February 2021

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Are we better off forgetting the details? I started writing this memoir as a way to process my mother’s death and remember the events surrounding it as they happened before coping mechanisms settled in to destroy the memories in order to protect me. But I haven’t yet been able to write about the actual moment of her death. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding reliving those moments because writing them down will make them real again in my mind and bring me one step closer to a breakdown. My mother went out of this world like she came in. “The Red Menace,” as she was called by someone along the way—probably my father, made her own choice as to when to go. There was no peaceful exit, even though we were there, holding her hands and singing to her. A timebomb went off and simultaneously destroyed her body and my life. Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but I was simply not prepared for the devastation left in her wake or for the PTSD I experienced, like a soldier having returned from war. I’ll be honest: I was a little worried about my mental health in the months after she died. I was able to cope better when I was with my brothers and sister. Maybe something about being together again reminded me that, in spite of the years apart and the distance between us, we are still a family. We grew up together and got on each other’s nerves as children (and still do now as adults). When we are together, I remember I am not just an interloper to their happy little trio. Nothing has changed.

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple. To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences. Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

Searching for Mom, an award-winning memoir by Sara Easterly, pulls back the veil on adoption, revealing its harsher side—the primal wound that leaves a child desperate to feel worthy, to belong, to be good enough. Easterly was adopted at two days old, born to an adolescent girl coerced to relinquish her in a “grey-market” adoption. She had difficulty attaching to her adoptive mother and struggled with feelings of abandonment by her birthmother, which spurred an impossible quest for perfection, a crisis of faith and trust, and a battle with overwhelming emotions. She felt broken and cast off, unwanted. To protect her adoptive mother’s feelings, she suppressed her deep longing for and curiosity about her birthmother, putting her own needs and desires last to keep a peace, until finally, when she was nearly 40, she admitted her desire to search. Her adoptive mother reacted with a cocktail of emotions including fear, anger, and defensiveness. And then everything changed, when she revealed that in fact Sara had been wanted by her birth mother, causing Sara to reevaluate everything she’d come to believe. In Searching for Mom, Easterly traces her search for, and reunion with, her birthmother, the strain it placed on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and the complicated bond she shared with both women. More than a search tale, it’s a story about love, faith, and spiritual transformation. Here, the author shares an excerpt from her compelling memoir—its first chapter.

Award-winning journalist Mary Beth Sammons has collected the accounts of people who’ve explored their ancestry, whether through family history, genealogical research, ancestry travel, or DNA testing, and she’s discovered a common denominator among the ancestor seekers. Overwhelmingly, the storytellers find in the discovery and sharing of their stories an experience of healing, a greater sense of wholeness, and a broader understanding of the threads that run through all humanity. In Ancestry Quest: How Stories from the Past Can Heal the Future, Sammons takes as her subject the growing phenomenon of DNA testing and the passion for genealogical research. She describes the quests of seekers in search of their lineages—their quests to solve known family mysteries, to grapple with unexpected revelations, or to look for knowledge with which to better understand their health. For many of these seekers, she writes, “this process has recast entire lives with surprises including shocking lineages, long-lost siblings, and family secrets that might have been buried for decades. For many, it has opened question about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Whenever I tell this story, there’s always the same reaction: “I don’t know what to say.” And who am I to blame them? How could they? I wouldn’t either. Sometimes, I still don’t. I’ve always known. From my earliest waking memories, I knew I was special; I knew that he was special too. Because he was a donor, and I was a donor child, in our unusualness I had a bond with this mystery man. But I didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know I existed. When you’re a donor child with a single mother by choice, something can happen. There’s a certain void. An abyss. Not a crater, because that would imply something was once there. You feel empty. You feel lonely. You didn’t have a choice. In this situation, everybody but you had a choice. Let’s backtrack. It’s April 2018, and I’m lying on my stomach, stretched out on the stone-cold floor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, on a retreat. Only three months until my 18th birthday. We were told to take some time to write and meditate. I’d been meaning to write this letter. Now I finally have time to do it. “Dear Dad.” No, that’s not right. Wait, yes it is! “I love you!” “Please love me!” “Please…want me.” Want me, goddammit. I never sent the letter. My 18th birthday arrived. Finally. I reached out to California Cryobank. The deal is that you get three tries to reach out; if the donor never responds, you aren’t allowed to facilitate contact ever again. And the donor has a right to his anonymity. Anonymous until 18. But he still has a right to turn you down when you turn 18. Such a bright age, 18. Shiny, almost. Full of promise and potential. Hope for the future.

In Facebook groups for people with not parent expected (NPEs) or misattributed parentage experiences (MPEs), there’s a consistent large difference in the ratio of men to women. If you were a man looking to meet women, this would be a place to be. There’s typically a handful of men and thousands of women. Where are all the guys? Percentage-wise there couldn’t be that many more women than men having DNA surprises. So what’s going on here? Looking at the bigger picture, this is a fairly common phenomenon among individuals with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health concerns. Several studies indicate that men are typically much less likely than women to seek professional help when facing psychological distress. The study authors suggest a number of factors for the disparity, such as the fear many men have of being judged as emotionally vulnerable or weak. Researchers also point to the fact that because men are trained from an early age to compete with other men, it makes them less likely to trust each other and reveal what they may perceive as weakness. I posed the question to several individuals who not only are behavioral health practitioners but who also have personal experience with misattributed parentage. Their thoughts generally mirror the finding of the studies, but they offered additional insights. According to Jodi Klugman-Rabb* a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor, “Sometimes it’s as simple as the gender role conditioning specific to cultural norms that men are not manly if emotional.  So expressing emotions is then seen as weak, making group process emasculating.  On a more micro level, emotional process can have a lot to do with the family of origin dynamics and whether kids were allowed or encouraged to explore emotions safely, how cultural gender norms influenced that and to take it back out on a macro level, how these expectations were transmitted intergenerationally.”