PART 1 Investigation and Memoir
A world of wanted children would make a world of difference
(bumpersticker in Boston, 2006)
I’m an adoptee for life. There’s no escape. I didn’t invent any of this … some thing or some one was missing from my life.
Because of synchronicity, or timing, my intention was to truly understand what my adoption did to me. I’ve been a journalist since the 1990s, so this helped me in the writing and research. I knew what needed be done to tell the story.
As new knowledge emerged for me since the 1990s, I was confronted with one reality after another, then it’s like I woke up. Whoa, I didn’t like this; I didn’t like what I was feeling. Bumping into brick walls - secrecy or lies - is not easy.
For a time, actually years, I wasn’t emotionally able to deal with it, talk about it, or even analyze it to any degree as a writer/journalist, as a Native person, or the unwilling participant. I was too busy living it. Yet I couldn’t understand exactly how “adoption” changed me.
For years I tried very hard to explain how “it” felt, but I could hardly believe it myself. For me to admit my infant orphan heart broke, or that I felt half-dead, half-empty inside, or that I didn’t fit in or belong, or that I wasn’t open or honest about it, or that I hated what was happening to me, “it” was too much to handle.
“It,” the mystery, was like reopening a wound and letting it bleed.
Yet “it” was real.
Over and over I asked myself, why? Why did she do it? Where is my mother?
If you’re lucky, you don’t think about it every second.
The most important days in my entire life were when I went to the judge to open my adoption and when I phoned and met my father in 1995.
In mere minutes, discovery was as much terror as salvation. What I found out really surprised me.
I had made a vow to cure my broken self. That is what it felt like… As a child, I knew that my heart - frozen, even empty - would heal and feel love, eventually.
Just this summer, in 2006, I finally met Bob, my birth-uncle and his daughter Mary, my first cousin. Bob asked me why I’m doing this search so I told him. It’s something I’d been hoping for and waiting for my entire life; to know something about my mother and her family; to know their history. I never expected what I learned that day. I’ve never met my mother, Bob’s sister.
I realize how fortunate I am to have met my biological father Earl and to know my real name and what tribe’s blood and history runs through my veins.
Two sisters and one brother, all biologically related to me, are a part of me now, a part of my world. My entire life, all 50 years, has been about my search for them. They never even knew I existed.
This book is not about my recovery from depression or self-mutilation or suicide attempts, not at all, though adoptees do suffer from these, apparently more than the rest of humanity. This book is about discovering how I lived a mystery and solved it, and that I survived it spiritually intact and remarkably well, even healed. Other adoptees need to know how this is possible.
For as long as I could remember, there was a hole in my heart, as mammoth as the Grand Canyon; at least that’s what it felt like. I was a total conundrum: confused, angry, hurt, terrified and devastated, yet I was a spiritual person, creative, enthusiastic, optimistic and driven. A Split Feather: two names, two identities.
This was not some cosmic joke. No, this heart sickness of mine went deep. It kept me hungry and uncomfortable. Nothing could fill that emptiness as an orphan; only the answers I didn’t have. It was very hard to pretend.
Everything was not all right. I felt I wasn’t in the right place, or in the right world. Little felt right.
Even an apology would have lessened my pain and worry: “We’re sorry for what we’ve done, taken you from your family, your life, your people.” That apology never came. I’m still waiting. I don’t ever expect to hear it.
My adoptive parents didn’t have papers to give me when I became an adult. It seems funny to say papers, like a pedigree puppy has papers. My parents didn’t know why I was abandoned. They didn’t understand that information was something I needed. They didn’t comprehend its importance to me. My adoption file was cold, sealed, locked up in a dusty file drawer somewhere.
Despite obvious fear and doubt, I planned to open my adoption anyway, even if it got me banished from my adoptive family or possibly arrested – for trespassing or spying…
I wasn’t sure how but something was driving me and would not let me quit.
I’d never give up until I had what I needed – to know who I am, my name, and have proof of my Native American ancestry. I had to know what I was feeling, and what I knew as a child, was real.
Yes, it was that important, even as a child. It was more than a hunch, or a face staring back in a mirror. I knew I was different, not better or more special, just different.
Actually, I didn’t know much about America’s Indigenous people, commonly referred to as Indians, other than the ones I knew and loved growing up in northern Wisconsin.
Solving this mystery meant more to me than grades, jobs or a career. I needed answers. I had no grand ideas about life on a reservation or being with my people. I had no illusions about someone looking for me. I didn’t think I was some rich person’s missing child or Marilyn Monroe’s love child with JFK. I just needed to know the truth. I wanted to know where I came from. I had to know why I felt so sick. I didn’t expect a reunion but of course I hoped for one, eventually.
I waited until I was 22, an adult, to open my adoption. It wasn’t easy but I will tell you how I did it and why it is so important that others succeed.
