A smarter person would not listen to Jeff Buckley on repeat when she’s gone cold-turkey from a medicine that made her manic enough to work eighteen hours straight with nary a yawn to one which takes months to kick in, leaving her in the interim vulnerable to extreme emotions with every thought and each time a butterfly flaps its wings four counties away. Nor should she, while listening to Jeff Buckley on repeat, agree to organize and print pictures of her children’s birth mother’s latest baby — a child in whom, like two out of three of her siblings, the maternal genes are strikingly expressed.
Not, you understand, that things would be much different if it were the father’s genes which had in the genetic mix wrested precedence, as is the case with my son. I watch his father; every time I see him I mark the deepening sink of his cheeks, the rotting decline of his teeth. He shrinks, this man does. I worry that by the time the boy grows old enough to appreciate the ways in which he resembles (and doesn’t resemble) his father there will be nothing left to appreciate or resemble.
A smarter person would, no doubt, do everything in her power to distance herself from the whole sorry mess. Not only would she avoid picture albums but also she would have gracefully declined to be the support person at the infant’s birth. She certainly would have held back from allowing three sets of hands to be joined across a swollen belly to be convenient when the pain from a pointy fetal skull smashed against the nerves of the back, a pain which could not be touched by epidural but could only be soothed by the squeezing of hands: on the right the hands of the mother whose child was causing so much pain and on the left your humble narrator, who watched the laboring woman stare into the eyes of the woman on the right one time, the woman on the left the next time; who whispered breathe, honey at the start of every contraction because inexplicably every time she forgot; who murmured we’d do it for you if we could, wouldn’t we to the laboring woman when eight centimeters stretched on for days and all three women — all three mothers — cried from the exhaustion of bringing not just a new child but also entirely new relationships into being.
No. She definitely would have stayed home from that.
If fairy-tales end with the joining of hands in altogether featureless matrimony, so do adoption-tales end with the surrender of the perfect infant. After that there is nothing worth mentioning in the calm ocean of blissful parenthood undisturbed by a birth mother who becomes a generous yet distant figure, virginal as a statue. She has learned her lesson. She has no more accidents, no matter how happy those accidents make couples who cannot otherwise reproduce.
There are no rules for times when the birth mother chooses a different sort of life. No one has guidance on organizing the thoughts around a growing army of small people who look just like your children but who are not. Google “dealing with birth-mother’s other children” and you’ll find a whole lot of nothing; search the boards of adoption support sites and you’ll find another gaping maw of nothingness.
Maybe someday I will have the strength to whisper into that digital void, but for now I will propose its very first rule: Do not listen to Jeff Buckley on repeat while sorting through pictures of your children’s new sibling, because if you do, it will all end in tears.
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.
You’re an uncommonly strong person, AAG, and keep doing what you’re doing. I’m sorry to see you sad, and I can imagine; “Hallelujah” always pushes those emotional buttons for me as well. I know things can be difficult in your life, and I don’t pretend to even begin to understand the nature of those difficulties, especially with birth mothers and fathers and all of that — but hang in there. You’re doing everything right, and your heart is certainly in the right place, even if you do make mistakes like all the rest of us. *hugs*
PS: I can appreciate your use of ‘praeteritio’ — or at least approximating it (“A smarter person would do X…”, akin to “I could say this, but I won’t”).
The last time i heard that song was at the funeral of a woman whose child, strangely enough, i have taken into my home just as surely as if i had adopted her. Interesting coincidence that i felt like mentioning.
And on another note:
Being a birth parent who is currently raising three half-siblings of that child from so long ago, i am uncommonly aware of the situation you describe.
And at this point, having sent a letter requesting pictures of said child a number of months ago and receiving no response, i’m feeling a little more maudlin about it than usual. She was the only one of my children to have ended up with the reinforced recessive blond hair and blue-grey eyes that my grandfather once wore.
They promised to help her find me if she wanted to when she was 16. She turned 14 almost exactly one month ago. Does she even know she’s adopted?
fuck that fuckin song…only cause it makes tears run down my face the instant I hear it no matter what I’m doing.
its rather inconvenient sometimes
they decided to play it a memorial for a couple soldiers here in Iraq a few weeks back
I love that song. I have it almost every playlist I’ve created. Melancholy songs, love songs, cheer me up songs, chillin’ on a summer day songs. That song inspires whatever emotion I want to feel. I believe it to be one of the best songs ever written and no one sings it better than Jeff Buckley.
You are one of the good ones, AAG. You just keep doing what you are doing, feeling what you are feeling, and being who you really are. I know it’s hard sometimes, that brain chemicals wreak havoc on even the best of us. But at the end of the day, the universe depends on the souls of the people who have them.
You are blessed, perhaps mostly at the moments when you feel the least blessed. Those moments are when our true selves show up.
Jeff Buckley can guarantee a crying jag at the best of times, listening to him while transitioning meds and tyring to make sense of the senseless is definitely not a good thing. I can only send you some positive energy and good thoughts.
love is pure crazy
driving itself deep within
to burst forth, alive.
Your dedication to others is amazing and inspiring. I’m not sure what smart means, but you show the world what love means.
beautiful song, one of my favourites