POLITICAL IMMERSION

8:36 am
Sunday, October 19, 2008

I don't know how to start again. Not entirely sure I want to pick up that which I rather abruptly dropped. Partly, it is an identity crisis of sorts. Not knowing what I want this blog to be, not knowing its focus. Always, I am vascillating about direction.

This week I watched the documentary "The Cats of Mirikitani", about an 80-year-old homeless man in New York City who is an artist and a survivor of the Japanese internment camps here in the U.S. in the 1940's. And toward the end he says something to the effect of "....There. Now I have told it. Now I don't have to be mad anymore...." I recommend the movie.

Otherwise...

What I have been is utterly immersed in this exhaustingly long election period. Working hard to be informed. Correctly informed. Never believing anything at first glance, frequenting the fact-checking sites like factcheck.org and politifact. I must spend 20 hours a week working at this.

With some of my wealthy clients, I attempt political discussions, wanting to know not so much what they think (that, I already know), but how. So far, it is disheartening at best, quite fearful at worst. I almost entirely dismiss McCain (he has broken all records for the number of lies told in a campaign), as I think it very possible he would not make it through his first term. And so the issue at hand is Palin.

I don't understand. Period. How does anyone accept, let alone admire someone seeking such a position of power who is so basically unintelligent? Could we please have a leader who knows how to pronounce the word nuclear? Not once have I heard her say it correctly. Then there are the evidently small matters of believing the world is 6,000 years old, having preachers lay hands on you to protect you from witches, believing Armageddon is just around the corner and so who cares about the nuclear bomb button because the righteous, after all, will be saved. There's the horrific "sport" of gunning down wolves from airplanes - but of course that is irrelevant to so many who love the culture of hunting and killing for fun. There is also the long list of her absurd statements - such as her being able to see Russia and the like.

There's the fact that I watch Palin (and McCain too) look straight into the camera and deliver stunning, flat-out, bald-faced, pants-on-fire lies. As she did when she thanked the powers that be for finding her, in their investigation, to be free of any unethical behavior whatsoever when in fact the report delivered a clearly stated and official verdict of her abuse of power and violations of ethics in her home state. It is beyond bizarre.

Yet her supporters just shrug me off when I ask about these things, when I ask how they explain it. Not one of them does any fact-checking of any sort. (I did ask, specifically.) One college-educated, 60-year-old former top executive of a major global corporation, who has lived all over the world, just doesn't care, he says. Her religious views don't matter to him. He thinks her fantastically articulate, gutsy, and stated to my face: "She's amazing. I want her to be the mother of my children."

My father, from whom I am largely estranged, has begun sending me numerous emails full of flaming lies about Obama. I find it all just flabbergasting. Maybe we should require some sort of basic critical-thinking tests before granting rights to vote. I asked my son once whether I was just unaware, or did the Republicans really have a monopoly on these sorts of absurd lie campaigns. Was I just not getting the ones the Democrats were mailing out? He rather chuckled and suggested it was a reason he wasn't a Republican. Somehow, the Republicans know they can bank on idiocy, that they can lie, lie, lie and no one will question them. And that it works. I also find it interesting that while the Democrats work like crazy toward involving more people in the voting process, the Republicans notoriously work to suppress and intimidate voters - always those in poorer or non-white neighborhoods.

Obama has lied too, in his ads. While I forgive both sides errors of numbers, evidently Obama put out one flat-out lie ad (last I checked) and that angers me. McCain's lies (ranging from misrepresentations of details to full lies) are 3 to 1 to Obama's - but that little statistic doesn't necessarily make me happy.

Too often, I feel a wave of near nausea, when I think what could happen. I feel it when I imagine McCain winning. But I feel it far more --a horrible, sinking, desperate feeling-- when I think of Obama's safety. McCain's responses to the shouted threats of violence toward Obama stun me. He refuses any responsibility, and manages, miraculously, to blame Obama, to point the finger back at him, and accuse him.

SECRECY

10:37 Sunday morning

I suppose secrecy is underneath it all. Every bit. My writing or my not-writing. The existence or non-existence of my family/families. My relationships or the lack of them. My identity or its void. My voice or my muteness.



It seems to be the bedrock, the most fundamental principle, of my life. It feels, often, like the toxic fumes that permeate my airspace everywhere I am, everywhere I go, invading my cells, making me feel ill and dull and desperate for relief, for the clean and harmless. It, secrecy, and the world at large, curse me for the outcomes that having kept its cruel silence has wrought. Yet it and the world would also curse me were I to take it, like a barrel full of old dishes and smash the whole lot loudly against a tree for all to see.

It is not a single “it”. It is many, and varied. And I feel as trapped as a fly in a spider’s web, the frightening black spider fast approaching with its venom to finish me off.

I suppose what is first is adoption. The very nature of the institution, its structure, is secrecy. For the birth mother who was whisked away and must never, ever speak of it again, and the lifelong lying she must live with. For the adoptee whose past is erased and denied against her will and who must live forever with something worse than the excruciating confusion of a dual identity, for one identity is not even known, except that it did, does indeed exist. For the adoptive parents who must always fear to some extent “the truth”. With adoption, the very family itself is built upon a foundation that is secrecy.



Yesterday, I inhaled a book, start to finish in less than a day. Patty’s Journey by Donna Scott Norling, born Patricia Ann Pearson (which is she?). She was taken from her birth family at age 5 in 1937, put into an institutional orphanage, into several foster homes, and finally into a permanent adoptive one at age 7, and of course lost her siblings in the process. Rape and molestation and abuse and general cruelty greeted her at the orphanage and in all other placements except her final adoptive home. Her story eventually included that beautiful, horrible conundrum of reunion, in adulthood, where you learn that just as your adoptive mother who was your mother but is not really, so too is your birth mother your mother, but not really. And so you have to face that now that you have two, you really have none. You never did. All familial relationships are tainted. Siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents who are and are not.

How, pray tell, does that inform non-family relationships in the adoptee’s life?

Hers are my experiences, all of them, in some form or another. Except that her adoptive home was relatively (that being an important distinction) free of harm. Yet the book maddeningly frustrated me. For it seemed that once she married (so young, at 18), and she was lucky enough to have married a good man, all of life proceeded in a rather fine manner. I had been waiting, all through the pages, to learn how she was impacted as an adult, how she coped. It seemed that her disastrous childhood just disappeared once she turned 18.

And so I feel shame, in amongst both my confusion and my defiance at her perfection, that I could not do the same. Was it the few years of intactness with her birth parents that allowed her psyche to develop its tools and skills that it can only develop in the very beginning of a life? Was it that she had a genetic makeup less prone to brain-chemistry issues? Was it that she never, in adulthood, had to suffer the insidious and destructive effects of worrying about her basic needs being met? Was it that her abuse and molestation came neither from her original family nor her adoptive one? Was it that she had, through her adult years, an intact, imperfect but basically loving (adoptive) family for support and care? Did she just simply not write about it?



I resent that while very personal horrors were shared with the reader, there was no sharing of their effect in adulthood, nor their working-out. And I cannot believe there were no effects. What, then would that make me? I wondered, as I read about an epiphany at age 17 that she shared, if I were just simply too unintelligent.

This morning I began another book, The Birth Bond by Judith S. Gediman and Linda P. Brown that focuses more on the birth mothers and on the post-reunion phenomenon. And it was here, albeit on the heels of the first book, that all the separate but related pegs of secrecy began to line up for me. It was here that I began to translate the words about secrecy, about its incredible ability to fracture lives, into all the other, non-adoptive issues in my life, and to follow its path into and through my adult decades. Though really, there’s no such thing for an adoptee as a thing not touched by adoption.

It is the “primal wound”. It is one's identity and one's non-identity. As Norling states:

"...adoption, often viewed as a panacea, is really a fragile, lifelong process."

I could call up all the catchy and over-simplified phrases about secrecy that I learned within the halls of pop psych and ‘recovery groups’ two and three decades ago. But they are pale and wan as seen now from my 6th decade. Back then, there was all the intact hope and even assumption of healing, and the naïveté of too few years lived. I had not yet even begun to see the extent of the damage – nor had the damage stopped its accrual.

Now, despite the books by my chair, it is less adoption itself (meaning, perhaps, my birth family) than the secrets of abuse. It is the horrible lifelong tangles wrought by my adoptive family, the utterly unmanageable confusion in the right now. It is the debilitating secrecy. It is the ripples that would be caused by truth that I fear, the ripples that make me the bruised and raw center of a tug-of-war. I am so speechless in the face of my adoptive family. They gnaw at me daily (despite the rarity of contact), as does every feeling I have about them. Not just my psychological health is at stake, but so now is my physical survival. For there is now the very slightly increased hope that I will be included, after all, in the inheritance of their monetary wealth. A thing that means, in the face of my illness, my survival - the keeping of a roof over my head and food in my belly. Or lack of those necessities. And so I yet again retreated into muteness.

And there is my son. What of him? What might the unseen fallout be for him of my secrets becoming unsecret, becoming public?



Yet I tumble right back to the injustice so attached to my being, to the secrets within it. Were I to write my story, expose the truths, never would I be believed by those who once knew me. I would be ridiculed, damned, called a liar, called vicious. I would be the one cursed for wrong-doing. Not them, the parents. Not the perpetrators. And so I must devour myself, it seems. Swallow it all, or incur further abuse: which shall I choose?

Will I ever, ever be free? Will it happen tomorrow, me waking with the fire to have my say? A decade from now? Must they die first? Yet oh, oh, how I ache for a conversation with them. Just one. One honest, even compassionate conversation. Just a moment, one moment when they would lay eyes upon the huge, ugly, writhing mass of blame on my bended back and say yes, that is ours, not yours. We are sorry. Please, will you forgive us?

And I would say yes, yes, and would rush into their frail, aged arms to claim a family that has never existed, will not ever exist.

Still Here

I was sure I'd get a post written this past weekend. And sure the weekend before that. And the others that have slipped by since my last post. But I cannot catch my words. They buzz all around me, wanting to be caught, to be told, but I am dull and slow and haven't the energy to corral them.


This seemingly collapsed house-top sped by my passenger side window at 65 miles per hour last May and I knew it would be perfect for some blog post in the future, so begged my son to stop his car, turn around and go back so I could capture it.

Soon. Soon I'll get going again, will feel like sharing and writing, interacting, and will get back also to commenting on those blogs I love so much to read.

A PANEL TALK: PART 2

Alas, I have just discovered (on Aug 17th) that this bit was never posted. And so I insert it now, a month and a half after the fact.

6:49 Thursday morning
July 3, 2008

After the formal part of the panel discussion I wrote about in the last post, we mingled a bit and could speak with the panelists. I wanted to ask each of them the same question: “How do you deal with the anger?”

I was only able to ask two, the lesbian rights woman and the director of the homeless day shelter. The lesbian responded first. “I don’t get angry”, she said. I pushed a bit by asking “not even when your child was hit in the face?” Nope. No anger. It is a bit difficult for me to believe her, but I’ll respectfully accept her answer. What she said further made good sense to me, though. She told me she didn’t get angry because she knew what to do. In the case of her child, within a few months she had organized an educational program for her child’s school.

The other panelist, the homeless shelter one, spoke up and said she just was not that much of a saint. That she did indeed get angry. Very angry. But she solidly agreed with the first that being able to do something about it made a big difference. She also went on to tell me how the fact that she herself (as a college-degreed professional) had undergone the humiliation of applying for assistance had helped her understand much better the people she served. Said she might not have entirely believed all the stories from those in need about the mistreatment from various agencies had she not herself experienced it and the attendant anger.

I can imagine this. That the taking of action would be a great help. That the ability to effect change would make all the difference in the world within one’s psyche. Of course. It was good to hear it. Though how I do that in my own life is still a dense, foggy mystery to me. I know my own anger would shift were I able to climb somehow out of the cesspool I’m in. I know my attitude would improve were I not living daily, and almost solely, with people I disdain for their greed and cruelty, if I were not living daily with so much basic need gone unmet, the kind that when unmet, grows such underlying fear.

Or so I hope. Those couple of hours in the midst of all those activists were certainly of another world. That sounds so absurdly obvious. My work environment is much akin to being caught in an abusive relationship. Except that there are no shelters for those like me, caught in a completely unworkable situation but with no way to climb out.

Over the course of the next week, having learned more about what the day shelter could use (different from the usual things I have long culled and taken to various agencies around town), I went through my own things with new eyes, and also asked one of my wealthier clients for any toiletries or luggage she might like to get rid of (the one that has said to me she mustn’t interfere with the poor because it would not be appropriate to interrupt their karma). She travels a lot, and I’d learned that these shelters desperately need things like those little soaps and shampoos folks bring home from hotels. She scrounged up several shoeboxes’ worth, inlcuding lots of little compact toothbrushes and combs and razors and shaving cream.

Last Thursday I took them in to the day shelter, along with a large bag of clothing. And they were thrilled with the abundance of toiletries. I imagined what it might mean for some homeless woman to have a miniature hygiene kit that would fit in her pocket.

Shall I tell you that the woman who donated the several shoeboxes’ worth of toiletries is intensely upset because a house is now being built in the empty lot next to their own McMansion that will block (only a portion of) their lovely view? Shall I tell you that her husband tried to “just buy the property” himself to protect their view?


I try to remind myself how capable I am of doing the same, of being upset about something meaningless. Mostly, I fail.