint I have with my biological mother, it's that she thought so little about her own gifts, her own self-worth, that she thought any random person could take care of a child that shared her genes.  I have paid the price for that low level of self-regard, and not only by being sold to a couple who were ill-equipped to rear me.  For if she thought so little of herself and even less of me, then logically how could I be worth anything?

Forty-seven years later I can sit back, look at what I have and at what I've accomplished, and say to myself, "Buck up, it's not so bad."  But the thought still slithers through the rubble of my memories.

All people are created equal, but not interchangeable.  Modern adoption practice is based on the premise that you can fit square pegs in round holes if you start forcing  them when they're tiny and soft.  How is that not child abuse?

What's Wrong With Her? She's Gifted.

I was adopted anonymously by parents who wanted a normal, healthy baby.  For a while it looked like they'd got their wish, but by early elementary I started to show signs that something was wrong.  I'd had good grades briefly, then they had crashed.  I'd soon become inattentive and withdrawn.

In fourth grade, around 1975, the experts went looking for an explanation for my straight-D grades, inattentiveness, and poor social skills in school.  The suggestion that I might be gifted was made by my reading teacher, who noted that while I didn't pay attention in class and always had my head stuck in a book, it was a different book every day.

Her suggestion was met with universal derision.  How could a very smart child be such a failure?  But upon reflection it was decided that I might be retarded (the term was still used clinically at that time), and that I should be given an IQ test to see if I qualified for Special Education.  So I was abruptly pulled out of class and sat down at a bewildering exam the likes of which I'd never even imagined.

To the amazement of most, I barely squeaked in as "gifted".  Something had gone wrong!  I had cheated, or there had been a mixup involving the grading of the test.  So I was pulled out of class and given the test again, and the tester made to score the test on site in front of a committee of teachers.

But this time the test was not a complete surprise to me.  I had been through it once before, and knew what to expect.  This time I scored 20 points higher, over one standard deviation, easily clearing the "highly gifted" mark.

Oh, the consternation!  Such hooting, hollering, and carrying on you have never heard in your life!  I'm told the administration wanted to test me a third time with even more rigorous anti-cheating measures in place.  "You want to see how much higher she'll score next time?" snarked the gifted ed teacher.

(The answer, when another school system tested me four years later, was 30 points or 2 standard deviations higher than the second test.)

The testers tried to explain that only half of high-IQ students perform well in a regular classroom.  The other half become bored and disengaged.  That explanation only made the administration resent me for not being a team player.  However, with so much documentation staring them in the face it was felt that they risked a lawsuit if they didn't put in me in the gifted program (they didn't know my adoptive parents very well), so I was grudgingly allowed in on probation.


Of course, once I had access to people like myself doing things that actually interested us, school became a lot less boring and more engaging.  I paid more attention, and my grades improved.

It makes me angry that regional schools no longer have gifted ed programs.  Those schools have undiagnosed gifted children in them who are starving for the companionship of their peers and for an IQ-appropriate learning environment.  That doesn't do them any good, and by adding to their burdens instead of lightening them we take away their ability to do our country any good.

So Much For Exposure Deadening the Pain

I thought dealing with my adoption paperwork would get easier with time.  It doesn't.  It's just as excruciating as ever.

First Book

My husband and I have begun turning the material he worked up for his junior high and high school science classes into a curriculum. Here's the first e-book:

Earth and Space

This is nine weeks worth of lesson plans and quizzes. We're planning to put out something more comprehensive at a later date, but this was what we could get out right now.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, please look it over and tell me what you think.

ETA:  Fixed the link.