Exciting News! I'm on the Dirtbag Diaries! Yahoo!

"Double Vision" went live today!  
I'm very excited and honored to have my work featured on The Dirtbag Diaries podcast! It's been my favorite podcast since I found it about two years ago--I admired the quality of the writing, production, and entertainment value of their episodes. One day, as I was walking my dog along the greenbelt with my friend Robin, I told her about the Dirtbag Diaries, how much  I liked it, and she said, "Maybe you should write for them!" 

Well, it's happened. Here it is; I would love it if you could take 15 minutes and listen to it. I'm so excited! My essay, "Double Vision," on The Dirtbag diaries Podcast. 

Here are a few pictures taken around the time this story takes place: 

Crossing the Teklanika River, 
Alaska 1992

Climbing Mt. Hubris, Castle Crags, California 1996

Hiking on a day off from rangering duties at Grand Canyon, 1991

Beginning of My Report on Berlin

Frida: fractured and beautiful, as always

Here's what I've been up to: exploring the lesser-known corners of Berlin! And thinking about social justice, and freedom, and patriotism, and the evils of nationalism, and the U.S. involement in all kinds of things it should and shouldn't be involved in. The above art of Frida Kahlo is a photo I took at Teufelsberg, a graffiti "gallery" that inhabits the remains of a CIA spy tower built on a hill that is composed of the rubble of destroyed buildings from World War II. In other words: an art gallery built on the rubble of the Cold War, which is built on top of the rubble of World War lI. In a nutshell, Berlin. 

Yes, lots of feelings about America here

As I mentioned, I've been thinking about patriotism a lot too these days, given our current political situation. Here's an essay I wrote for the July 4th holiday, but it seems appropriate to post it here now as well, after witnessing the art at Teufelsberg:

Lineage and Independence Day

As I spread my dad’s ashes on the graves of his revolutionary war ancestors, I found a star-shaped medal at each gravesite, placed there by the Sons of the American Revolution. Each star point declared a value: to love justice, to be sincere and open-hearted, to suffer persecution. Like his ancestors, my dad was sincere and open-hearted, and he loved justice, to be sure. While as a lefty-liberal Political Science professor, he had suffered little persecution, I suffered persecution because of his heritage.

One day, when I was a junior in high school, I was summoned to my guidance counselor's office.

Smiling brightly, Mrs. Simic said, "Andrea, you've been nominated by the DAR to apply for a college scholarship!"

            "What's the DAR?” I asked. I had never heard of it.

            "The Daughters of the American Revolution! You are one! You have an ancestor who was a patriot. That's how you got nominated for this scholarship—but you have to take a test to compete for it."

I took the test, which asked about patriotic things: who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the like. But I never learned my score because of what happened next.

Mrs. Simic called me at home. "I'm so sorry," she said, "but you're ineligible for the scholarship."

            "I failed the test?" I asked.

            She hesitated a bit. "No, it wasn't that. You're adopted, correct?"

            "Yes…" I wondered how she knew.

            “The DAR is a lineage organization. Its membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of revolutionary patriots. They looked up your birth certificate and noticed that it’s amended—it’s an adoption birth certificate."

            At that point in my life, I didn't know what the DAR had tried to do to Marian Anderson in 1939. I only knew they had claimed me as one of them and were offering college funds, which I needed. And now I learned that because I was adopted, they had rejected me. Looking back, I wonder if my dad never told me about his family’s connection to the DAR because he knew they wouldn’t accept me— and he despised that kind of injustice.

            Confused, I asked, "I'm DQed from the scholarship because I'm adopted?"

            "I'm afraid so. I'm sorry."

            I was adopted in 1967, when the attitude toward adoption was this: if adoptive parents treated the adopted child as their own, the child would magically become theirs. That way, the fact of adoption could be ignored, the birth-family would cease to exist, and it would all be for the best. It was the stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-sing, “LA-LA-LA-LA-I can't-hear-you" approach to adoption. No information about the birth-family was given to the adopted person, and vice versa. Adopted people like me grew up feeling they should only identify with one family, so I identified as a Ross—until the DAR told me that I wasn't. I didn’t belong to the family who had raised me. But neither did I feel I was of the family I'd been born to: I was not legally allowed to know who they were.

            My son, too, grew up hearing our Ross family lore of coming to this country and fighting for freedom. He loves history, and he loves that he has revolutionary ancestors. George Ross, his great-great-great-great-uncle signed the Declaration of Independence. He claims the Rosses as his, as he should. And he, too, suffered the same kind of rejection I did: recently, at a revolutionary war reenactment, he excitedly talked to a man recruiting for Sons of the American Revolution. My husband started helping our son with the application, but on its front page: “we accept men with a lineal connection to an ancestor who provided service to the cause of American Independence.” Our son wasn’t qualified. He was crushed. And I was at a loss to explain to him that he's not "really" a Ross, even though he bears their appellation and they are the only ancestors he knows.

Sometimes things change: most DAR scholarships are now open to non-members. And many open adoptions take place now—every family member has the right to know the others.

Sometimes things don’t change: those organizations still don’t consider us members of our own family. And I still don’t have the legal right to see my own birth certificate.

This is a reminder that, while we may have learned from past mistakes and taken steps to make amends, as the DAR attempted with Marian Anderson, the fight for justice and equality must continue. Given our country’s current political climate and the pursuant rise in nationalism and bigotry, we must recall the patriotic principles of open-heartedness, tolerance, justice, and equality that American revolutionaries and their forbears sought when immigrating here. On this Independence Day, we must remember our country’s battles by working for acceptance and egalitarianism.

 

new study shows that gene expression changes according to who we hang out with

check out this amazing game-changing article: about how our gene expression changes when we hang out with people who we are not genetically related to.
It's blowing my mind!

"Gesture Writing": Some Good Advice for Writing about Adoption

Did you see the interesting essay called "Gesture Writing" in Sunday's New York Times Review section? Author Rachel Howard explains how her job as a nude model for art classes led to some information about how to write better, something she calls Gesture Writing. She says, "realizing that writing is a lot like drawing gives us a deeper approach. Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see. And seeing is not simple."

This article appeared at a perfect time for me, as I am wading through my manuscript (it's about the decade I spent as a wilderness guide while I searched for my birth parents) and trying to connect the chapters. Howard made me realize that I, too, am looking for the gesture in my writing, trying to "step back" from the page  and see the overall movements, gestures of the work.

Good advice.

New Novel: Jennifer Gilmore's The Mothers

Yesterday on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Jennifer Gilmore, author of a new novel about a couple going through the process of open adoption. (Click here to link to the interview.) One of many things that intrigued me about Gilmore and her book was that she said that although her novel draws heavily upon her personal experiences with adopting a child, she chose to write fiction rather than memoir because she wanted to be tougher on her main character than she thought she could be on herself. I liked hearing that because it indicated that this novel would not be all roses and snuggles and babies in blankets, that we might perhaps meet an adoptive mother character who has flaws, and by extension, an adoption system that has flaws.

I haven't yet read the book. Have you? Want to weigh in?

Birth Day

Yesterday was my birthday. Many lovely friends and family members reached out to me to wish me happiness via Facebook, text, phone, and in person.

An adopted friend wrote, "Happy Birthday, Andrea. If birthdays are as difficult for you as they are for me, I wish you the best in getting through yours. If not, then just have a great day!" It was a sweet, empathetic message, and it really made me feel for my friend.

There were many years in my early adulthood when an impending birthday would bring with it feelings of dread and sadness. On many May 20ths I woke up in the morning wondering who I really was, what it meant that I was born, and if the woman who had borne me was thinking about me on that day.

I compensated for these negative feelings by planning elaborate birthday adventures so that I would be too busy to think those sad thoughts. But the sad thoughts always crept back to me anyway.

I'm happy to say that since I reunited with my birth families, even though learning how to be in relationship with them has at times been challenging, I no longer dread my birthday. I don't languish in bed wondering if I deserve to exist on this planet.

Birthdays are no longer a big deal to me anymore. I don't need anyone to make a big fuss just to prove they love me, I don't make elaborate plans so I can celebrate myself. I deeply enjoy hearing from friends, but I don't sit around waiting for the phone to ring.

There is tremendous power in knowing where we came from, and those of us who are or were denied that knowledge tend to struggle. Our struggles manifest in various ways, but they are struggles nonetheless.

For any of you reading who do not have access to information about some part of your family, some part of where you are from, that integral part of the self, please know that my heart is with you.

Poetry Wednesday

This is a fake legend. I wrote it to try to portray the feeling that many adoptees have that they are not fully human because they aren't allowed to know their true origins.

Sometimes, we invent our origins.

The stanzas written in regular lettering are meant to represent someone telling a story, the italics indicate where the storyteller is spinning a tall tale.

Raven-Watcher

by Andrea Ross

Crouched on a shale slope, she peered

from between yucca spears

to watch them toboggan down snow patches

on their black-feathered asses; she muffled

her laugh when they snacked on snow-clods.

She learned raven-talk—

the sounds of water pouring into a canteen,

a hasp settling into place.

But what she loved most

was the way ravens loved: in mid-air.

Opposites attracted;

her sweetheart was a rock-climber.

He spent each free moment pressed

to canyon walls, while she loved the air’s caress.

Some swore she jumped.

She tumbled over the rim

like the pack-mules in the snowstorm that year.

Black feathers crowed across her face in love—free-fall, a mile.

They twirled, iridescent, and then swept upward.

Now, in a pile of raven’s down,

a human-raven baby softly grows

while mother blackness swoops

around the world, calling.

Blog Spotlight: The Declassified Adoptee

Hi, Everyone:
I recently found this excellent blog, The Declassified Adoptee, written by a woman who has had similar experiences as an adult adoptee as I have had. What I find especially exciting and compelling about her blog is that she writes eloquently about many of the same feelings that I try to write about, and she writes about them with real aplomb. Like me, she has found her birth family and has a good relationship with them and with her adoptive family, but she still feels a sense of loss about being adopted and a sense of injustice about the way that adoptees are regarded in this country. Check. Her. Out.

I'm Missing You, Betty Jean Lifton.

From the New York Times Obits.
She was an amazing person who helped so many of us to understand and accept ourselves.
Blessings, Betty Jean!

"The Quirk of the Smile..."

Last night I met a woman who was a friend of next-door-neighbor. The two of them were chatting in the hallway of a venue of an event we were all attending, and I introduced myself; I said, "Hi, I'm Andrea." She said, "Hi, I'm Marissa. I work at the preschool. You have a child who used to attend the preschool, don't you?" I said "Yes," and asked how she knew that.
Here's the clincher:
She said, "I have seen pictures of him at the school, and I recognize him in the features of your face."

She couldn't have said anything more profoundly gratifying to me. No one could have.
Adoptees want to look like their family. And we don't get to until/unless we have our own children.
I'm so grateful I have my son.

In the words of the venerable Nancy Verrier:
Growing up in a family where they are not reflected back is a tremendously difficult experience [for adoptees]. A great deal of an adopted child's energy is used in trying to figure out how to be in the adoptive family. It is important to an adoptee to have the opportunity of experiencing that reflection: the tilt of the head, the quirk of the smile, the pace of the gait, not to mention the more obvious aspects of physical similarities or of talents, aptitudes, and interests.

"'I was adopted because I have _____________'"

How many times have we adoptees filled in the blank about why, oh why, oh why we were given up?

Finally, some good news:

I just read this little article at the Adoptive Families Magazine website in which a social worker explains that it's important that adopted children get to make their own "lifebook" or scrapbook so they can express their feelings and ideas about being adopted and so that their adoptive parents can witness those feelings and ideas.

Let me just say: we have come a long way, baby. Doing something like this was so far off anyone's radar screen when I was a little adopted kid. I wish I had been guided as a child to express some of the fear, confusion, and guilt I felt as an adoptee. Instead those feelings had nowhere to go and so instead they got stuffed away somewhere and have been seeping out for decades in everything I've written and all over every relationship I've been in.

So, kudos to you, social workers who encourage adoptive parents help their their adopted children do this emotional work, kudos to the parents who have the guts to do it, and most of all, blessings on the forthcoming generations of adoptees who may grow up with the ability to name, expose, and dissipate the shame, guilt, and fear associated with being adopted.

The Terrible Twos?

Today, The Sought-After turns two years old, so I've come out of cyber-hibernation to post!
(Finally!)
Yes, it's been two-and-a-half months.

Frankly, I was having too much fun to think about being adopted; I went on a beach vacation to the Outer Banks, backpacking in the high sierra with good friends, visiting family and friends in California, and camping in the sand dunes in southern Oregon with my son and husband. It was a really, really good vacation. And then we came back to crazy busy September, during which all three of us went "back to school." So I'm just now lifting my head out above water to take a breath and say hello to you.

Thank you for your continued interest in my blog, dear reader! Knowing you're out there helps me collect and articulate my ideas in a way I might not otherwise do. Please keep reading!

And now, for a moment of joy:

Film Review:Mother and Child

I finally saw the movie Mother and Child.

And I have a few thoughts about it.

Annette Bening plays a 51-year-old single woman who gave up a baby girl for adoption when she was 14, and she has never recovered from that loss. She frequently writes letters, never sending them, to her daughter. She is bitter and isolated and doesn't want to let anyone into her life. Not even Jimmy Smits.

I would love to hear from you birth moms out there about how this character resonates with you and your experience. To me, Bening's character seems caricatured. She's our imaginary version of a birth mother: a woman who pines after her lost child, unable to think of much else, and who, when said child re-enters her life, suddenly lives in technicolor and becomes happy and satisfied with her life and all is right with the world.

Real reunions, of course, are much more nuanced than this.

Now, on to the adult adoptee character: Naomi Watts plays a beautiful, 37-year-old lawyer who is cold, manipulative, and creepily detached from any kind of emotional intimacy with other people. She seduces inappropriate men (married ones with pregnant wives, ones who are her boss), and casts them off indiscriminately. She has no friends, and has divorced herself from her adoptive family.

Ok, now, is this how the general public thinks of adult adoptees?

Overall, the portrayal of these two members of the adoption constellation seems ham-handed. I assume the director is trying to show us that adoption can cause a lot of grief, and that the secrecy and shame surrounding closed adoptions can compound that grief and wreak havoc on peoples' lives.

Yes. True.

But must we stereotype birth mothers and adult adopted women as unsympathetic, unsavory, super-yucky people? Who is this movie serving?

Your thoughts?

conversations

My self-imposed writing retreat has gone well so far. It has been helpful that the weather here has been atrociously hot and humid, so going outside to play has not been much of a temptation. For the whole first week, I took advantage of my overly air conditioned college office, even wearing a sweater for most of the day as I huddled over my computer.

This week I have been less disciplined, but I got enough done to give a draft to a lovely writer friend who stopped by for a visit on her way to England. I'm planning to get back in the saddle next week.

Sometimes I feel ridiculous writing a book while the publishing industry as we know it is imploding, but I have lots of friends who are publishing books as we speak, and I do think that what I have to say about adoption and identity is important. There is still so much resistance to accepting that the adopted person's psyche is different than the non-adopted person's. And I want to bust that resistance.

I started this blog to try to generate a conversation about the issues relevant to adult adoptees, but it's been difficult; adoptees who read it say "Yep, I'm with you," and non-adoptees either disagree or are silent. Mostly.

Anyone want to chime in?

Turning the Corner

A little update on SuperBob:
he's doing much better! My brother has been feeding him nonstop, and with the appetite inducing magic of prednisone, the Super One has gained 15 pounds back! And he has energy! And he even talks on the phone now!

With regard to my writing midwife/pitocin:
I don' t want to jinx it, but I am going to try a writing experiment for the next two weeks: My son and I will ride the train downtown in the morning, where I'll take him to science camp, then I'll write all day in cafes, libraries, what have you, until 4pm, when I'll pick up my little scientist and take him home on the train. A sort of forced writing retreat. Wish me luck and perseverence.

And with regard to feeling wild and free
(see picture of me in grand canyon with crazy hair a few posts ago):
I'm planning not one but two backpacking trips with friends this summer, and one or two camping trips with my little family.

The universe is on our side. The universe is on our side. The universe is on our side...

a little more about the universe

Superbob is still hitting some bumps in the road. Last weekend, while strolling through Target with my mom, he fainted and whacked his head on the floor when he landed. An ambulance ride to the ER ensued, where, after 6 hours, the final diagnosis was that he was severely dehydrated. He has also lost 30 pounds. So my brothers and I are gearing up to take turns going out to California again to help out and to give my mom some much-needed respite from Cancer World. In fact, one of my brothers is headed out there today, thank goodness. I'll probably go in two weeks.

I don't think any of us knew how hard this was going to be. I, for one, have been in quite a funk since Superbob went into the hospital back in March. I have been so sad that it has been difficult to say "yes" to things. Instead, my psyche has shut down and I say "no, no, no," not wanting to let any more bad into my life.

But by way of explaining the poem I posted a while ago, I have lately been trying to re-convince myself that the universe is on my side. That saying "yes" to possibility, to friends, to help, is in fact a way to say "no" to the bad stuff.

Birthing

As an adoptee, I found it extremely difficult to imagine giving birth to a child.

During my pregnancy, I repeatedly tried to visualize giving birth, I read lots of birth books, looked at lots of birth pictures, and attended birthing classes and even hypnobirthing classes.

But I had a really hard time picturing all this happening to me, and week before my due date I had a crisis of confidence. I sat in my living room, huge and gravid and undeniably pregnant, and I still couldn't figure out how the baby in my belly was going to join us on the planet.

Intellectually, I knew that every person who has ever lived has gotten here essentially the same way, but since I had no connection to my own birth, I could not imagine that birth could actually happen to me.

I called the hypnotherapist, who talked me through a visualization of it, and reassured me in as many ways as she could. I felt a little better for a while, but when the rubber hit the road and I finally went into labor, my troubles returned.

I was as physically prepared as a woman could be for birth: I had all the right equipment: yoga ball, gatorade, candles, a detailed birth plan, a supportive partner, and an awesome doula.

But my labor kept stalling out and stalling out, no matter what natural route we tried: walking, cohosh root, showers, baths, you name it.

At one point, after about 24 hours, my doula asked me, "Is there something that's holding you back, something that's keeping you from doing this?" Wild-eyed from sleep deprivation and painful contractions, I answered "I don't think so," feeling as if I were being accused of purposely holding back (although I'm sure that's not how my doula meant it.)

But I knew even at that moment that my lack of connection with my own birth and my birth mother was somehow stalling out my labor, but I couldn't think of what I could do about it--I had already tried everything I could think of to prepare for this birth.

I labored for 35 hours, without much progress. (But not without pain!)

Finally, I allowed the midwife to give me pitocin, and things started moving along. As the pitocin was administered, I noticed that the contractions felt very different. I remember thinking that they were foreign contractions, not my own.

Those foreign contractions did the trick, and a few hours later, I was dilated enough to push.

Finally, I was able to take action, rather than enduring the contractions while hoping I was dilating. At that point a doctor was preparing a operating room for an emergency C-section for me because my baby was now in distress. But I was determined to do it myself--something had changed for me, and I knew I could do it myself now. Once I was allowed to push, my son was born within an hour, safe and healthy, and naturally. The way everyone else got here.

Having a child of my own has helped heal some of the scars of being adopted; it has helped me feel more connected to other people, it has helped me feel more grounded, and it has helped me appreciate my adoptive parents more.

But without the pitocin, I would definitely have ended up with a C-section, and I wouldn't have gotten to experience birth the way I wanted to. Even though I really, really wanted to go through labor and birth without drugs, I really needed that pitocin to get where I needed to go.

Sometimes when we are stuck and we can't unstick ourselves, we need an intervention, an unanticipated shot in the arm of something foreign to jumpstart our progress.

Right now, I'm stuck in the process of writing my book about adoption, and I have been laboring with it for a long time. I know I have to write it, but I don't know how to get to the next step with it.

It's very scary to write because I'm afraid it will make people in my families angry (that old fear of abandonment rears its ugly head again), I'm afraid people will discount what I say ("Everyone feels lonely and alienated sometimes"), and I'm afraid it won't be good enough.

I am very tired of being in this place and letting this loop play in my brain.

I hereby open myself up to an intervention. But what will it be?

Intuition

When I was 23, my boyfriend and I planned a climbing trip to Ecuador for the winter. We were going to put our stuff into storage, get on a plane, and scale volcanoes for three months. We had plane tickets and everything. Expensive ones.

Then, in early December, I got a phone call from someone at Grand Canyon National Park asking me to go out and be a ranger there starting in less than a month. For some reason, I accepted the offer even though I had those other big plans. And my boyfriend said he would go with me.

I only spent one season working at the Canyon because I didn't like working for the park service, but I fell deeply in love with the landscape there, and it became a touchstone for me. I have gone back countless times, I have led backpacking trips through the canyon, and I even rafted the canyon for my honeymoon.

My season at the canyon also catalyzed my search for my biological parents in an interesting way that I am working to recount in a book about wilderness and adoption search and reunion. It has become immensely important to my identity and well-being.

Limbo

Between May 20th, the day I was born, and June 12th, the day I was adopted, I was in "foster care." I don't know how many families I lived with during those three weeks, or who they were, or how they "parented" me, or why they would take a tiny newborn baby into their home(s) for a few weeks and then gave her away.

It is so weird to think about that three week period, and I'm really thinking about it right now. I hate it. What a stupid, stupid idea, to needlessly shuffle a newborn around from home to home, from caregiver to caregiver three--or more--times in her first three weeks of life.

the end of May and beginning of June is always hard for me. I feel so at sea.

What if the Universe is on Our Side?

S u p p o s i t i o n


Suppose the molecular changes taking place
In the mind during the act of praise
Resulted in an emanation rising into space.
Suppose that emanation went forth
In the configuration of its occasion:
For instance, the design of rain pocks
On the lake’s surface or the blue depths
Of the canyon with its horizontal cedars stunted.

Suppose praise had physical properties
And actually endured? What if the pattern
Of its disturbances rose beyond the atmosphere,
Becoming a permanent outline implanted in the cosmos—
The sound of the celebratory banjo or horn
Lodging near the third star of Orion’s belt;
Or to the east of the Pleiades, an atomic
Disarrangement of the words,
“How particular, the pod-eyed hermit crab
And his prickly orange legs”?

Suppose benevolent praise,
Coming into being by our will,
Had a separate existence, its purple or azure light
Gathering in the upper reaches, affecting
The aura of morning haze over autumn fields,
Or causing a perturbation in the mode of an asteroid.
What if praise and its emanation
Were necessary catalysts to the harmonious
Expansion of the void? Suppose, for the prosperous
Welfare of the universe, there were an element
Of need involved.
—Pattiann Rogers (from Firekeeper: New & Selected Poems)