Surrender

CHAPTER 1

THE HOUSE OF SHROUDED MIRRORS

When I was sixteen and not yet wise enough to know what it meant to have a child and lose him, I surrendered my firstborn son. He was adopted. For the years of his youth, he was my ghost child. On good days I imagined him biking to the library or knocking helmets in a Pop Warner game. On bad days I pictured him dying and in need of a bone marrow transplant. I had never held him, not even as a newborn, and I had only briefly seen his face. Two years after his birth, I married his father, and we had four more children, full siblings to my absent child. When he turned twenty-one, I searched for him.

Back in 1962, when a mother surrendered a child, she signed a waiver that stripped her of her legal right to know anything more about her baby. She could not know his name or even whether he had been adopted. And yet, as an adoptee myself, I knew firsthand the difficulties of assembling an identity without the crucial, and missing, pieces that came from DNA.

From an early age, I knew I did not fit with the family that had adopted me. There was something inside me, trying to come out. I didn’t know what it was, but growing up, I sensed my parents watching and waiting for the real me to emerge.

Why did I suspect that inside lurked a more authentic self? The little jokes they told. The innuendos that I did not then understand. All of these had to do with my genetic heritage. Rather than confirm my feeling of belonging to them, my adoptive family’s speculative asides hinted at the opposite—that I was not of them.

After a difficult seven-year search, I reunited with my own birth family. For the first time in my life, I met people who looked, sounded, and acted like me. Now, I am a seventy-four-year-old former carpenter, sister, grandmother, and wife. My husband lives in Arizona, where he is a professor, and I live in Sonoma County, California, where redwood trees grow in my backyard. I often drag a blow-up mattress out to my back deck and enjoy the miracle of sleeping under the stars.

Each decade—each birth or move or life event—has caused me to revisit my own origin story and to try to make sense of two cataclysmic events that shaped my life. In the first instance, I was a baby, not much bigger than a shoebox, handed from one family to another. That transfer disconnected me from my genetic roots. In the second instance, I was the one doing the handing off. I did not literally hand my baby to his adoptive mother. I was not even allowed to touch him. However, the wheels of the transfer were set in motion the instant I signed my name to the surrender papers, thus surrendering a part of myself.

I do not blame myself for surrendering my son, nor do I seek forgiveness. Given my age at the time (sixteen), feelings of obligation to my adoptive mother, and societal norms, my signing those papers was not so much a decision as an inevitability.

As Albert Camus wrote in his novel The Fall, Alas, after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face. Throughout each person’s life, during all our acts of self-discovery and self-creation, we become the face we will one day see in the mirror—our own, authentic self.

The author was six weeks old at the time of her adoption. Pictured left to right are Rex and Lorene Benham (father and mother), Orville and Celicia Pitney (maternal grandparents), and Marshall and Louise Pitney (mother’s brother and his wife). The photo was taken on Thanksgiving (1945) at the adoptive parents’ avocado ranch in Camarillo, California.

CHAPTER 2

THE CRYING BABY

Revisiting the past is never easy. It was 2008, I was living in Evanston, and I did not want to move to Phoenix, where I had once lived in a home for unwed mothers. Already in my parka, awaiting my husband’s arrival, I stood looking down at a black-and-white border collie running back and forth in a neighbor’s yard. Light streamed through the dining room’s windows. I was nearing the age, just at the edge of it, when the world suddenly took on a sharp beauty, each pane of the steel windows framing a seasonal tableau: maples bursting into a lime-green spring; the lush, variegated greens of summer; and now, late September, with its red, yellow, and orange leaves fluttering to the ground. Soon, it would be winter. Ice would coat the bare branches. This decade would bring one final burst of health and vitality, and I did not intend to be dislodged for the sake of my husband’s job.

Coming in from his office two blocks away, Bruce unlocked the front door, came up behind me, and wrapped me in his arms. His muscled chest was the wall I had leaned on during the ups and downs of my children’s teenage years and the reunion with my oldest son, the one I had surrendered for adoption. Now, unless I could figure out some way to convince my husband otherwise, he was all set to move from Northwestern University to Arizona State. The therapist was squeezing us in.

Ten minutes later, Jim, a minister’s husband with gray hair and the long-legged, rangy body of a distance runner, showed us into his basement office, both he and Bruce dodging the heating duct. Bruce, unwinding his muffler, took his usual seat in a leather chair near the door. Fit and muscular and with the quiet, gathered intensity of a man who never missed a day at the gym, he was at the top of his game, a leader in the world of science and a person who maintained strict control over his emotions. Jim, steepling his fingers, took the Eames chair across from us and asked what had brought us in—the therapist’s standard opening gambit.

Bruce received a formal offer from Arizona State, I said.

They’re giving me everything I could hope for, Bruce said. A huge amount of lab space. A million dollars for remodeling. An endowed professorship. Permission to hire faculty. Oh, and moving expenses.

Sounds great. Jim smiled benignly. So, what’s the hang-up?

My wife doesn’t want to move.

I want to, I said. The back of my neck prickled. My face lit up. I just can’t.

Why don’t you turn to Bruce and tell him what concerns you? Jim said.

Take a deep breath, I told myself. Raising your voice won’t do any good.

I swiveled my chair around and leaned forward. The corner of Bruce’s mouth crimped. If he heard the drumbeats of anger, he would flee. Oh, sure, his body might stay seated in that chair, but he would shut down like a liquor store on Sunday, its metal grille pulled across the plate glass. How to convey my white-hot rage without scaring him? What words would open his heart?

I need you to listen to my feelings and not be scared, I said.

All right, he said. What is it?

The research institute you’re going to is an anthill of activity. All those multimillion-dollar grants. All those big egos. I’m scared that if you take this job, you’ll work even more than you do now.

That’s not my intention. Grimacing as if I had stepped on his toe, Bruce looked at Jim. For years, Marylee has been saying I work too much. With this job, I’ll have a lab manager and an administrative assistant. I’m actually doing this for us.

Bullshit, I thought.

Will you work Saturdays? I asked.

One by one, he pulled his fingers until his knuckles cracked. Finally, he said, I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.

I hated his integrity almost as much as I hated myself for trying to extort a promise. It was like trying to shame a puppy. Chewing on shoes was in its nature. However, I was not one to give up easily. In my nights of stewing about this, I had come up with some appeals to reason.

I reminded Bruce that he was in the middle of a visiting lectureship that would take him to one or two universities every week during the fall. Even with the best job in the world, surely he could see that the logistics of the move would fall on me. I’d have to get bids from moving companies, oversee the packing, and get our apartment ready to put on the market.

I know that’s not fair, Bruce said, but Marylee has always been the one to handle the practical details of life. That’s why we make a good team, he told Jim.

Yes, Jim said, we are often drawn to our opposites.

Very true. Both my husbands were engineers.

Also, Bruce said, when I went down there last January to give a talk, I couldn’t believe how nice the weather was. I won’t be walking to work in snow.

We live only two blocks away from Northwestern, I said. It’s not like you ever freeze.

She’s not out there on the sidewalk at six thirty, Bruce said, appealing to Jim. It’s slippery as hell.

And you’ve never been to Phoenix in the summer, I said. "It’s hotter than hell."

They tell me it’s a dry heat.

You could fry an egg on your head, I said.

Jim held up his hands. Whoa, whoa, let’s lower the temperature.

I gripped the arms of my chair. My eyes welled with angry tears. A box of Kleenex sat on the table between us. A bottled-up scream made my throat shrink to the size of a straw. I needed to lower my voice and use I messages.

Phoenix is where I surrendered my son, I whispered.

I know, Bruce said.

You wouldn’t ask a Vietnam vet to relocate to Vietnam.

I’m not asking you to move to Vietnam. Bruce turned to Jim. She thinks she has some kind of PTSD issue with Phoenix.

Oh? Jim said. Do you?

I’m no psychologist, but yes, I probably do. A hand clutches my throat and cuts off the air. I wake up at night and obsess. What it comes down to is, I wish Bruce would honor my feelings.

You didn’t want to move to Urbana either, Bruce said, but that turned out okay.

Okay? For you, maybe, but for three years, I was fighting off major depression.

You weren’t depressed. You were just angry. Bruce turned to Jim. When I came home from work, I could never tell what kind of mood she’d be in.

It wasn’t like that when we moved to Evanston, I said.

No, of course not. You wanted to move.

That’s what I’m talking about, Bruce. I can’t buy into this move. My whole life is here. I have friends of the heart.

One thing I’m good at is recognizing an opportunity, Bruce said, and something like this won’t come my way again.

Twenty-five years earlier, we’d convened a high school youth group. With long hair and bangs that he cut himself with a Swiss Army knife, he had not looked like potential husband material. His hair had thinned, but inside, he was still the same sweet, introverted nerd he’d always been, with rare exceptions—like today.

I know this is the job of a lifetime for you. Arizona State values what you can bring to the campus. Your vision. Your leadership.

Yes? He sat back and smiled.

More than anything, I want you to take this job, but my life is here. I don’t know a single soul in Phoenix.

I’m starting from scratch, too.

Yes, but you have an institutional affiliation. Departmental colleagues.

I don’t know them.

I have a profession, too. Where am I supposed to find other writers?

Put up a sign in Whole Foods?

If you didn’t have that offer, would you think that putting up a sign in a grocery store would help you find work colleagues?

No, but then, if it weren’t for my job, you wouldn’t have the luxury of calling yourself a writer.

Ouch, but fair enough.

I took a printed email from my purse and handed it to Jim. The email had come at 7:30 a.m., just after I finished my muffin and settled down to write. After reading it, I had walked down Noyes Street toward the lake, past Bruce’s office on the second floor of McCormick Technological Institute. I saw that he’d turned on his office light, but rather than go up there and throw a fit, I continued down the alley and onto the running path that skirted the athletic fields, the duck pond, the student union, and the theater department, where we had season tickets. A sailing club overlooked the swimming beach where I liked to swim in summer and where Bruce, when we’d first moved to Evanston, often met me for a walk to dinner at the Fish Market or the opera café that had been our favorite, Verdi & Puccini.

I sat down at a picnic bench and, taking the email from my pocket, read it again. The writer, one of the few literary writers I’d been able to find, had moved to Tempe because of her husband’s fabulous job at Arizona State. The Valley of the Sun was so spread out, she had not met any other writers. Her husband worked all the time. Her daughter needed to finish high school. Trapped, she had fallen into a clinical depression.

If I could have felt one ounce of reassurance, of gladness, one single ray of hope that I could create a life for myself in Arizona, it would have eased my mind. Instead, I was unable to put on my good sport beanie. Ashamed of myself, bitterly angry that I could not find it in my heart to be the wife I wanted to be, I sat there, numb with misery, staring at the flat, calm lake. I had just turned sixty, and yet I felt as lonely and as lost as I had at sixteen, standing on the walkway of the Phoenix Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers, the sun beating down on my head. A part of me was still the high school student with her new learner’s permit and rag rug rolled beneath her arm, dreading experiences she could not yet imagine and did not want to have.

That was my Phoenix.

Bruce’s Phoenix was all promise and glory.

Jim handed the email to Bruce, and he read it. Then he handed it back to me.

This is only one person’s opinion, Bruce said.

One person’s experience, I said. An experience is different from an opinion. This is her reality. It’s what she’s living through, day by day.

But you always make friends.

I cannot and will not uproot myself again, I said. Especially not to Phoenix.

Call me a romantic, but I have always believed that love conquers all. Bruce just needed time to think through the implications. Then he would come around.

I reached for his hand. It felt warm and firm. If I said to you, ‘Choose between me and your career,’ what would you say?

His eyes darted about. He looked up, as if the keys of an invisible typewriter were striking his forehead. He pulled his hand free and cracked his knuckles.

Finally, he said, If you force me to give this up, I’m afraid I would hate you for the rest of my life.

I gasped. Wind whooshed through my ears. The pressure in the room shifted. The torrential rain of arguments gave way to a dead calm. An upright humidifier stood in the corner. Its whirr filled the silence. Then I heard a sniffing sound, air sucked through a nose. Then a snort, similar to a sneeze, followed by a deep, short grunt. The sound of a cat in heat or a baby in distress. Mortified that I could not hold back the tears, I rocked forward, my face hot, palms covered in snot. A loud Waa, waa welled up from my throat and went on and on. It wasn’t a cry of pain. Those were sudden and shrill. It wasn’t hunger. It wasn’t a whiny or fussy cry, either, but it would not stop. My face flashed hot and cold. I tried to rein myself in, and the crying grew in volume, until hiccups made me choke. Why couldn’t I bring myself under control? I wanted to be rocked, I wanted to be held, but when I peeked out from between my fingers, I saw the therapist sitting wide-eyed and my husband standing with the doorknob in his hand. The clock above the door told me I had cried for a full half hour.

Jim looked at Bruce. I think we’re at the end of the session.

Bruce pulled a check from his pocket. Here you go. And to me: Pull yourself together. I’ve got an important conference call, and I need to get back.

Chin trembling, eyes aching, I blew my nose. Numbness washed over me. It was as if I were standing in a cold shower, my face, my chin, my shoulders, my hands, all going dead.

This was why Bruce and I were a good match. I was emotional. He was nonreactive. And now I had another important piece of information about his priorities. My fear of displacement didn’t count; at least, it didn’t count more than his job. Goddamn talk therapy. It never helped. I was going to have to figure out how to cope on my own, and I didn’t have a clue.

CHAPTER 3

COLLAGE

Solving environmental problems was Bruce’s calling, not his job. The move wasn’t about status or salary, but about his trying to save the world. He and I had the same values. That’s what had attracted me to him in the first place. Plus, he did his own laundry, was intensely loyal, and paid the bills. If Bruce went out on the dating market, he’d be snapped up instantly. I was just being unreasonable and selfish. Army wives moved all the time. Why did I think I was so special? I wished I hadn’t thrown such a hissy fit.

I unbuckled my seat belt and waited in the alley for Bruce to park the car. His first academic job had been at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and that was where we’d raised the kids. Our two-bedroom apartment in the Rookwood Gardens—a 1927 castle with a crenelated parapet—was where we had downsized. The kids were off at college, and Northwestern had made him chair of environmental engineering.

Bruce closed the garage door and then reached out and drew me to him. I rested my cheek on his chest, feeling the metal snap on his jacket against my face.

I was thinking on the way home, he said, that we don’t have to sell the apartment.

Can we afford two homes? I asked, pushing back so that I could see if he was serious.

His eyes, looking down through his glasses, searched my face. With what they’re paying me? Yes, he said. That way, you could come back for your writing workshops. You can stay as long as you like, and if you don’t want to be in Tempe during the summer, you could come up here.

Thank you, I said, my throat still raw.

As I watched him head down the alley, his step springy, his navy jacket shimmering in the sun, I realized how many times in this marriage I’d underestimated him. Occasionally, not just with Bruce, but with my first husband, too, marriage felt like a jail cell, a place I had to spring myself from. I wished I were the kind of person—a normal, good wife kind of person—who could just go with the flow. Instead, I was like a shopper in a shoe store, wanting the salesperson to bring me box after box, until finally, tired of myself, I settled for a pair that was an almost good fit, simply because I had to have something to wear. In most ways, Bruce and I were a good fit. However, his passion for his career pinched my toes. Similarly, my flying back and forth would be an almost good fit. I didn’t relish the idea of living apart.

As I climbed the steel stairs to the second floor and turned the lock in the kitchen door, I heard the phone ring. Inside, I grabbed the receiver from the wall.

It’s Jim here, the voice said.

Jim the therapist, I said, or Jim from the condo board?

The therapist. I apologize for cutting off our session, he said. What was going on today?

I put my hand on my stomach. Like torn strips of paper, my abdominal muscles felt shredded. Oh, nothing, I said. I’m better now.

I doubt that.

Jim told me to take a deep breath. Reach down inside and see if I could find that voice inside that had cried so desperately and for so long.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I was probably the only person in the world who cared whether I was depressed or not. It was better to ignore my feelings, pretend they weren’t there. But all right. If he thought it would help.

Elbows on the cool granite counter, I pressed my fingers to my eyes. It was weird trying to talk to a therapist while standing in the kitchen with a Princess phone in hand. I told him that, like it or not, I was going to have to move. I wasn’t the first woman, or the only one, who was financially dependent on her husband, and I supposed that was part of the reason for the tears. It hurt my pride to acknowledge the truth: that in exchange for the freedom to write, I’d stopped paying my share of the bills.

I don’t think that’s what brought on the tears, Jim said.

Then what did? I said.

The tears sounded like those of a very angry baby, he said.

I should have stuffed a sock in its mouth, I said.

Don’t be embarrassed, he said.

It was like being possessed by a demon, I said. I just totally let it take me over.

You felt threatened.

Threatened? How?

Like a child torn from its mother’s arms.

I’m adopted, I said.

Yes, I know, he said. That’s what I’m talking about.

He suggested I find a small notebook, something I could carry in my purse. He wanted me to make a collage. Find images that represent other parts of you, parts you can draw on to protect that baby.

A collage. All right. I’d always been sort of artsy-fartsy. Maybe this would, in some weird way, soothe the crying baby.

After the call, I found a stack of National Geographic magazines and a Moleskine notebook. In it I pasted a picture of a feisty little girl riding her first bicycle; also, a mountain gorilla, a redwood grove, and fog rolling in over the Golden Gate Bridge. California was where I had grown up and where I felt most at home. If I’d had my druthers, I would have moved back years ago. As I dabbed Elmer’s glue on each image and smoothed it onto the page, I went from feeling desolate to feeling the knot in my stomach loosen. If I held tight to this notebook, I might be able to make this move with more good grace than I had imagined.

Some psychologists believe that babies who are not reunited with their birth mothers soon after delivery experience a form of infant PTSD.

The notebook was my talisman. It soon filled with names and phone numbers of moving companies, human resources managers, real estate agents and title companies, and doctors and dentists.

Even though I was going through the motions, doing the tasks expected of me and trying to do them with a spirit of generosity, the crying in Jim’s office still troubled me. Had I embarked on that crying jag because of my incipient feelings of displacement, or was the problem Phoenix itself, the place I had surrendered my son?

At the very bottom of the long-buried layers of emotion I was experiencing, akin to the geologic layers in the Grand Canyon, lay the rage that had spilled out in my therapist’s office and that author Nancy Newton Verrier, herself an adoptive mother, wrote about so eloquently in The Primal Wound, a book that examines the displacement felt by an infant transferred from its mother’s arms to the arms of its adoptive parents. ¹

The [adopted] child actually experiences being left alone by the biological mother and being handed over to strangers. That he may have been only a few days or a few minutes old makes no difference. He had a 40-week experience with a person with whom he probably bonded in utero, a person to whom he is biologically, genetically, historically, and perhaps even more importantly, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually connected. . . . It is a real experience about which [adoptees] have had and are having recurring and conflicting feelings, all of which are legitimate. These feelings are their response to the most devastating experience they are ever likely to have: the loss of their mother. The fact that the experience was preverbal does not diminish the impact. It only makes it more difficult to treat. It is almost impossible to talk about, and for some even difficult to think about.

Reading Verrier’s book and occasionally bringing up adoption as a potential issue with the various therapists I have seen over the years should have expunged adoption as a force that could still cause me to behave irrationally. After all, I was a smart person. I understood that this rage was a raw and primitive form of anger, a response to abandonment that is typical of many adoptees.

But I was wrong. The crying told me that my feelings, much as I might want to deny them, still blew at hurricane force.

Therapist Jack Hinman, who has worked with adopted teenage girls who are acting out, explains it this way: ²

An infant’s world changes radically when her biochemical connection to Mom is suddenly absent. The baby is programmed, at the neurological, biochemical, and limbic levels, to attach to its biological mother. Separation can constitute an actual trauma and drive significant developmental changes. Some experts are even entertaining a diagnostic label of developmental PTSD for infants or children who experience attachment issues as a result of separation from the birth family.

Despite the evidence that carrying around my little notebook with its collages—my security blanket—actually helped, some part of me did not want to believe that my own adoption trauma was a trauma at all, or that it continued to ripple through my life. I was a grandma many times over. I wished my whole adoption history would just go away. I didn’t want to feel it anymore (the emptiness and desolation) or have it jump out of nowhere and bite me in the ass.

In the book Birthbond, ³ the authors, Judith S. Gediman and Linda P. Brown, say that some adoptees can thrust their adoption into the background of their sense of self. For others, it is absolutely primary, an awareness that begins the moment they learn they are adopted and is never outgrown. The book quotes one adoptee, a woman in her forties:

Being aware that I was adopted was a cloak that I wore around me at all times. I was always aware of my adoption; it had become a part of me. Wherever I looked, whatever I did, I took the feeling of adoption with me.

Adoption creates a deep scratch on the LP of the soul. Every time the record revolves, the needle drops into that scratch. A normal person might be tempted to throw the record away. As hyperaware as many adoptees are about the various ways adoption has left us with scratches that cannot be repaired, we would also give anything for those feelings to be erased. If only the feelings would go away, we could feel normal. Thus, we try and try again to push this adoption angst into the background, to keep it below the level of consciousness.

Here’s a quote that sums up the fallacy of this thinking: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.