This month’s selection of the Barren B*tches Book Brigade is AM Home’s memoir, The Mistress’ Daughter. And it is a prime example of how the number of pages or words doesn’t necessarily correlate with the length of time a book can linger in one’s mind. I probably finished The Mistress’ Daughter the day after I borrowed it from the library; I have been thinking about it ever since.

The book focuses on the author’s feelings about being adopted, finding her birth mother, or rather, her birth mother finding her, and trying to find the similarities, if any, between “who I arrived as and who I’ve become.” As I read the first 36 pages, I kept waiting to find a passage that didn’t resonate, that didn’t feel like I could have written it. The story then twists and takes a path that neither Homes nor I had expected and reaffirmed for me that the person asking the questions is never really in control of the answers she might receive.

Before I share my answers with you, here’s Melissa from Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters to explain how this all works:

This book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Sound like fun? Go here for details on next month’s book. Want to read more? Check out these bloggers to see how they reacted to the book:

The Annex (Josh)
The Road Less Travelled (Loribeth)
Everyday Stranger (Helen)
Weebles Wobblog (Lori)
Candy’s Land (Candy)
Sell Crazy Someplace Else (Jendeis)

My reactions are below:

Notwithstanding what happens in the book, most adoptions from the 1950s’ and 60s’ are closed, with birth records sealed except upon a courts’ finding “good cause” to open them. In light of Homes’s experiences, does this seem to be the appropriate method for handling adoption records?

I was adopted in 1974 through Catholic Social Services and my records are closed. My birth certificate names my adopted parents, who have always been open about the fact that I was adopted, but like Homes’ parents, seem to have forgotten the details that feel so critical to me. What is left is a whitewashed story, so similar to the one Homes’ grew up with, which talks about anticipation and longing and ends with a brand new baby being hand delivered to the expectant family who has always known she would be theirs.

My knowledge of my origins comes from bits and pieces gathered from my adopted parents’ vague recollections and papers and scraps found stuffed in my baby book (I’m guessing salvaged from other places when my parents’ basement flooded and put there for safekeeping, not for finding). Some of the papers are legal, others handwritten, reading like a recipe on how to keep me happy and free from rashes (apparently I was allergic to several things). These scraps and receipts feel like they’ve fallen out of Pandora’s Box and into my lap and are staring up at me, waiting for my next move. We’ll discuss that in a later response.

Where I Came From has always felt like a bit of a mystery to me, a puzzle which I could either try to logically piece together, or better yet, use to create, like Homes, “the myth of my beginning.” Homes writes, “In my dreams my birth mother is a goddess,” and this mirrors my own created reality. I know my birth mother was very young (16), musically inclined, nearsighted, obviously Catholic. I was told my father was a little older (18), also musically inclined and of Polish descent. I was told that he wanted nothing to do with my birth mother once he found out she was pregnant, that he essentially abandoned us both, leaving her alone to figure out how best to proceed.

The story I heard was that she “loved me so much that she knew she could never give me everything that I deserved. She realized that to give me the life I should have that she would have to give me to someone else.” You know us Catholics love martyrs. Can you see how this woman quickly grew to princess status in my mind?

A closed adoption gave me the freedom to create a Perfect Mother in my head and hold it there. This image gave me peace and comfort, especially in those times where I felt disconnected and actually quite relieved that I was not my parents’ daughter. It didn’t matter where I was, because where I came from was someplace special, and where I would go, I knew, would make my birth mother proud.

It is hard for me to discuss open adoption, because I know so little about it. It is so far removed from my understanding of adoption, which is cloaked in secrecy and anonymity. My closest brush with it comes from high school, where another student was pregnant and quite open about the fact that she would be giving her child up for adoption. I remember her talking about selecting the parents (did my birth mother choose my parents?). I remember the student creating a scrapbook about herself for the new parents to share with her child. This absolutely blew me away. Did such a document exist for me???? I remember being incredibly envious of this not-yet-adopted, hell not-yet-born little baby.

But then I stop and think about it from a wanna-be mom point of view. I know that my adopted mom always considered me her daughter and she my mother and was incredibly defensive of any other interpretation. “Do I feed you? Do I take care of you? Do I put up with your sh*t? Well, I guess I’m your mother aren’t I?” I cannot imagine her mental well-being holding up very well with a birth mother stopping by to say hi every few months. I think she would have been seen as an interloper, worse, an intruder, into this version of a family that had been created. And how would I have held up?

And what about now? If we were to consider adoption, what kind of relationship would we want with a birth mother? Amicable? Anonymous? What would be best for the children? For the family?

I honestly don’t know, but I am eager to hear how others answer this question.

In the book, A.M. Homes writes about being adopted into a family that had recently lost a nine year old son. She says “I always felt that my role in the family was to heal things, to make everything all right - to replace a dead boy.” Grieving mothers of this generation and others, were often told to “forget about their lost child, have another one right away, move on” What, if any, of this is helpful advice and why/why not? Is this attitude something that might give a subsequent child the burden of feeling that they would not have been wanted had their sibling lived - particularly in the case of adoption, where the child was specifically chosen and might not have been otherwise?

I never felt like I was replacing anyone in particular, but I did feel the burden of being something/someone that was the result of years and years of anticipation. While my parents never discussed their previous attempts at having children, they made it very clear that they waited and waited and waited for the “perfect little girl” to arrive. No pressure, right?

I am not sure though that this pressure is specific to adoptees (although, had you asked me years ago, I would have told you it was). I keep reading now that those of us using assisted reproductive techniques (ART) will be guilty of placing unreasonable expectations on our children conceived through these methods because they will embody the hopes and dreams of all previous attempts. I’m not sure I agree with that either. What child doesn’t embody hopes and dreams of their parents? Actual, adopted, assisted? Does it matter?

In The Mistress’ Daughter, AM Homes points to several facts that undermine her parents’ assertion that they had always wanted three children. She doubts whether or not she would have come into the picture had her older brother survived. But I don’t find these “what if” scenarios very useful, simply because they can spin off into so many different paths and directions, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. What if my birth mother hadn’t given me away? What if a different set of parents would have chosen me? What if my parents chose me but chose a different little brother for me? What if my parents would have been successful at conceiving while waiting for me? What if….

One doesn’t “forget” about a lost child. One doesn’t “move on.” But this advice feels so familiar and so oft-stated, even now. But do we use these words with people who have just lost an aging parent? A spouse? When someone you have shared part of your life with, even for a brief moment, is no longer there, the pain can feel unbearable. I am not one who ever looks for advice, but I do look for ways to cope and continue with life. I don’t think “forgetting” is ever a useful piece of advice.

The story about Ellen’s boxes and the fact that the author was unable to go through them for several years struck a cord with me as I have my own boxes that are hiding in the house waiting for unpacking. Have you experienced something similar with a project, book, or other item that plagued you with emotions that prevented you from tackling it? What was the situation? How did it resolve– did you become zealous about something you discovered during the resolution (like the author’s quest for her genealogy) or did it just all fade away?

While I don’t hold the bounty of Ellen’s boxes, I do hold in my possession a handful of recently discovered facts and potential leads to my birth parents. While my adoption was closed, I am fairly certain there is enough here to lead me somewhat closer to the truth of my origins. There are court documents, lawyer’s stationary, no names (except for the one I was called in the orphanage), but I think there is enough.

When I first stumbled across these things, it felt like my fingers were on fire. I was ready to start making phone calls, send Michael off to courthouses to dig through public records, take excursions to the part of the state where I believe I was from, stake out Catholic churches and wait by the exits to see someone who looked like me. I met with my adopted brother to share what I had learned about him and to ask him what he would do with the information.

Nothing. He said. Absolutely nothing.

He had no desire to dig deeper. Find more. His rationale – what if he didn’t like what he found?

Like Pandora’s Box, like AM’s initial meetings with Ellen, you can never put the lid back on. You can never unlearn the new knowledge. And unlike your imagination, there are now other people and other lives involved. It’s no longer just about you.

So that conversation, this book and other recent events in my life have set the papers back on a shelf. I can’t decide where I will go from here. If anywhere.

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