Filling My Adoptee Cup

 Have you ever heard the term Ghost Kingdom? If you watched This Is Us, you may remember Randall's Ghost Kingdom. Lacking any true knowledge about our origins, adoptees craft an alternate reality where we imagine what our true families might be. 

For myself, it was more dreaming and fantasizing, the maybes and the probablies and the hopes. Think "Maybe" in Annie. This song was my favorite in the movie as a child, because it reflected my reality so deeply.

My whole life I've been obsessed with looking at how families look alike. I studied their faces, their bodies, their hair. I compared and contrasted. I could see who shared eyes, noses, chins, cheeks. I'd watch TV and be irritated at poor familial casting, because they didn't look like each other enough for me. Because I looked around me and saw no one I looked like. I was adrift and lonely and often felt like I wasn't a real, physical person of my own, like an alien just plopped on the planet or a fae changeling left in the dark of night.  

Since I knew just a few snippets of the truths told to me by my adoptive parents, and those few things were about my birth father, since they'd met him, I could more easily picture him in my mind. I tried to Google an example image of what I pictured, and came up short, but it was basically a young, tall, lanky blonde cowboy with bad skin (that last detail always brought up in my youth as a reason for MY bad skin) who drove semi trucks. When I was a child, I'd look for him at truck stops and on the highways. I was sure I remembered him and would recognize him (even though I hadn't), because, I think, I'd dreamed up a version of him. But when I saw pictures of him recently, it's pretty damn close to what I pictured! 

For my mother, however, I didn't know anything. I assumed she'd have hair like mine and that I resembled her, so I took a woman I admired and had my hair and danced like I did and was tall like everyone said I'd be (I was a lanky stick of a thing) and plugged her into the role: Miss Farrell from, yes, Annie, played by the fabulous Ann Reinking . Yes, I was obsessed with Annie. Just don't call me Annie.

Ann Reinking

I once told this to a friend and she said I was setting the bar too high, to pick this famous dancer as how I pictured my mother, but you have to understand I wasn't literally thinking my mother was Ann Reinking herself, all Fosse hands and jazz kicks and screen presence; no, she became a stand in for what was even better and that I needed so desperately: a real woman who was MY mother! 

But, honestly, minus the height, I wasn't that far off and my mother did dance in her youth (which makes me so happy and teary to think about that thing we have in common), but her hair was darker and her face more real in a way, more like mine, and her teeth jacked up like mine were before my many years in braces. And trust me, I would've traded the fantasy of the famous dancer for my real mother in a hot second. 

And now that I have photos of my mother and I see myself in her and I hear my sister tell me I look like her, it fills me up in a way that I didn't even know how empty I was! I've mentioned before how the first time I felt like a real human was when I did a DNA test and saw I had ancestors and heritage, just proof I exist and there are people I came from. But seeing photos of my mother, my sister, my family? It pours so much back into me that was scooped out the moment I was taken away. And, yes, there are things I wish I knew that I'll never know because she took those things with her, simple things like the sound of her voice or her laugh or what my pregnancy and birth were like. I wish I had those, but I never will and I accept that.

I pictured my sister too, by the way! I knew she was out there, but I didn't have anything to go off of except I thought she was 2 years older (it's actually 3) and so I just tried to picture myself only a little older and cooler. I needed her to look like me since I could see the ways my adoptive cousins looked alike and always felt so apart from that. I imagined us playing and fighting and hugging and crying together. I craved her desperately. I begged my adoptive parents for a sibling, probably thinking it would fill that need for my sister I knew I had. 

I can't wait to meet her in person (we're working on it), but she's so much more than I ever could have pictured or imagined as a child, because she's real (and cooler than me too). I study her photos and we talk on the phone and it feels like coming home. I can't imagine how it will feel to be in the same room together!

Oh and? Funny story: I also once made up a brother! I'm not sure why I picked a brother. Maybe it was so no one took her place or maybe it was due to my adoptive parents' baby boy who died the year I was born and who I replaced. But I need to be clear: he wasn't an imaginary friend; I just lied. I named him Brian and I told people he was my twin brother. Where I thought people thought I was hiding a twin brother who was never around, I have not one clue, but it clearly shows how much I needed my sibling. I stopped when my parents got a call from my teacher asking if I had a brother at home (cue: laughter). 

I want to make it clear that it's not about whether I would have liked my family or not. 

I got that a lot before reunion. People said things like, "Prepare to be disappointed," or, "You might not even like them," etc. I think this comes from a place of assumption that all birth families are terrible and all adoptive families are wonderful in order to justify adoption. But like that's just all kind of unrealistic and irrelevant to me. In reality, people are complex in their good and bad characteristics. All families are complicated. All families have trauma and struggle and joy and love. Mine, both of mine, adoptive and biological, are no different and it's not a competition.

I have to admit that maybe it's a little easier precisely because my mother is dead. Lots of birth moms have lots of their own baggage from relinquishment and I've seen the pain of fellow adoptees through secondary rejection. I'll never have to face that. I'll never have to carry her baggage (and we know it took me a long time to set down my adoptive mom's baggage). That stuff belonged to her and she took it with her. It's not mine to carry and I'm relieved I'll never be asked to. I'll never have to explain to her that my life wasn't all sunshine and roses and opportunities. It would've been hard either way and, before I knew she'd died, I used to dread telling her that. Now I'll never have to and that's a kind of relief. 

But I never knew my mother and I never knew my family before now so it really doesn't matter what would have or could have been. Because they're mine and I deserve to know them and learning what I know now fills a place in my heart that has been hollow for a long time. 

My mother and I, just a couple of dancers