Blown Off Course

By Kathleen Shea Kirstein

I allowed my son to hijack my homework. Like I have allowed those I love to hijack my desires, needs, and, sometimes, my beliefs over the years. My ugly mug was ceramic with a picture of a Christmas tree. I asked my son and daughter-in-law if anyone had any attachment to it. God forbid I would decide on my own because I might pick out something someone else might like. They said no, and my son asked why? Then he saw the hammer in my hand. “What’s that about?

I told him about my writing class homework. Get an ugly mug, smash it with the hammer, pick a word from an emotional wheel that describes how it felt, and write about the experience.

“Oh, I have this,” he said, producing a small firecracker. He went on to say, “ I think this will work better than your hammer.”

I didn’t want to explore why my 38-year-old son had a firecracker so readily available. It was Valentine’s day. (I hate Valentine’s day.) We went outside. The air was crisp, not a cloud in the sky, and the shining sun made it feel warmer than the actual temperature. I filled the mug with water and put it into a container to keep us safe from exploding shards. My son lit the fuse, stepping away to maintain a safe distance. The anticipation was everything. I knew the blast was coming, yet I jumped a bit when mug exploded. It’s always interesting when I know something is going to happen. I plan for it to happen, even set the steps in motion, yet I’m surprised when it occurs. That was the goal. Blow up the mug. The explosion was small due to the contained space, yet still powerful enough to shatter the mug.

“Wow, that blast was a little more than I expected,” my son said.

I told him I knew what I was going to write and thanked him for helping.

How did it feel to smash the mug? Realizing the ease with which I let others hijack my plans, needs, desires, and, yes, sometimes my beliefs, was an insight I was happy to acknowledge, so happy is the word I chose from the emotion wheel.

Suddenly, I was thinking about my love of target shooting. Due to a shoulder injury, it had been a while since I spent time on the range with my pink-handled Sig Sauer Mosquito. I love the moment when everything is dialed in and all I hear is the sound of my breath as I steady it to take the shot. It’s quick, short-lived, but violent. Could it be I like explosions? I never thought of myself as a violent person. I think of myself as the opposite.

I thought about the mug as a metaphor for my life. My life has exploded four times. Three that I remember in precise flashback available detail.

The first  explosion—the one I don’t remember, the one that happened on the day I was born—lives in my cells. It’s preverbal and developmental. Wendy was my name. My life/Wendy’s life was blown up and shattered moments after birth. And whatever life that infant was destined to live was taken away when I was sent off to the hospital, to the incubator, without so much as a pit stop into my loving mother’s arms. After all, Helena, my loving mother, was headed home to live a life without me. She was leaving Wendy to hang out in the maternity home for 43 days, relying on staff to keep the baby fed, warm, and safe until a family from New Hampshire would come and take her home. Wendy died on April 15, 1958, when the adoption/infant protection agency assigned her a new identity, a new name. With the bang of a judge’s gavel, Kathleen Ann Shea was born. Hers was the life path I would take.

The second explosion happened in August 2005, when my parents confirmed my adoption. I was 49 years old. The following year, after working with the adoption coordinator from The Elizabeth Lund Maternity home in Burlington, Vermont, I would reunite with my biological mother Helena. Her son, George, was home on vacation the day of our visit. The gift of our reunion was the moment Helena shared with us that George and I were full siblings, that Peter was our father.

The third was in May 2014. As I was wheeled down the hall into surgery, I realized that my marriage of 34 years was over. I would subsequently learn the reason: my husband had a boyfriend.

When I think about being lied to, my parents and the husband come as a matched set. I wish I could articulate the gravity of knowing the three people I loved the most lied. Why didn’t they love or trust me enough to share their secrets? For my parents, it was my origin story. For my husband, it was his authentic life story. Had I known early on, I could have figured out a way to support his need for a family and a different lifestyle. I may be just kidding myself on that one.

The fourth explosion was in December 2019, when my brother’s DNA test results came in, showing that Peter was no longer my father, and I no longer had any full siblings.

I thought about Wendy (no middle name) Dudley’s obituary. Based on the non-identifying information, Wendy was a preemie. Oxygen was needed as her color at birth was poor, and she spent a couple of days in the hospital in an incubator. At the time of adoption/death, she was described as being small-boned like her mother and having delicate, well-formed features—lovely blue eyes and a sparse light brown hair. The Elizabeth Lund Maternity Home nursery notes state that she “received extra attention while there.” The people providing her DNA—the biological parents—were George William Reynolds and Helena Ruth Brownell. Wendy never got to meet her grandparents, aunts, and uncles and would never play with her many cousins on the porch of her grandparent’s farmhouse on 4 Grant St in Essex Junction, Vermont. I am struck with sadness that Wendy even lost her eye color. The blue wasn’t permanent. Her eyes turned brown. That feels significant and symbolic. All outward traces of Wendy vanished.

George was undoubtedly out of the picture as he was married with a wife and two kids. He surely was unaware that a third kid was in the world. The adoption/infant relocation program was the only choice this loving mother could make. Helena had no support and no resources. A loving mother who went home empty-handed. A loving mother experiencing her grief alone. A loving mother enduring the shame and the stigma society placed on a pregnant unwed woman in 1957.

How do I know she was a loving mother?

Because 50 years later, I would see how she cared for her son, my brother George. I would bear witness to their closeness and the way she nurtured him. Her little boy. Her pride and joy. Occasionally she would refer to him in my presence as her little boy. I would watch the lighthearted teasing between George, his wife Jennifer, and Helena as they joked and poked a bit of fun at how, now, even though they were all adults, Helena would use those words. Even through the mask her dementia provided, I could experience Helena’s child-like playfulness.

  George was the baby she got to keep because she did things with this child in the order society dictated. Marriage took all of society’s stigma away. George and I are only 22 months apart in age. I took a moment to consult a calendar. I was 12 months old when my brother was conceived. Relinquishing a baby in February 1957 and getting pregnant with the next child in February 1958 has to be significant. He was the brother I longed for all through my childhood and into early adulthood. All my life, my favorite brother had been only three hours north of my childhood home.

Since my adoption discovery, I wonder if my strong desire, my wishing to have a brother, was an “unthought known,” a cosmic DNA episode. An example of how my cells remember the explosion my brain couldn’t.

I look at the mug’s fragmented pieces as I clean up from the explosion. My thoughts drift to what Wendy’s life would be today if she hadn’t been sacrificed for Kathleen. I know we share this vessel, this one body. I am curious, as Kathleen, what fragments of Wendy I have developed and what she would think of the life we have lived.

Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a retired registered nurse.