TO JANET, I was considered a gift from God and the answer to her prayers for good health. She was sure she wouldn’t be given a baby if she were going to die. My arrival felt mystic and important—my place in their world, as daughter, was called destiny.
I wanted to believe I could be someone’s destiny. I liked to imagine I was of the divine. I went so far as to build rough scaffolding that propped me up on the set of their lives where I tottered around as if I belonged, but if pressed I would admit I felt itchy and wrong, as if I wore a pair of tights that were too small and hung below my crotch. My life was like a series of tugs and pulls where I had to take huge, wide steps across my interior rooms in order to fit, and still I did not find myself at home in their world. Perhaps the reason for this has to do with time. In the end, I had so little of it with Janet, Bud, and Bryan.
FOUR
THREE DEATHS
JANET DIED WHEN I WAS Seven years old. Bud died eighteen months later, when I was nine. Bryan ended his life when I was twenty. He was twenty-three.
For many years of my adult life, I snapped off this news in precise sentences whittled to the most basic facts. Having grown up to become an investigative television reporter and trained in the art of story telling, presentation, and delivery, I’d developed the belief that to tell it straight was the best approach. Why be elusive or even coy?
Life had been brutal to me and I’d go ahead and be brutal in return.
Dead, buried, gone.
That’s how I coped with all that loss and if you asked I’d tell you that I didn’t look back. I’d say, “It happened, it’s over, I’m past all that.”
For the most part, people believed me and didn’t ask me to elaborate on the gruesome details.
If they had, I would have been just as succinct: Janet died from complications associated with a tumor in her spine, Bud had an unexpected heart attack, and Bryan shot himself in the head.
This usually had folks take a step or two back, giving me room, as if my situation had some form of residual effect. Was tragedy contagious?
Before people went too far away, I was quick to reassure that I was doing just great.
Look at me,
I practically said.
Look at what I have become!
I was the one who offered to shake hands first when introductions took place. I was the one who asked a man out—not the other way around.
I was the one who didn’t need anyone, who left the party first, and who was alone even when in a crowd of people.
I was a survivor, yes, but I didn’t want to be known as a survivor. I wanted to be known as the one with ambition to spare. I wanted you to see me as a busy person with important matters to think about.
Feelings?
What were feelings?
Who needed them?
AS SOON AS my son, Spencer, was given a clean bill of health and we were released from the hospital, we went home and every known emotion welled to the surface.
Before the baby, I had been tough, focused, sharp, and defined
by my ambitions. After the baby, as I lay in the quiet of those lush days of sleep, breastfeeding, and skin-to-skin contact, I became primal mother—overflowing with a new desire to nurture and protect. I was also molten, raw, Technicolor love—this kaleidoscope of infatuation and devotion. And I was scared, paranoid, bitchy, unreasonable, and argumentative.
Here was my son, his warm body draped heavily on my chest after a drunken feast on my ample milk supply, and I found myself looking at him but also looking beyond him into the abyss of my own childhood and infancy. At times there would be great swells of sadness, loneliness, fear, and confusion. Other times, I would hear fragments of sound, experience splinters of recollection, and feel shards of sensation. Sometimes it felt as if madness circled overhead, not unlike the teddy bear mobile that spun above Spencer’s crib.
EXPERTS DIAGNOSED ME with postpartum depression and in part, that may have been correct, but it felt bigger than depression.
I was now feeling everything, and therefore, it became important to sort my feelings out.
This is when I began to write the book that would become my first,
Blackbird
. Just prior, there had been a spate of therapy but talking all this insanity out with someone who charged by the hour seemed ludicrous—and time consuming. I’d be in therapy until I was eighty. I didn’t have that kind of time! Spencer didn’t have that kind of time.
Instead I used my reporting skills to investigate Janet’s death,
Bud’s death, and then Bryan’s death. I wrote everything I could remember and told myself that I did this writing, not for my sake, but for Spencer’s. He deserved a mother who was fully awakened and not a hostage to her past. He also deserved a historical account that hadn’t been reduced to a series of sound bites. Spencer, I told myself, deserved the full truth.
FIVE
GYPSY TRASH
“HERE’S THE TRUTH,” Bryan said. “Your real parents threw you in the trash.”
It was a sunny day in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1970. Our family, still intact at this time, had moved from Nevada a year earlier so Janet could get the best health care at UCLA Medical Center.
I was seven years old. Bryan was nearly ten.
It had been an ordinary day, like any other—school, peanut butter sandwiches, milk to wash it down, skinned knees, Barbie dolls, and episodes of
The Brady Bunch
. And then Bryan said, “You’re adopted. Your parents were gypsies. They tossed you in the trash.”
I remember standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment that had a view of the sea. Gulls hung in the sky like ornaments with no wires. Salted wind blew off the Pacific Ocean.
BY SEVEN, I had adapted quite nicely, thank you very much. As the designated special gift from God, I took up my role as divine caregiver
with an earnestness that might be called either saintly or irritating. I didn’t really care what others thought of me though, I was my mother’s savior and Lord did I have a lot of work to do.
Janet was such a sick woman, most of her time was spent in bed where she withered away. Kidneys, bladder, bowel, liver, and stomach—all were put under strain by the persistent growth that lived in her spine. Although it wasn’t cancer in the way one thinks of cancer, it was a tumor and when it grew, it pressed on nerves and brought dreadful pain.
Many medications were prescribed and in the same way that some software programs will not interact well inside your computer, her medications did not interact well within her body. Pain meds brought on hallucination. Antihallucinogens brought emotional pitches. Other drugs had her sleep and sleep and sleep. Add in a few surgeries to remove a kidney and to scrape out bits of the reoccurring tumor and you get the picture. Janet was dying.
BRYAN MAY HAVE been so cruel in handling this news of my adoption based on a need to put me in my place. Perhaps he was jealous of my position of importance as divine interloper. How I wish I could have told him he need not feel such pettiness. Obviously, I was failing in my celestial work, and besides, it was no good night of sleep being me—the twenty-four-hour worry, the changing of the urine bag that connected to her catheter, the endless filling and refilling of her water glass, in hopes that each sip she took would turn her health around. The guilt. The gut-wrenching realization that I was not saving this
woman but might actually be causing harm due to incompetence. Janet needed hospitalization—not the care of a child—and yet I tried so hard. I believed I had some otherworldly power to heal.
But Bryan, by nature, was a pissed-off kid. Anger was one of his defining qualities. There was good in there too but his light was hard to see through the darkness of his rage.
When he told me I was adopted, I felt dirty and bad—the opposite of God’s gift. In his declaration, “You’re adopted and gypsy trash,” I became a fallen angel.
In an act of recklessness, I raced into our apartment, slammed the front door and locked him out as if this might make what he said untrue.
Bryan banged his fists on the door and bellowed, “Let me in! Let me in!”
Despite a feeling of pure terror, I dragged a stool across the kitchen and under the phone that was screwed into the wall. Climbing up and getting myself steady, I tugged the handset from the cradle and dialed my father at work.
There were no push buttons in this day. Each number required a spin of a rotary dial, which took a month of Sundays to my own hard beating heart. Bryan’s banging became louder still. The door rattled under the power of his fists.
Finally, my father picked up on the other line and when he did, I began to cry and talk at the same time. “Bryan says I’m adopted,” I said in a rush. “He says my parents are gypsies and they put me in the trash.”
A long moment of stony silence passed and then my father said he was coming home from work early. Something he never did.
IN THE HALL of our apartment, there was an unused place to toss extra shoes and hang winter coats. I wedged into the corner of that hall closet with my Barbie suitcase against my chest. I pushed my feet against the door, to keep it shut and sat very still.
My father and Bryan watched TV.
My mother slept, as she always did, in her room.
And I there I sat, undone.
My father had come home right away from work to give over the details. He said they had wanted a daughter; actually Janet had wanted a daughter most of all. When she couldn’t have more children—being so sick and all—well, they adopted me. He told me that my first mother was a young girl in trouble. It was a long time ago, in Reno, and that was all he knew.
In part, I felt such relief. It was as if I had been freed from the lie we were all living and taken off the stage. It was okay not to be God’s gift in the light of this news and my days of adapting felt as if they might be nearing an end. Another Jennifer was out there, another life to be lived.
I wanted to ask if he knew my mother’s name.
I wanted to know where she lived.
I even felt like saying, “No hard feelings but this whole adoption thing isn’t working out so great for me. I want to go home now.”
But my father didn’t entertain conversation. These were the
days of children being seen and not heard. Speaking up was called back talk.
Once the news was out there, my father looked tired and old. He said it was time to have dinner and thus ended our “adoption talk.”
I felt that he wanted everything to be as it was before—as if the adoption didn’t matter—but such a scenario wasn’t possible.
I was like one of those fake snakes that had exploded from a faux can of nuts, the gag gift any child can purchase in a prank joke store. In Bryan’s declaration and my father’s confirmation, I had been freed from my own confining space and learned how I was someone else’s child with a story beyond Janet’s rotting sickness, Bryan’s seething anger, and Bud’s long days of work. These people were living
their
lives, not mine. My life was out there, somewhere.
But since my father wasn’t going to talk this out and help me sort the story, I had to figure it out myself. That’s when I slipped into the closet, covert and quiet. I plotted my escape.
AS THE LIGHT of the setting sun fell through the slats of the closet door, I opened the lid of the Barbie suitcase and dumped out doll clothes, Malibu Suntan Barbie, and a few pairs of plastic shoes. The junk tumbled over suede loafers and patent leather pumps.
By my estimation, the little case could hold a couple pair of underwear, an extra pair of pants, and a sweater. I’d put the rest of my clothes on and head out the door.
I told myself that maybe the trouble had passed for my first
mother and first father. Maybe they wanted me back. I could see myself in Reno, standing in front of Harrah’s casino and surveying the main drag. But then my vision faded and it was just me in the closet again.
I asked myself some very adult questions next:
How in the world are you going to make your way to Reno? What if your real parents aren’t there anymore? And—think about this—what if they don’t want you back?
It is said that an adopted child has two identities—that of being the child who has adapted to the family where she has been placed, and that of being a shadow baby of the mother who gave her life. The baby part is waiting to be fully born. The growing child is conforming and shaping and bending to fit the adoptive family in order to ensure a secure place.
I distinctly felt these two worlds at play within my small body on that day in the closet. I had been awakened to the reality of another life—yet to be lived—and I was also forced to accept, for my very survival, that I could not yet access that original life.
A FEW MONTHS later, Janet died. The date was September 19, 1971. This was Bryan’s birthday. Like me, my brother lost his mother on the day he was born—only ten years later.
I hurt for him in a way that couldn’t be spoken. It was empathy. I knew something about how Bryan felt on that hard day.
JANET AND I never spoke about the adoption or that I had been told the truth.
When she died, I felt great empathy for Bryan but I did not feel sad the way many children do when they lose their mothers. Grief came inevitably; it was actually expected. But for me sadness was not the first emotion. At the age of seven, I felt defeat. Janet’s death became my first failure. I had been God’s gift and had let her down.
SIX
COME LOOK
IT’S FUNNY THE way we lock our stories down in the past and walk away, as if memory will be obedient and stay put. I’ve learned, the hard way, that it doesn’t work like that. Unless you are Peter Pan, the shadow you cast stays pretty close to your heels.