Go Ask Your Father



Father's Day's just around the corner...

Did any of you listen to This American Life last week? It featured a narrative told by Lennard Davis, author of Go Ask Your Father: One Man's Obsession to Find Himself, His Origins, and the Meaning of Life Through Genetic Testing, which will be published in 2009 by Random House.

Davis isn't an adopted person, a few years ago, after his father died, Davis's uncle told him that he (the uncle) was Davis's biological father.

The meat of the story is about Davis's quest to find out if his uncle's claim is true, and when it becomes clear that the man who raised him is definitely NOT his father, he says he feels "abandoned."

This is the part that caught my ear--feelings of abandonment run so rampant in me, and in many other adoptees, that I'm always trying to figure out how to come to terms with them, how to contextualize them in new ways to understand them better, and in doing so, to drive them away.

So Davis feels abandoned when he finds out his father is not his father, which highlights the fact that keeping secrets from people about their origins almost always leads to more pain than openly sharing the facts from the very beginning would have done.

(Thank you, thank you, thank you, Sharon and Bob--my parents--for telling me I was adopted from the minute you got me. I wish all adoptive parents had your strength and foresight.)

Anyway, so even though Davis is not an adopted person, he feels abandoned in the same way that many adopted people feel because his parents kept secrets from him about his biological origins.

The reason I bring this up is that so many non-adopted people have a hard time understanding adoptees' feelings of abandonment; they say things like "but you were chosen," or "you were raised by wonderful, loving parents, how could you feel abandoned?" So here you have it, nay-sayers: proof that feelings of abandonment arise from confusion about one's origins, no matter the circumstances.

I'm curious about what you readers think of the "abandonment issues" argument: your thoughts? Comments? Questions? Let's hear them!

More about Bellybuttons

This morning before he got dressed for school, my son snuggled up with me on the living room couch in his polarfleece jammies. The room was darkish and my husband was off in the kitchen eating breakfast, and my son and I had the most lovely, intimate conversation:

HIM, patting my belly: Mommy, was this my home before I was born?

ME: Yes, it was.

HIM: And you fed me through here? (unzips his jammies and points to his bellybutton).

ME: Yep.

HIM: I didn't have a mouth, so I needed to eat through my bellybutton.

ME: Well, you did have a mouth, but you ate through your bellybutton.

HIM: What would happen when salad tried to go through there? It would get stuck.

ME: Umm...

HIM: Or tomatoes? I hate tomatoes, so when a tomato went through there I spat it right out.

ME: Umm...

HIM: But mashed potatoes would fit through; they would just slide right into my bellybutton.

ME: I guess so...

HIM: I love you, mommy.

ME: I love you, too, sweetie. Now go change into your school clothes.

He's the best. And I know I've posted about bellybuttons before, but dang, this connection I have with my little son is so very rewarding.

I don't know why he's so obsessed with his bellybutton, but I know why I am, and I feel so very lucky to have been able to carry him in my body and give birth to him so that I can have conversations such as this one.

I'm just a little nervous about what other people are going to think when he starts telling them that he spits tomatoes out of his navel. Oh well. It won't be any worse than what they think when he tells them that before he was a boy, he was a fish (the results of my attempts to explain evolutionary biology to him), or when he tells them that after he dies he's going to turn into a plant (the results of my efforts to explain decomposition to him).