Lioness' blog

Staring into the unfathomable abyss that is the Grand Canyon, my first coherent thought was a renewed appreciation of domesticity, i.e. everything the Grand Canyon is not.  There is nothing soft, easy, or uncomplicated about it.  The very name "Grand Canyon" is a misnomer.  Not the "grand" part, it's certainly that; but this is no more a "canyon" than New York City is a hamlet.  What started out ages ago as a simple riverbed has grown over time into hundreds of fissures at different depths veering off and doubling back in every direction.  "Canyon" implies a slit in the Earth's skin, this is more like the shrapnel damage from a grenade. We were told the gap was unfulfillable, the width was unbridgeable, the river at the bottom was all but unnavigable, the traverse was perilous, the environment at the bottom was wildly different from the environment at the top, and the trip back up was four times harder than the trip down.  I challenged none of these assertions; I was saving my strength.  After this stop I was going to meet my mother for the first time.

My second thought was about how hard the land had fought the water.  The earth had not simply lain there and been washed away.  It had resisted time's efforts at every turn, and thanks to its resistance it was still standing -- as a monumental, awe-inspiring wreck.  Were it not for the human tendency to turn anything unusual into beautiful, inspirational metaphors we would be overwhelmed by the destruction endured by the earth in that savage, millenia-old elemental combat.  I know something about that kind of resistance; growing up it was my specialty.  Not the sort of active rebellion that brought retaliation; I got hit often enough already, thank you very much.  But passive resistance, enduring the unendurable because there was no choice, that I know to my core.  I have come so far, endured so much, my soul has been etched and corroded with so much pain, how could anyone else possibly understand me?  I 'm not the unblemished babe she left behind.  I wish I was.  I  have this primal, instinctive ugre to fall sobbing in her arms and have her kiss away my tears while I tell her, "You know how they told you how they were going to give me to good people who would take good care of me?  They lied."  I have dreamed of that moment for so, so many years.  But now that it is upon me I don't know how I could do that to someone, anyone.  There's too much to tell, so much more than a body should bear.  Time and again even a tiny fraction of it has proven too much for other people and I watch myself transform in their eyes to something resembling the Great Stone Face of New Hampshire, something that time and erosion have etched into a thing remotely resembling a human being but not really human.  I am so very tired of not being human.  I have no idea how to be human.

The land had endured by being patient.  I must be patient.  I had to keep it together no matter what.

And -- I did.  I kept it together all through our first meeting, because that was what she obviously wanted.  And at the end she shook my hand and said it was nice to meet you and seemed flummoxed when I said we were going to be in town for a few days.  And we kept it together through two more days of talking only to break down crying on the phone while we were pulling out of town.  And then we drove back to Mississippi and I spent the next six weeks in bed from exhaustion.

Now -- I have no idea where we are now.  I don't know how to navigate this unfamiliar terrain.  I talk about awful things that happened to my friends and its brushed aside.  I mention something mildly unpleasant that  happened to me and it's "OMG That's The Worst Thing Ever!" and everyone starts talking past me instead of to me and I'm going, "For real?  How y'all gonna handle the bad shit?"  I'm lost in the back country and I have no idea how to find my way.

So, six  months later, how's the whole "aftermath" thing coming?  Well there's me, and there's me-and-them.  Let's talk about me first.

I got pretty stressed out around the end of the year.   Come January, I wasn't stressed at all. I felt drained, a little fragile, very mellow, and extremely lethargic. I had started reading Dr. Seligman's book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being; at one point he talks about helping clients work through their depression. "I wanted to make them happier, but all I did was make them emptier." That fit me like a glove.  But when you've spent a lifetime full of pain, sorrow, and anger, empty is a big improvement, and a necessary first step to anything better.

There's all these little fractures in my psyche that used to be full of poison. Now it's gone, and I can feel all the little abrasions the acid of pain wore into my psyche. They need time to heal, and I don't need to let more poison settle in.

I'm working on the exercises in Flourish. I've started a blessings journal, and I've found someone to send a gratitude letter to. I also bought a pretty journal at B&N & turned it into a phone log, with everyone's # on the first page and a log of who I talked to when and for how long in the rest. I need to add birthdays on the other side of the first page as well....

Keeping up with all these extra people is a bit of a nuisance, but better than the alternative.

I stared angrily at the scale.  Where had all my hard work gone?

"Have you ever heard of people saying, “this feels like it’s happening to someone else” or something to that effect? Now I can completely relate to that. I kind of feel like. Well, I don’t know exactly how to quantify it. It’s a new sensation.  Extremely weird, but not entirely unpleasant." - my newly-discovered maternal half-sister

"I have to admit, this is incredibly awkward, but I am happy to get to know you." - my newly-discovered paternal half-sister

"That is a picture of your grandmother.  If you want to know what she looked like when she was younger, look in the mirror.  You look just like her." - a great-uncle

"Who the Hell are you, where did  you come from, and what's this nonsense about a Promised Land?" - the Canaanites

I waited a week for my biological mother to call my biological father, then picked up the phone and called him myself. Guess what?  She hadn't called yet.  I told him she had given me his name, and that I was their daughter.  He was upset for a long time.  Not angry or anything, just reliving old traumas.  He has two younger children with his wife, so I now have gone from one sibling to five.  Our relationship is -- awkward.  He feels guilty but won't say it.  I could give  him every reason to feel guilty, but I don't want to drive him away so I won't say it either.  Upshot:  there's a lot of things unsaid.

After a couple weeks of "phone tag" I got up with my mother.  She talked a bit about being at the maternity home with me, even though she couldn't remember the name.  Apparently her mother wrote either Ann Landers or Dear Abby for a recommendation as to where to send her.  I may have made the paper before I was even born.  Thanks Ann -- not!

So after she got pregnant she and my father talked about getting married.  She's Protestant and he's Catholic.  They went to see the priest, who would only marry them if I was reared Catholic.  My mother balked at that, and the wedding was off.  Thanks Roman Catholic Church -- not!

But she says my father knows about me and is a real nice guy, and offered to call him for me if I gave her his number, which I did.  That's a relief off me.  It felt good, until everything slotted into place.

Because if everybody and his buddy knew about me, and everybody and his buddy were all real nice people, then the problem comes down to this:  none of those real nice people was willing to fight for me.  Not one.  And that fact is an absolutely devastating thing to have to face.  I haven't stopped crying, and I don't think I will for a while.

AKA "Shit gets real."

"Fracture reduction" is the fancy term for resetting a broken bone that's healed the wrong way.  Somebody breaks a bone.  They should lie up and have someone else take them immediately to the doctor, but that doesn't always happen.  Maybe they can't get to the doctor, maybe there's no doctor around, maybe they have to use that broken bone anyway just to get by until they can find a doctor.  Whatever.

So when they finally get to the doctor's office, what happens?  The doctors get out the bone saw and the knives and takes the broken bone back apart.  They "break" it again into at least as many parts as the first time, if not more.  They have to do this in order to set it properly.  It's the only way they can ever hope to restore the limb to full functioning.

But the pain is out of this world.  The patient screams and struggles, fighting to escape from the excruciating suffering.  Knowing it's the only way to regain the full use of their body does nothing to spare them from the agony they are going through.

That's sort of what's been going on inside my head the last two months.

Usually things get easier to write about over time.  Not this time.  It's getting harder.

My First Cousin (technically he's not, but he'll always be my Very First Cousin) was eager to help me.  He's an elderly man in poor health, who needed the mental stimulation such a puzzle provided.  He's been very encouraging, even as my moods have swung like a weather-vane in storm.

I'm one of the least emotional people you'll ever meet, although I'm self-aware enough to realize that for me this symptom is a sign of an underlying problem.  But here I was obsessively combing through genealogies and bursting into tears at every photograph.  I desperately wanted to know who these people were, what their stories told about them, and how their stories related to my stories.   I craved the stories grownups swapped while visiting and told to the kids on the porch during long afternoons.

I cried the first time I spoke to First Cousin on the phone.  It was the first time I'd heard the voice of a blood relation I hadn't given birth to.

But I'm still me, capable of burying myself in data to the exclusion of the outside world.  So I was hard at work in trying to figure out my father's genealogy when my First Cousin emailed me that he had a possible lead on my mother, a young woman the right age at the right place in the right time and a promising genealogical match.  I wrote back, "Great!  I'm tracking down leads on the other end!" and went back to work.

Part 1

PTSD blankets my emotions with numbness.  It's hard to feel any emotion, I think them more than I sense them. Unexpected strong emotions tend to cause an automatic whole-body shutdown response.  But this was so unexpected it blew through my automatic defenses like they weren't even there.

It had been a few weeks since I was told that my results would be ready in a month and a half.  I checked the site everyday, but the expectation of seeing anything had long since slumbered.  I almost forgot to check that Saturday when I remembered it before running off to do some outdoor work.

I logged on to Ancestry.com, expecting to see the now-familiar white page with a tiny "come back later" notice.  Instead I saw colors.  There were greens, beige, browns, oranges, blues, pinks, blacks, and even a few tiny full color photographs.  Some of the colors formed words, but I couldn't read them, too shocked to see that there was something -- quite a lot of something -- there at all.

The page was full.  How could the page be full?  My origin had always been a blank page, how could it be full?

Searching for my biological family is extremely stressful.  Fortunately this time of  year my garden can absorb all the nervous energy I can throw at it.  But it demands more attention than I gave it recently when distracted by my personal distress I blundered into poison oak and ended up covered in a rash.  The medicine they put me on leaves my too drowsy to write my next post.  Sorry for the delay, will get back to it in a few days.

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Reposted from here.

I took a DNA test to learn about my biological relatives and found out some things.

Let's start with the basics, shall we?  I found out I was a human being, homo sapiens sapiens (at least mostly, I haven't compared it with the non-human samples yet.)  This actually was a concern for my younger self.  There were no people around who looked or acted like me in my adopted family or in the society around us, and everyone was quick to point out how weird and alien I was.  So what's a kid supposed to think?  Where was the evidence I hadn't fallen off a UFO?  I became sensitive to attempts to "other" me or anyone else.

My questionable humanity became a sore spot in adolescence.  I played D&D in my teens and I noticed this huge disconnection between myself and some of the other players.  A lot of players never, ever wanted to play a human character.  They despised humanity.  It disgusted them.  For them, the whole point of playing D&D was to explore the possibility that they were not human.  At least not wholly human, safe within the confines of a RPG game.

I stubbornly insisted on only playing characters who were 100% human, which caused a certain amount of consternation among the anti-human crew.  Everyone else thought I was weird for playing D&D in the first place, and they thought I was weird for how I played D&D.  There was nowhere I felt at home, nowhere I felt safe.