THE WIND PHONE | ADOPTION
Christmas in the Ghost Kingdom
Wrestling with ghosts of mothers past
Ghosts of adoption spring from the depths of unresolved grief, loss, and trauma. These ghosts are the lost babies, the parents who lost them, and even the parents who found them. They live on in a spectral place in the adoptee’s psyche coined by author Betty Jean Lifton as the Ghost Kingdom.
It’s Christmastime, and I’m thinking about the woman that raised me, because she was the queen of Christmas, and she’s not here anymore. She spent every December baking for everyone she knew, dancing in the kitchen to the John Denver Christmas album.
She was a complete anglophile, so a lot of what she baked was like something out of Dickens — those insanely dense “puddings” that you boil in cloth, mincemeat pies with homemade mincemeat. There were lots of other things too — cherry cream cheese brownies, mint chocolate squares, rum balls, shortbread cookies in the shapes of holly leaves and bells, and my absolute favorite: a cunning confection called “dream cakes,” which aren’t actually cakes at all, but a gooey coconut-walnut-butterscotch topping on a shortbread crust.
I still remember my childhood Christmases in Toronto as idyllic, magical. We moved to Baton Rouge when I was fourteen, and being ripped from the city I adored and dumped in a swamp was shattering in a way I still haven’t gotten over forty years later. I didn’t stop adoring Christmas, but it was never as good after the move, and my mom’s baking was one of the few things that still lent it some magic.
When she was in her early eighties, my mother stopped cooking altogether, and we knew that something was very wrong. When she died shortly before Thanksgiving of 2019, my dad, who’d been married to her for over five decades, physically and emotionally collapsed. On Christmas Day, I got a call that he’d fallen and couldn’t walk, so I left my kids and my half-cooked dinner to fly out to him.
Wandering around the Dallas airport between flights, fighting back tears, I was more bitterly heartsick than I can ever remember being except when we moved to Louisiana. To spend Christmas Day by myself, on planes and in airports, was devastating in a way that just sounds silly and histrionic when I say it out loud. But it really felt like the world was ending. I’d been ripped from the warm nest of my home, my family, and my Christmas; and thrown into the cold, alone. I got to Baton Rouge just before midnight, the dream cakes I’d brought in my carry-on crushed to a mess of crumbs.
It’s a bit shocking now to realize how much more fiercely I experienced the grief of losing Christmas than of losing my mom that year. But in a way, losing Christmas was losing her, my strongest connection to her. Her physical presence, in the deepest sense, was something I never really had and learned to not even want. Her cooking and baking were the only things about her I could ever nestle into.
I’ve had friends that would talk about their wonderful or troubled relationships with their mothers, and I could never relate to the intensity of their emotions. Hearing about the good relationships made me uncomfortable, cringey; and the level of distress some friends felt about their difficulties with their mothers seemed melodramatic. I would shrug inwardly and think, I have a crappy relationship with my mother too, but so what? In both cases, I was mystified at experiences completely outside my understanding or interest.
I was 52 and my mom had been dead for half a year when it finally dawned on me that this all might have something to do with being adopted. Just maybe being relinquished at birth and passed off to strangers not only affected me but colored my entire experience of having a mother and even just being a person. I began to wake up to how much of myself had been shut down and disfigured by it. But most of that trauma had happened between gestation and toddlerhood, so I had no memory of it. No one ever acknowledged the devastation of being ripped from the mother who’d been my entire world and dumped into the cold, alone, which I now know is how my infant self experienced maternal separation.
After my first mother fled the region where she birthed me without signing the relinquishment papers, I couldn’t legally be adopted out, so I was handed to unknown foster parents. Then, when she was finally tracked down and signed me over 14 months later, I was taken from the only family I’d known and given to a couple of new strangers, who suddenly called me by a different name. These adoptive parents wanted me to be a “clean slate,” so that was the narrative I was presented with as reality and raised to unquestioningly accept. There were no celebratory “baby’s first Christmas” photos for me; it was like I hadn’t existed at all until I became the property of my adoptive parents.
So I grew up surrounded by ghosts I couldn’t see, enshrouded by and oblivious to the societally manufactured fog of adopted-doesn’t-matter. In retrospect, it’s obvious that my deeply buried trauma did surface in episodes, usually at night, when I’d be in the fetal position smashing my head on the floor and wailing, for no apparent reason. But this was infrequent, and easy to forget about in the light of day. My parents certainly seemed to forget about it. Because their trauma, the trauma around their infertility, was buried too. Under me. I was the soil that filled that hole. The child they chose; and no one wants to believe they’ve chosen damaged merchandise.
From the time I was a teenager, I blamed my bad relationship with my mother on her. She was cold and critical; I could never be what she wanted. She would stand at the door of my bedroom yelling at me while I lay dissociating on my bed, tracking the pattern on the ceiling. She never came in.
Now I get that she couldn’t. Now I think she probably desperately wanted to bond with me from the moment they brought me home, but it was I who wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t; this woman, this third mother, didn’t smell right, didn’t fit. Eventually she just gave up and began shouting at me from a distance because it was the only way (besides through food) that she could try to connect. I doubt she even realized that’s what she was doing. Adoption disfigured her too.
The sentence that keeps running through my brain lately is: It’s not that she was a terrible mother, she just wasn’t my mother. And we both were made terrible by that unacknowledged fact.
But one of the many paradoxes of being an adoptee is that she was my mother. And it’s Christmastime, and I miss her.
I also miss my first mother, who I found and started a Facebook relationship with in the fall of 2020, but who began ghosting me a few months later. Even though we never met in person, even though I’ve never heard her voice, just the experience of seeing her face in photos and communicating through text impacted me in ways I may never be able to fully grasp let alone explain. After she responded to my first message, the description that leapt to mind when I tried to name what I was experiencing was that it felt like being body-slammed by a ghost.
I contacted my first mother for many reasons, but at the core was the desire for healing. I thought if we could just talk about things, it would be a salve for both of us. I have a similar feeling about my adoptive mother; if she was still here, there’s so much we could unpack and process together about our relationship and how adoption affected it, now that I know what I know.
But both of these mothers have disappeared, and the healing is mine to do. I’m learning now, in my mid-fifties, to be for myself the mothers I lost, give myself the mothering I’ve never known. This is excruciating, magnificent work. I’ve put a sharp blade to the lifetime of scar tissue built up between me and a terrifying abyss, and I’ve found there my infant self in freefall. A little at a time, because it’s too much all at once, I’ve had to feel the infant’s full agony, listen to the echoing screams. I’ve had to allow myself to feel the depths of remorse for all the ways I failed my own children because mother was a synonym for torment. And, then, the miracle: deeper and deeper, through the primal wound, I come to the will to love, more primal still; my own heart pulsing, the motherheart at the center of the world.
The child within is finding at last what it is to be loved and the mother to love, and sometimes, just for a moment, the screaming stops, ghosts give way to angels, and a lucid hush, a shimmering tranquility enfolds me. A nativity of the soul.
It’s Christmastime. Soon I’ll be baking dream cakes for my kids and grandkids, dancing in the kitchen to John Denver. It will be bittersweet, not just because of the ghostmothers at my elbow, but because Christmas can never again “win me back to the delusions of my childhood days,” as Dickens would have it. Nothing has that power anymore.
Hallelujah.
