Adoption, Abuse, Acceptance: Finally Saying What I Find So Difficult To Speak.
Coming to terms with life at mid-passage.
CW: sexual and physical abuse
Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like, the other life, the first life, the kept life; the life where she named me Caroline instead of Baby Girl. Would she have told my father? Would she have found him — sweating in the strong sun, knee deep in rich West African mud building homes (not fighting war) — and said to him in her sweet Southern drawl, “This is your daughter.” Would she have unwrapped the soft bundle in her arms and shown him my blue eyes, sparkling just like his? Would he have taken me in his arms and said, “You are wanted”?
In that life, she smells like crisp sweet honey and velvet gardenia, and he is damp musk, the scent of work and clay, and together they smell like home; a two-story brick facade center hall colonial down a long gravel drive lined with weeping willows. In the backyard, she lays a white cotton blanket on the deep green grass and sips sweet tea while I coo and roll and rock my tiny body back and forth as I begin the journey to upright.
In that life, I am not an object of curiosity and wonder (When did they tell you? Do you want to find your real parents? Who do you look like?) or cuttlefish — changing my colors, mimicking my surroundings to survive. In that other life, I am me, descended from rebels and settlers and grifters and an elegant beauty (debutante, sorority sister) who aches to be thinner and better; who aches to be whole, just like me.
In that life, I am safe.
It is difficult to speak of the night.
It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
But where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
I stand alone in my backyard, sipping wine, inhaling fragrant orange blossoms and night blooming jasmine, admiring the golden glow of twinkle lights crisscrossing the dark sky. It’s our first phone call in years, the first time I’ve called him in decades. Our mother’s illness forced us back together, and the detente feels good in the way cold feels refreshing until you freeze.
We took turns caring for our ailing mother, texted updates daily. She just went into surgery. She’s out of surgery. They’re releasing her. Holy shit, there’s a Calamine lotion older than me in the bathroom. Oh my god, she has paprika from 1978.
My brother and I (in our 50’s) don’t get along and go through long periods of estrangement. He lives 3,000 miles away, is a single father of a nephew I met twice decades ago, and lives a life I know nothing about. But there was relief in letting him in, in imagining — hoping — we could be good again, relief in picturing the big brother I adored, drilling ground balls to me on the rocky front lawn, yelling at me to keep my glove down. The brother determined to make me a sporty little sister (star softball player), the dark-haired, dark-eyed boy determined to make me who he wanted me to be.
I called him to vent about our mom — our father died decades ago — he understood the way only a sibling can. We spoke for hours, revisiting our father’s abuse and our mother’s silence and recalling realities of our house: black mold on the inside, shiny shingles on the outside. A doctor, his homemaker wife, their two adopted children so lucky to be raised by them.
Maybe my brother knew my answer before asking the question, like a general plotting a sneak attack, he lulled me into easeful softness, brought down my defenses with jokes, reminders of when it was good, when we burped the alphabet at the yellow formica dinner table.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you think we were like real brother and sister?”
I paused, searched for the right words, the not hurtful words, the true words.
“No. I mean, we were an engineered family. That’s what adoption is, you know. Artificial.”
“Yeah exactly! Like, I wouldn’t have done the things I did to you if you were my real sister. I wouldn’t have, you know, rubbed against you, touched you…”
I stood frozen, suddenly aware of the soft and sharp undulating pea gravel beneath my socked feet. Rubbed up against you? Touched you? My eyes struggled to focus, string lights blurred into muddled haze, stomach acid stirred.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know, when I was 14 or 15, when I hit ground balls to you, I would sometimes…”
I was 9, 10.
I hear the words hard and penis or dick and erect — or maybe I imagine them because suddenly I feel his husky body lying on top of my skinny one, holding me down, his pointed adolescent member pressing into my girlish frame, the minutes spent holding my breath before I scream, “Get that thing off me!” and he releases and laughs like a giggling hyena.
I quickly hang up with words of appeasement, something like, “It was an abusive house, we both suffered,” something to make him — us — feel better, something comforting. But I am not comforted. My body trembles, nausea bubbles into my throat. I run into my quiet bedroom, passed my husband lounging on our bed to the toilet and vomit up what I remember but find too difficult to speak.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
When I dream of the other life, the kept life, my first father — gentle and kind — holds my hand, leads me along the sand dunes of Martha’s Vineyard, teaches me about the ebbing tide, shows me which shiny black mussel shells are good to eat and how to crack a lobster. Under sunset’s glow, our tanned bare feet meander back to his parent’s summer home, to its weathered shingles, polished hardwood floors, and elegant rugs he brought back from Morocco. We sit at the long mahogany table, my grandmother (famed scientist) and my grandfather (writer) encourage deep conversation, intellectual dialogue and I sit wide eyed learning about bird songs and marches with MLK and what wine goes with what food, and I am home.
In that life, my first mother picks me up from my father’s house and together — just us — we drive the highway south to New York City, to our elegant apartment on Lexington Avenue and she bathes me, gently washes my back with soft bubbles, then dresses me in finery brought back from Paris. I am the flower girl at her wedding (Hungarian nobility) and the three of us move to London, we are a family, and as I grow from girl to woman, I hear over and over again, “You look just like your mother” and I smile because all I want in the world is to be just like her.
In that life, I see my first father in summer or visit him in far-off locations (Ivory Coast, Bulgaria, Palestine) where he assists developing countries to build infrastructure, helps humans build a better life. When he marries and the girls (bundles of joy, blues eyes like mine) come along, I am their beloved big sister and we too, are a family.
In that life, I am safe.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
In the pre-dawn darkness — careful to dim my phone light, my husband sleeping — I text my brother, tell him I need more details, more truth, unvarnished and unrelenting. I see the three typing dots, imagine his deep inhale as he struggles to find the words. He tells me about therapy and remembering and thinking this is why I hate him. He apologizes, says he understands I would hate him for that.
“I don’t hate you. It’s just, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of you.”
“Get in line,” he texts back and an ominous shudder travels my spine, but I don’t ask what he means because I am smart and still afraid.
For hours, we text back and forth, and I shake like downed electric wires. I remind him of the time he punched me in the eye; he recalls it differently, shares another story of his fist in my face. I tell him that happened, too; there are several times he ravaged my body. He tells me how hilarious these memories are — they still make him laugh — but also that he feels bad. I don’t know how to reconcile it all. I am both too old and too young, too fragile, for this trip down memory lane.
I quietly get out of bed, in the bedroom I’ve slept with my husband for 22 years, in the beautiful home we share with our children. I secure my bare feet are on the cold tile floor and breathe.
I am here. I am safe. He cannot hurt me again. I close my eyes.
At 23, I moved to Los Angeles, 3,000 miles from the suburban New York u-shaped redwood ranch I grew up in. My bedroom’s bright floral wallpaper I loved. The basement ping pong table, pool table, pinball machine. Pretending I was Eric Hayden, speed skating on the speckled tile floor. Dancing to Le Freak C’est chic playing on my beloved record player (toted everywhere). My mom tickling my back as I fall asleep. I left it all behind but am reminded the good still lives in me, like reproducing cells keeping me alive.
I open my eyes. This is my life. All of it. The imagined other life, the childhood life, the adulting life, the forgiving and moving forward life, the unburdening and accepting life. The no contact with him ever again life.
The thing is, I don’t know if I have the strength to keep living it.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in mid passage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.
— Jack Gilbert, “It Is Difficult To Speak Of The Night” (1965)
The Los Angeles rains arrive; drenching, damaging, nourishing the dry, parched landscape. Mud flows, street corners disappear under water, aged trees descend to the ground. I walk from the flat pavement of my neighborhood to the nearby sloping hills, traversing puddles of worms, mounds of soft earth, thick fallen branches.
I head off the muddy trail, negotiate detritus, make my way to a clearing — a spot where fragrant Eucalyptus trees generously part, make way for a magnificent view: palm trees in the foreground, lush mountains topped with crisp white snow in the background. I’ve lived long enough to see this. Snow in Los Angeles. I smile, take a deep breath. I’ve made it this far. Keep going.
I stand for a long time, swallowing the beauty, searching for solace. Maybe too, I’m searching for god or faith or something to ease my burden — the bastard’s burden — something to make sense of incomprehensible truths that define my life. Jack Gilbert’s words echo in my head.
Suddenly in mid passage, I come into myself. I leaf gigantically. A solitude. An enormity. Thank god.
I stand there alone, in awe of nature’s beauty and resilience, and I feel free — not because I’ve forgotten or forgiven — because I’ve remembered, and the act of remembering is liberation.
So I extend my arms wide, inhale winter’s cold clean air, and cry like a cleansing rain, tears nurturing a parched landscape. I head back down the hill to the home and family I love, remembering it all, seeing clearly, breathing deeply.
Leafing gigantically, speaking words I found too difficult to say. Because I am home and I am safe.
