The Black Mercury & the Wound of Inheritance:
Lineage Without Line
There are dreams that return not to reveal but to remember for you. This was one of those dreams. I didn’t see him, my adoptive father, not as he was. But what lingered was a version of him not conjured by memory alone but shaped by a need to locate something that lived between myth and matter. The dream was stylized, framed like a film from another time: his niece standing beside the black 1946 Ford Mercury, the one I remember him driving. She wore a broach and a ring, each a symbol, each a cipher, and I, barely five in the dream’s echo, stood watching something I never actually witnessed.
But what is a dream if not the language of the dispossessed trying to map their lineage in metaphor?
The Mercury as Memory Vessel
That Mercury wasn’t just a car. It was the only evidence I had that he carried something like pride. He kept it polished, black as a priest’s cassock, four doors wide like a vessel made to carry not just people but roles. Authority. Belonging. A certain kind of masculinity from a world that no longer exists, or maybe never did.
It was around my 16th birthday that he sold it. That act, casual, transactional, coincided with my adoptive mother instructing me to sign a no-contact veto on the bonnet of the car in the driveway, severing my ability to be sought by my original mother. They say timing is everything, but this felt orchestrated by a god who likes irony.
In a single season, I lost a symbol of origin and the chance to ever find the one who first held me. You learn, when you’re adopted, that objects take on the burden of memory. The car was more than steel. it was story. And its disappearance felt like someone burning the only photograph you had of yourself.
The Broach and the Racecar Ring
In the dream, his niece was the center of attention, though she remained unnamed. Her dress was modest but deliberate, her broach glinting like a wound masquerading as adornment. It reminded me of those old lockets women used to wear during wartime, small containers of grief made presentable.
And then there was the ring: a black racecar wrapped around her finger. It was jarring. Childish, maybe. But in that context, it became mythic. A symbol of speed, of escape, of a masculinity trying to outrun itself. Maybe it was his. Maybe it wasn’t. But the juxtaposition was arresting, femininity adorned with the echo of horsepower, both beautiful and absurd.
If the broach was the wound, the racecar was the flight from it.
Lineage Without Line
Adoption strips you of a continuous narrative. It turns lineage into a puzzle with most of the pieces sanded down. You’re left with hunches, with proxies, with dream-images that try to stitch together the things no one will say out loud.
What does it mean to be a son to a man you never quite reached, whose affections lived inside a metal shell with four doors? What does it mean when your clearest memory of him is mediated through a dream, a car, and the performance of someone else’s wedding?
It means you become fluent in metaphor. You learn to live in the sideways glance, the symbol, the subliminal. You grieve not what you had and lost, but what you were supposed to have, and never did.
Selling the Car, Signing the Veto
The day he sold the Mercury was the day I was asked to consent to permanent silence. The coincidence is too precise to ignore. One moment you’re sixteen and full of questions, and the next, you’re standing on a legal scaffold that says you don’t get to know where you came from, not even if your body aches with the need to.
That car could have taken me there. At least metaphorically.
But it was sold, just like my access to the truth. Discarded. Made someone else’s possession.
The Fiction That Reveals the Truth.
The dream wasn’t a memory. It was a message dressed in memory’s clothing. A stylized fiction that tried to hand me back something I didn’t know I’d lost.
Because if I couldn’t see him, my adoptive father, in waking life, if I couldn’t reach my original mother due to the laws that kept us apart, then the dream had to become a kind of séance. Not to raise the dead, but to retrieve the silenced.
There is something almost cinematic about the whole sequence. The niece, the car, the wedding. The aesthetic was polished, even reverent. As though my subconscious was trying to give me what the waking world refused: a father not of facts, but of presence. A scene where he was admired, not out of duty, but through the lens of someone who believed in his goodness.
And maybe I needed that.
The Wound is the Thread
The ring. The broach. The Mercury. The veto.
They are not separate events, but fragments of one large tapestry, one stitched not in chronological order, but in emotional logic.
If you want to understand the adopted psyche, you have to read dreams like scripture. You have to look at objects as archives. And you have to know that sometimes, the only way to heal is to create the lineage yourself, out of metaphor, out of longing, out of the wreckage of what was withheld.
I was there in the dream. And that means I was there somewhere between story and silence.
Between what happened and what should have.
My Son, My Daughter: The Inheritance of Silence
My son is alive, though our relationship now hangs in exile. He survived the unthinkable, 2 brain tumours that tore through childhood with a cruelty words can barely contain. Yet rather than becoming a moment of collective healing, his illness was weaponized by my adopters, framed not as tragedy but as proof of my failure. As if fate itself became my accuser. As if maternal devotion could be nullified by biology’s betrayal.
But let me be clear: this isn’t a story about motherhood, not in the way it’s often romanticized or stripped of complexity. It’s about something colder, more systemic. My daughter, brilliant, defiant, blood of my blood, was also coerced into no contact with me. Just as I was at sixteen. Most likely by my adoptive mother who also lost her son to adoption 10 years before acquiring me! We are generations bound by silence, not by choice but by more than law. My signature was not the product of free will, it was the conclusion of a process designed to break down resistance and sever lineage under the guise of protection.
In Australia, the no-contact veto is a legal mechanism that purports to protect privacy, but in reality, it continues the legacy of forced adoption by institutionalizing separation long after birth. It’s a paper boundary drawn by bureaucracy, often signed under duress, misinformation, or coercive counselling. And once signed, it becomes a barrier to reunion, a fence that keeps the past buried, especially for women and girls. It’s not protection. It’s policy-based erasure.
My family was not broken; it was splintered. Repeatedly. Surgically. My mother silenced. I was silenced. My daughter continues to be silenced. This is not estrangement, it is engineered estrangement. A lineage of legally sanctioned invisibility.
What happens when silence is legislated and systematically weaponised? When the only way to “move on” is to forget who you are, who you came from, or who you birthed? The answer is not healing, it is hollowing. It is the slow, psychic dismemberment of identity.
So no, this is not about motherhood. It is about sovereignty. About reclamation. About refusing to inherit the silence any longer.
