Missing? Me?

Here's how I feel:

when I go to places like this:



My spring break is at a different time than my son's and my husband's, so I took off by myself and went to the desert.

It felt like a century since I had been outside (Stupid Philadelphia Winter. GRR.), so hiking for 4 days helped restore me mentally, even though it took some long plane rides, some long car trips, and a lot of dollars to do it.

I need the desert. It's my touchstone.

It's where I learned I wanted to search for my birth parents. It's a place where I can set my sights on a butte or canyon ten miles away, point my feet in that direction, and walk until I get there. Being in the desert made searching seem possible for me all those years ago. And it was possible.

And I keep returning and returning to the desert in search of other wisdoms.


Thanks for reading.

Grief = Searching

I've been reading this article about grief in The New Yorker. The author Meghan O'Rourke chronicles popular thinking about grief, and mentions that:

"In the nineteen-seventies, Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and a pioneer in bereavement research, argued that the dominant element of grief was a restless “searching.” The heightened physical arousal, anger, and sadness of grief resemble the anxiety that children suffer when they’re separated from their mothers. Parkes, drawing on work by John Bowlby, an early theorist of how human beings form attachments, noted that in both cases—acute grief and children’s separation anxiety—we feel alarm because we no longer have a support system we relied on. Parkes speculated that we continue to “search” illogically (and in great distress) for a loved one after a death. After failing again and again to find the lost person, we slowly create a new “assumptive world,” in the therapist’s jargon, the old one having been invalidated by death. Searching, or yearning, crops up in nearly all the contemporary investigations of grief. A 2007 study by Paul Maciejewski found that the feeling that predominated in the bereaved subjects was not depression or disbelief or anger but yearning. Nor does belief in heavenly reunion protect you from grief. As Bonanno says, 'We want to know what has become of our loved ones.'"
(emphasis added)

I wanted to post this to propose the connection between some adoptees' need to search and what is commonly understood about how all humans deal with loss of loved ones. That is all.

Comments?

Well, Here's One Way to Search I Never Thought About

A biological dad of a 19 year old girl, who was recently informed of his paternity, is searching for his lost daughter via...ebay! Check out his auction here.
What do you make of this approach??

I'm off to Read at and Enjoy a Conference

The Adoption Resource Center and The Center for Family Connections is sponsoring a special conference in Provincetown, MA this weekend, and I'm lucky enough to be able to go! I even wiggled my way into giving a little reading of my adoption-related poems and essays, and I'm so excited. I'm looking forward to telling you all about it, but in the meantime, check it out via the link above; maybe you can drop in for part of it. I would especially recommend the performance, which is open to the public, btw, by actor, comedian, and writer Alison Larkin. I recently read her novel, The English American, and I loved it. I highly recommend it--it's written from an adoptee's perspective (she's an adult adoptee), and it chronicles her search and reunion experience with her birth families.

Here's the official blurb:

"When Pippa Dunn, adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang from Larkin’s autobiographical one-woman show of the same name."

Have a great weekend!

The Long Road Home

I just returned from wandering the desert for 4 days, searching for ancient ruins and petroglyphs.

On Friday, my friend Kim and I hiked for 9 hours straight, almost without stopping, trying to find some ruins we had sketchy directions to. It was quite an adventure: We had to get permission from a cranky woman to walk across her land into the canyon where the ruins were, then bushwhack our way downstream for several miles, then climb up pouroffs and cliffs of a side canyon for a couple more miles. At one point I was scritching on my belly over a big sandstone boulder on a cliff ledge, trying to avoid falling to my death. We finally turned around without finding the ruins, and got back to the trailhead well after dark, nauseated and headachy and dehydrated.

Why, you might ask, would any sane person do this to herself?

The short answer is: I'm obsessed with finding ruins, rock art, and any kind of artifact.

The long answer is: I think it has something to do with being adopted. Searching for ruins, pot shards, projectile points, ancient corncobs, granaries, pictographs and petroglyphs replicates "The Search"--for self, identity, ancestors, birthparents.

I talked to Kim about this obsesssion--she has it too, but she's not adopted. I asked her what it means to her to goat around the wilderness, searching for artifacts. She says she likes (and I mean really likes--we were both so stubbon about finding those hidden ruins, we almost ended up spending the night huddled under a rock ledge; we just couldn't admit defeat and turn toward home) it because it's a like a treasure hunt.

But I really think that for me it's something more than that. In searching for, finding, and trying to decipher rock art, a very hidden part of myself thinks I will learn something about that very hidden part of myself.

This whole process reminds me of a dream I once had in which I was digging around in my backyard, and I uncovered some human skulls. They had been embellished with decorative carvings and were very beautiful. They were the skulls of my long-lost ancestors, and finding them led me to a great epiphany in the dream--sadly, a non-verbal epiphany, but in retrospect, I realize that this dream was about finding my personal history, my true identity, very close to home--in my own backyard--that is to say, in myself.

Busting Myths about Mythbusting

Last week, this article from Adoptive Families Magazine showed up in my email inbox. It suggests that the media perpetuate these four myths about adoption: 1) Adopted Children are Troublemakers, 2) All Adoptees Have Traumatic Birth Histories, 3) All Adoptees Search, and 4), Adopted Children Are Obtained Illegally.

I take the subtext of this list to be "Things That Dissuade People from Adopting," since from what I have read, Adoptive Families is extremely concerned with making everyone's experience with adoption seem very positive, and they want people to adopt. If this is indeed the subtext, I am kind of appalled by #3, All Adoptees Search.

Does the fact that some adoptees search for their biological origins dissuade people from adopting? If so, why? I understand that the prospect of an adoptee searching may threaten the adoptive parents' sense of parenthood, but shouldn't Adoptive Families, as an advocate for, well, adoptive families, which I assume includes adopted people as well as those who adopt them, support adopted peoples' interest in searching? And, come to think of it, shouldn't they disabuse adoptive parents of the notion that their parenthood is in question if their adopted child searches?

What is going on here? Please read the article (hyperlinked above) and let me know what you think.
Thanks.

So, Who is being Sought After Here, Anyway?

Recently I was reviewing the materials I kept from the long search I conducted to find my birth mother (more to come on that), and I looked up the organization that allows adoptees born in Colorado (like me) and their birth parents to use a confidential intermediary service to find one another.

Back in 1996 when I was searching, this website didn't exist, so it was interesting to see how the program was described on its website. One of the terms used on the website particularly intrigued me: it described the person being searched for as "the sought-after." The air of mystery and the inclusivenes of this phrase piqued my imagination. In a sense, the sought-after could be anyone; obviously in this case, it refers to someone touched by adoption: a birth parent, a child who was adopted, or any member of their families.

However, for me this term also conjures up the sense of longing for connection and belonging that I and many other adopted people feel as a result of the way that closed adoption obscures our origins. In the end, The Sought-After becomes more than a euphemism for the birth parent or birth child we seek; The Sought-After is also the elusive self we are trying to find and trying to become as we grow into ourselves as people touched by adoption.