Lucky me, I got a reboot from my sister, who has been leaving her charger with me in the evenings. I then wake up sometime between 6 and 6:30 to walk it back over and drop it in her door (this is 8 and 8:30 according to the clock ruling me from 1998-March 2011). I suppose there should be some residual kickback from living on the East coast for all of those years, but I can say that I wake up and I am ready to go most days earlier than I should be. When I was a kid it was all window jumping and flying around to scuttle in the window sometime before 5:30 am, the time my father woke up to get ready for work. If I had school that day I would be especially tired, but I wandered around my life then as an excited observer, keeping my best parts hidden from view.

Today we are supposed to go over to Joe and Bab’s apartment building to grab more things for me (that’s my birth mother’s nickname, given to her by Francis and I years ago after she visited me and got totally wasted at this punk bar in Manhattan). Bab’s in ACTION is scrawled at the bottom of many of my polaroids from this time.

That was during the first visits she made to me after I met her. It is so weird that these arguments come up time and time again. The explanations, the little sideswipes and notes about why I was given up. In my mind it was an issue of the girl was 17, what did you expect? I told them when I first met them that I never questioned too much the whys once I realized I was the daughter of a kid, more or less, in high school. I was all of 24 and I could not picture myself with anyone’s child so I really didn’t care too, too much. And my grandmother, her mother, sometimes takes moments to relive the whole horrendous experience and tell me that she was wrong, implying things were done a certain way. The thing I don’t understand is that in all of these clouds of acceptance, many people had no idea I even really existed until the funeral this past January. It has been a constant source of embarrassment for much of their family it seems, given my own sister was instructed by my grandparents to act as if I was a family “friend” not even two years ago for my sister’s wedding because they couldn’t handle their shame and embarrassment. How sad, right? Not really sad for me given these episodes of rejection have been a common theme throughout my life. I do wish my grandfather had been able to really accept me publicly instead of hiding files of photos of me and I am sure early files of my life from public view. I wonder what he thought, looking through them and seeing the very obvious resemblance of my mother and I and he and the two of us. How on earth he expected to hide who I was as a friend (I am sure he might not have told anyone there who I was directly anyways) when I am walking around with mirrored faces of his and my mother’s is beyond me, but the man had guts, that’s for sure.

I am not sure these are the guts I aspire to. When I was say, 7, I think, I was told I was adopted by my family. This was in the era of Cabbage Patch dolls, so it seemed only normal for them to broach the subject with me, given I had just “adopted” Cecilia Nell and Abner Denny. (I didn’t choose the names, but my memory pre-surgery is pretty good for some details, so shhh). I remember recognizing some timeline issues when I was a kid. I understood time and its progression well enough at 5 to know that me not being in the photos to Disneyland from early 1977 meant that I was somewhere else, but where? So when that came out a slew of other realizations. It took me all of a day to tell everyone I knew. I think at the time my mother was such a force, such an overwhelming presence and ruler in my world, I felt I had to tell everyone so they would realize I wouldn’t come out as stern or as strict as she happened to be, like you became your parents automatically. I felt relieved, too, recognizing that my personality was so bizarre compared to my sister’s and brother’s that I often felt like I was the physical manifestation of the black sheep that started baahing at me from an early age.

As the years passed I would look around, assuming that they (my birth family) were somehow spying on me, knew who I was but never came to say anything. Though this is uncomfortably true in some regards (my grandparents knew who I was placed with and knew I sat in foster care for 6 months as well), my mother never saw me until I emailed her some photos. Her parents apparently hid that they knew who I was and where I was, only bringing me up when fighting with her catholic husband “We can bring her daughter back whenever we want,” they taunted. Joe, however, is not so twisted around himself or so selfish as to realize that he would not accept me, no matter that I am not his daughter. So he told them, “please, do it, that’s what she wants.” Had he not been so accepting they probably would have pulled out that card and somehow put us in contact, but so much of their time was spent trying to coerce my mother into leaving him that there was little room for much else. (This is actually the protestant versus catholic argument.) If you are protestant, you are committing a grave sin to marry a catholic I guess. Once I realized this was the entire basis for the argument, I told them all that “no wonder I can never accept any of your religions. You all fight over semantics and things at the end of the day which do not matter.” Family matters, love matters, all of this junk about who’s church is right over the other is insane to me. Fights and misunderstandings over religion have caused millions upon millions of deaths, and these arguments inside my own family have done nothing but push everyone further apart. And I have to say, nobody here ever criticizes me for not believing in what they believe in. I am not so sure that would be the case in the Christian community, given the Catholics in my life seem to be pretty progressive in their thinking. Heck, I am pretty sure I was able to convince Joe gays should be allowed to marry because it is an issue of removing rights from a group who happens to be a minority, who didn’t make the choice to be gay, they just are who they are and that’s that. I am pretty sure that’s something to remark on.

In any case, these relationships I am involved with are kind of strange for me to look around and realize. When I was a kid all I wanted to do is find them and spy on them from afar. It is a disconcerting thing to look around your family and see zero resemblance in personality, attitude, features, etc. So this is where the nature versus nurture argument comes in. I am more like both of my birth parents personality-wise than my own parents or family. This has been a constant source of strife for members in my own family who couldn’t understand why I was the way that I was. I was a very quiet child. Very quiet. I was happier locked inside reading books through all of that grounding (90% of my school life, no joke) and listening to music and drawing than anything. I was very into challenging authority, because I tried to rationalize everything and thought that having rules for the sake of having rules which benefited nobody but the rule givers was insane. And I felt like I didn’t belong. Not in that which one doesn’t belong kind of way, but the things I thrive on and still thrive on are not family-recognized, I guess. When I met my birth father, Mark, and Babs I realized I was not so crazy or weird. My father is a total smartass, who tells inappropriate jokes and is super stubborn about his viewpoints. He is also an entrepreneur (surprise, no?). My mother is the more gentle end of that and is super accepting and can rationalize these differences with no judgment. She was also a writer as a kid and super artistic, sitting out on the mountain ledges drawing much like I did. I can say I got the best of both of them, mentally and physically. They are polar opposites, so the dichotomy is interesting to note. My coaching as a kid definitely shaped who I am to great extents, but I see more of my personality in these two than the parents I knew and grew with.

Now I am trying to reconcile my relationships in many ways between my three new families. The parents I grew up with are not happy I am out here living amongst the birth family, and I can definitely empathize with and understand the whys. I am not that cold, after all. I wish in my heart of hearts that everyone would try and learn to accept that I felt the need to know my birth family because of these questions I had as a kid. Initially it was the heart stuff that had me reaching out to unseal the record, as I understand that it would have been very hard to do without extenuating circumstances. And I was fearful that something would happen to one or all of their kids, because genetically, this was an issue which is passed down. I never thought any of them would want to talk to me, because let’s face it, they probably had their own families and I am sure I was a mistake from the past they were always petrified of confronting again. But they were in contact (my mother and father) and they apparently were excited to see me. Unusual thing for an adopted child, I know. I have many adopted friends who have not met the same fate in the searches for their own families. Some of them have no desire whatsoever to make contact with virtual strangers aside from blood and body. I can get that. For me, it was about answering some things which I still am trying to navigate today. What does it all mean?

I have no idea. But I am pretty sure my lack of ability to commit to much aside from my own happiness is somehow entwined within these arguments. And then throw in a bunch of heart surgeries on top of it all and you get a fear of wasting time, and a fear of not being happy for any extended period of time. So I refuse to stay in situations which make me miserable. My last job was one of those situations I manipulated an out to so I could have some time to be happy. I am always talking about leaving not because I am so happy to be running all of the time, but because I guess I have not found home, exactly. I am trying to find one here, if not because I do have my families, birth and my adoptive’s entire secondary family living here, but because I needed this clean slate. I missed my mountains and had serial dreams about coming back from 88-09, I think. They stopped a few years ago because I am pretty sure that part of my subconscious was swamped with NYC panderings and crazy expectations I set up for myself to somehow make it in a city that big. Oh, I made it, 12 years of bowing to the pressures of giant city life, and it made a big hole in my bank account too. It’s like a hollow vacant thing. But I did develop a way to jump outside of my shell and I have zero problem engaging with strangers. I am pretty sure NYC was an experiment in blooming in a way that would not have happened had I stayed cloistered in Mass, probably getting married to some fool and doing the things they expect of girls my age. Ohs well. I gained a personality, a more liberal perspective sitting amongst every kind of minority that exists, and being exposed to more culturally than I ever could have enjoyed in MA, or even here, in Denver.

All that aside, I still feel the drive to do more for other people. People tell me all of the time I should go into counseling or social work because I am incredibly intuitive with motive and reason behind actions, no matter how convoluted it might seem. I am very good at digging past the layers of baloney people put up to hide who they are at the heart. I am actually very good with advice giving in difficult situations, and have an ability to listen sometimes which I find myself challenging unconsciously, because I guess I know that I have things that need to not only be said, but heard.

I am too sensitive to be a good ambivalent counselor, however. I could not take all of that home with me every day. I still read NY papers and am appalled sometimes at the ease with which some people can take a life, not realizing the time and love and conditioning that goes into producing a productive member of society. And they are usually taken by the exterminators, those whose lives could use a kick of understanding or realization that the only life you have to live is yours. And this is it. You may want to believe the best is in heaven, but who’s to say there even is a heaven? Has there been any proof? I look up into the sky and the clouds and consider the cloud jumping or the Islamic view of multiple virgins, and wonder…not only who came up with the cloud jumping theme (the roots are in Greek mythology, I’d guess) and the virgins? Really? How many virgins would have to be executed so that every one could have their 72? And what happens when they are de-virginized, are they yours to keep? Goodness. What crazy things we believe in the hopes that life is not meaningless. For me, the meaning comes with the now. The later stuff I can find out later. Right now, though, the only things that matter are those things we have direct control over. How we love, who we show our love to, and what we can do to share that love with those who need it, and maybe even to some who feign ambivalence.