The Lost Daughter: A Memoir (20 page)

WAIS is a place unlike the rest of the world, which is ruled by biology. In the rest of the world, things are mating, birthing, living, dying. WAIS, on the other hand, is ruled by cold, hard physics: pressure, friction, speed, drift. Only dead things grow and fade here: the ice sheet, the cloud cover, the wind, the temperature. Even the sun is alien. In this flat, barren place, it is easier to see that the sun never touches the horizon. It circles overhead like a great unblinking eye. It is a stingy sun. Hardly ever does its warmth reach us. It floats above us, a stark reminder of a familiar comfort hopelessly out of reach.

The never-setting sun had a strange side effect. I would wake up several times during the “night,” perhaps because the presence of the sun shining through the thin walls of my tent was telling my body it was time to wake up. I woke up on average every two to three hours, every day for the entire three weeks. Once, I left my watch in the galley while washing dishes and went to bed without it. When I woke up, I didn’t have it to let me know what time it was. It’s useless to peek outside because midnight and eight
A
.
M
. look exactly the same. I had the choice of crawling out of my tent into the cold and trudging the quarter mile from tent city to the galley only to find it deserted because it was midnight. Or I could go back to sleep, potentially missing breakfast and being late to work. That was a stressful evening. I made the right choice, however, by opting to go back to sleep.

WAIS is known for its bad weather. This far into the continent, it is quite common to be “treated” to some of the coldest temperatures, strongest winds and heaviest snows Antarctica has to offer. Sometimes a bigger problem occurs when the weather is simply overcast. When the sky is overcast, the contrast between the ground snow and sky is almost zero. You are suddenly unable to orient yourself. A dark hat someone has dropped on the ground twenty feet in front of you looks like a huge building somewhere off in the distance. You stumble around because you step into depressions in the snow that are suddenly undetectable. People liken these weather conditions to being trapped inside a giant white ball. For safety reasons, no outside work can be done on days like this. In short, you never forget for a second where you are. WAIS won’t allow it.

After I was at WAIS for almost a week, the camp supervisor decided to treat me to a boondoggle. A boondoggle is a morale-boosting field trip or experience to release the boredom and frustration of monotonous camp life. A boondoggle in McMurdo can mean a trip to see seals at the pressure ridges, a trip up Mount Erebus or a trip to Cape Royds to see a penguin rookery. Boondoggles weren’t so exciting at WAIS. My boondoggle was on an old Twin Otter plane carrying eight hundred pounds of explosives, several 55-gallon drums of fuel and some kind of compressed gas in large canisters. I was squeezed in the back of this plane with this menacing cargo. The only other people on the plane were the two pilots up front.

The mission of the flight was to deliver these supplies to another deep-field research team called CReSIS. CReSIS is the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets. Its mission is to develop new technologies and computer models to measure and predict the response of sea level change to the mass balance of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. I had briefly met some members of this small crew (ten folks at most) before they took an overland traverse from WAIS to their research site. The land traverse took several days. It took forty-five minutes in the Twin Otter.

During the flight, to keep my mind off thoughts of the plane crashing to earth, leaving behind nothing but a smoking crater and a mushroom cloud, I focused on the single track left by the traverse vehicles, which was still visible in the snow days after they left. There was nothing else to see. Once the WAIS camp was out of sight, there was nothing but a flat, white, featureless expanse with a track across it. Twenty minutes into the flight, I smiled when I noticed the perfectly straight line left by the traverse vehicles suddenly turn into loop-the-loops and a doughnut. I could imagine the driver not being able to stand the monotony any longer and deciding to shake things up. Though the vehicles they used on the traverse can barely break thirty miles an hour, I’m sure the loop-making must have been exhilarating.

I was happy to see little dots on the horizon. CReSIS. As we approached, I got a lump in my throat. The camp from the air looked so insubstantial in the vastness of Antarctica. It was just a few mountain tents. They looked so vulnerable. Forget that these are experienced field researchers and contractors who had been working in places like this for decades. From my perspective on the plane, they looked as formidable as a splattered bug on a windshield. What chance would they have against a really brutal storm, or if someone got hurt? Help was at least an hour away by air, days by land.

Several CReSIS team members were on hand to greet the plane. I rushed out of the plane into the arms of my friends. Though it had only been days since our last meeting, it felt like much longer. I made sure to hug each of them at least twice. I’m sure they thought I was just being nice but it was more than that. I was giving them a proper good-bye should anything horrible happen to them. When the plane took off for the return to WAIS, I had the irrational feeling that I was abandoning them.

That night I didn’t feel so well. There was this heaviness in my chest. The next day I was lethargic, couldn’t eat dinner and had trouble getting to sleep. Somewhere around three in the morning I was able to diagnose my problem. I thought,
Could I . . . ? Could this possibly be . . . homesickness?
I’m never homesick. Never. Not when I picked up and moved to Morocco or Tanzania. Not once biking across the United States, through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, relocating to Tucson, Arizona. Never. Somehow Antarctica managed to get me. Subconsciously I had translated the vulnerability of CReSIS into a reflection of my situation in WAIS, in the world. I had an epiphany that no matter how fit, hardy and capable we think we are, from the right perspective we are all vulnerable. I’d stayed in contact with my family and friends via e-mail, even the limited access to e-mail at WAIS, but it was not enough to fend off my crushing loneliness.

Leaving WAIS was bittersweet. What I thought would be a challenging experience (it was) was also one of the most rewarding of my life. I would have liked to stay longer. But I was needed back in Mactown, so off I went. By the time I returned to Mactown from WAIS, my five months in Antarctica were coming to an end. The thought of leaving was unpleasant. I wasn’t ready. I began to look into staying on and working the winter season, all the time wondering how I’d fare living on a base reduced to a hundred souls. What would it be like to spend months in the winter darkness? I began to covet bragging rights to spending a solid year on the ice. So I reapplied for several winter jobs, and when my summer assignment officially ended, I began the required physical qualification process all over again. But because I was over forty, I was required to receive a mammogram, which could not be done on ice. Arrangements were made for me to fly to Christchurch, New Zealand, for the screening.

It was early January 2008 when I got off the plane in New Zealand and walked into a world pleasantly basting in 90 degrees. The smells! The colors! Your sense of smell atrophies in the cold. The eyes grow used to only seeing white and the earth tones of the buildings and the dirt roads of Mactown. But New Zealand in January? My God! And so just like that, the spell was broken. Broken by the beauty of wildflowers, rolling green hills, butterflies, a radiant sun and the complex scent of a busy city. I suddenly became acutely aware of all the aches and pains my body had been hoarding all that time on the ice. I thought of other adventures not yet had. I let go. I let Antarctica go. It was time to make room for others. I’d already gotten what I wanted. What I needed. There was nothing left to prove. But I was bringing something away with me. The ice opened up a space in me that I was now ready to fill with family. Again.

AND YET I DIDN’T GO
straight home. I took an assignment at a wildlife refuge in Alaska, thus fulfilling my dream to be bipolar. Then I took several more temporary positions in North Dakota, California and Oregon. It was while living in the caldera of a volcano in central Oregon in 2011 that I finally decided it was time to go home. After spending years obsessively traveling everywhere, except Oakland, the pull of home became a little too strong to resist. I’d made half-hearted attempts in the past, like an ill-prepared alpinist pushing for the summit of Everest, but each time I noticed that at even the faintest signs of trouble, I hightailed it back to base camp.

My first attempt was after a colleague at an Alaskan wildlife refuge introduced me to Facebook. She thought the social network was tailor-made for folks like me who led reclusive and transient lives. She hailed it as the ideal way to stay in touch with friends and family. I never dreamed it’d be the vehicle that would propel me home.

Soon after I set up my Facebook account, I found myself a bit embarrassed that after a little more than four decades of life I’d only managed to amass eighty or so friends, family and acquaintances that I could list as Facebook friends, compared to the hundreds, sometimes thousands that some of my friends, barely into the second decade of life, could boast. Out of a sense of inadequacy, I trekked deeper into the landscape of Facebook, and thus into my past, in search of more people I could lay claim to. That’s how I found Neome Banks, someone I hadn’t seen since childhood.

Neome and I grew up as the children of Black Panthers. Like me, Neome was the baby girl of her family, raised by a single mother. As small children we spent most of our time at the Panther-run school, starting each day with a hot breakfast followed by calisthenics, classes and afterschool activities. After leaving the Party, we hung out in the tiny bedroom she shared with her two older sisters in her family’s apartment down the street. We listened to cassette tapes of Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, the Pointer Sisters and the Commodores while gossiping about the goings-on in the neighborhood. She was my first true friend.

In her Facebook photo, Neome still closely resembled the young girl I once knew. I clicked on “Add as friend,” and, across space and time, she accepted my friendship. Again. Through our correspondence I learned that Neome was still in touch with one of my birth sisters, Teresa, who was also on Facebook. And so, after typing in Teresa’s name and seeing her picture pop up, I friended my sister too.

Just like that, we closed the void. After high school, Teresa went on to college and graduate school to become a college professor. When our sister Deborah was killed, she had really stepped up, along with my mother, to help raise her two children.

Teresa and I began sending each other Facebook messages and e-mails. She told me she’d recently divorced but was happy, and lived alone in a modest apartment by the sea; her daughter was now a tall young woman with long black hair and severe bangs. Then we reminisced about our family—a great-aunt who covered her sofas in thick plastic and kept hard candy in little crystal dishes on the coffee table in her living room. We coveted those brightly colored sweets but were admonished to only take one each. We recalled another great-aunt whose house always smelled of boiling chitterlings, and our mother’s father, China, who with his bald head and chubby body resembled the Buddha at birth and in old age. She told me our mother had stopped drinking and that they took a cruise together. She e-mailed a photo of them on the deck of a cruise ship. Our mother was plump, dressed in a purple pants suit paired with a loose pink blouse, sitting on a red mobility scooter. Her close-cropped hair was now gray, but her face was unlined. Though she wasn’t smiling, she looked fiercely happy sitting there in the sun on the deck of a ship headed for Mexico. My sister knelt next to her smiling a smile not unlike my own. Her hand rested on our mother’s arm.

Seeing this picture made me weep. My mother looked vulnerable but regal, so different from the woman I remembered. Out of nowhere I fantasized about forging a new relationship with her and Teresa. We could travel together. We could recapture the good times before our family fell apart. I wanted to visit, I told my sister. Considering the lives they led now, and how they appeared so unlike the childhood snapshots in my head, I opened my mind to the possibility of a reunion. I bought a ticket to Oakland and Teresa invited me to stay with her. I couldn’t believe how fast and stress-free things were moving. Teresa gave me our mama’s phone number and told me to give her a call. “She’ll be happy to hear from you. You don’t know how many times she has cried missing her baby daughter.”

Instead of warming my heart, this statement reignited my anger. “Misses me?” If she missed me, she would have reached out to me well before three decades slid by. I told my sister I didn’t believe I was missed. I told her I remembered well the abuse, the neglect. We argued.

The possibility of a reunion fell to ruin in the wake of my rekindled anger. Defiantly, she withdrew her invitation of a place to stay. She told me that she was angry too. Angry with me for turning my back on our family. A few days after the fight I reached out to her again. I told her I was still coming and if she wanted to meet, I was open. She let me know she was no longer interested in seeing me. The night before I caught my plane to Oakland, I sent her one last e-mail, letting her know the dates of my trip and giving her my cell phone number in case she changed her mind. She didn’t respond. I thought that, at the very least, I’d get to see my old friend Neome.

The clear, warm beauty of the Oakland weather belied the storm brewing in me. I was waiting to meet Neome at the train station when I saw her approaching on foot with a small boy. She recognized me instantly and we embraced. She was tiny, thin and not much taller than she was as a young teen. She still possessed flawless ebony skin and a radiant smile.

Her seven-year-old son, Josael, was biracial, with caramel skin and thick, curly black hair. He stared at me with his mother’s almond-shaped eyes, shyly hiding behind her. Neome and I had very difficult family dynamics growing up. Yet Neome still lives near her mother. They spend holidays together, visit often and are fiercely loyal to each other. Neome even left her children with their grandmother so we could spend a few hours alone. How did two girls so alike end up so different? I wanted to ask Neome if she would have accepted the opportunity of a better life, if one had come along, even if it meant leaving her family behind. But I was afraid of how she might answer.

Teresa waited until the last day of my trip to call, which pissed me off.

“Hello?” I said.

“You sound like me,” she said.

“Who is this?”

“Teresa. Funny how our voices sound alike.”

“No, they don’t.”

“So, how are you?”

“Fine.”

“Well, I was just checking in.”

“Great. I’m kind of busy. So . . .”

“OK.”

“OK.”

Click.

It was an awkward and unfulfilled end to my first real attempt to reconnect with my family. Though it stung, I was also relieved. There was obviously still a great deal of pain and unresolved anger that needed to be aired. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wade into that particular cesspool. So I chalked up the experience as a valiant effort on my part that was not realized through no fault of my own. I figured it would have to do as the closure and validation I needed to support my decision to stay away.

•   •   •

I went back to the Bay Area the following spring to work as an environmental education teacher at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge was less than an hour by public transportation from Oakland. Though I would be in the Bay Area for the next four months, I had no intention of trying again to reconnect with my birth family. I did make a few stealthy trips into San Francisco and Berkeley to visit friends and a few museums, always praying that I wouldn’t run into anyone I was related to.

So there I was. Again. So close and yet so far, and totally cool with that. I was still licking my wounds from being shut out by my sister. Instead I wrote about my ill-fated reunion, a piece that was published in
O, The Oprah Magazine
, and by means of that writing, I felt I had, for the most part, processed decades of trauma in eight thousand words.

When I first went to live with Jane, one of the first heart-to-heart talks we had was about anger. I had a hard time dealing with the emotion. My coping strategy was to completely repress it. The problem with this was that when I did get upset, my anger was way out of proportion to the situation. A stranger inadvertently nudging me on a busy street or a perceived snub from a waiter in a restaurant would have me seething with anger that I’d immediately wrestle back into the little cage within I’d created for it. While I was often bubbling with barely contained anger, I was good at keeping it concealed behind a façade of equanimity. Jane knew this about me and encouraged me to deal with my anger rather than repress it. She even went as far as to tell me that it was OK to be angry with her. “No matter how angry you get, let it out. Even if it is at me. I can take it.” I believed she was underestimating just how angry I could get and I vowed that I’d never turn my anger on her.

Throughout my teens, twenties and thirties, I was able to keep the beast caged, but as I entered my forties I found it more and more difficult to cloak my anger. I dubbed this period my Terrible Forties. I was an emotional chimera of a two-year-old and a sulking teenager, extremely sensitive to even the most benign criticism or perceived insult. Even Jane was not exempt. Where previously I had been open to any and every bit of advice and constructive criticism she had, now her advice and even the sound of her voice grated. I’d never missed our family holidays, and now I began to boycott them. And when Jane failed to invite me to her seventieth birthday party in Argentina, I became so enraged I partially lost my vision for a few hours and suffered a massive migraine that lasted for days. When I recovered enough to respond to this slight, I sent her an e-mail informing her that she was no longer my mother. And I meant it. I was thoroughly ready to throw away my relationship with Jane and be completely motherless.

Jane responded by e-mailing and calling repeatedly to say, “I am your mom!” I deleted all of the messages and consigned any messages from her and her office to junk mail. She continued to e-mail and call. It was weeks later before I agreed to meet with her. She flew out to Arizona to talk. When I saw her, she looked so worn out and confused I immediately felt bad for my behavior, but my anger quickly overrode those feelings. We were both in tears and she apologized for not inviting me to her party. I told her I accepted her apology but it would be another two years before I truly let it go. I remained contrary, passive-aggressive and distant whenever we were together. She remained patient, open and loving. Every waking moment of those years, I was angry, sometimes openly, though most times it hummed through my body like a low-grade fever. But it was always there until I realized that I wasn’t mad at Jane. I was really mad at my birth mother. I was torching Jane in effigy of my mother.