Into The Blank

It’s been 9 years since I first made contact with my birth father. I wasn’t intending to do it on anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it just impulsively worked out that way. I remember standing in my kitchen and just thinking “I’m gonna call him.” About 9 months earlier, my birth mother had given me his name and some details that she remembered about him. He was a musician. “He looks like you, only a guy.” When I initially found someone with his name on social media, she steered me back on track with the reminder than he looks just like me. “Jenna, think you, but a guy.” The search was relatively quick, compared to some in my community that spend years searching. My adoptive cousin, Emma, was along for the ride, states away but helping me nonetheless with my quest to find my parental roots. She was a sounding board, excited for me, excited for this journey, and it was a grounding excitement. To see someone from my adoptive family feel excited and unthreatened by the search was refreshing. Looking back, was also necessary. Without her encouragement and lack of estrangement in the process, I might have felt too pulled between worlds to even engage this part of my search. Within a month, I had followed the footsteps of my birth dad’s music career from Massachusetts to California, and found his now established sole proprietor booking agency out of Houston, Texas. I stopped there. I had the information, and I had never spent much time in my life thinking about reunion with my birth father. Birth mother was the main character. He didn’t even cross my mind for most of my childhood. With birth mom so elusive and taboo to even speak of, the ghost kingdom very much alive deep within my mind, I didn’t have time for a whole cast of characters. There was her, and there was me. Or who I thought I was to her, or to myself, what mirror I cast into who she was and who I was. Spells of the mind. Promises in my heart. “Someday.” On my 7th birthday, I remember feeling “old.” Old enough to no longer pretend I was happy. Each year I did the math as if instead of my age being the new number I embodied, it was the countdown of years until I was 21. Twenty one dangled in front of me, the promise of wholeness, of when records would be open, of when Catholic Charities would allow me to know my truth. They don’t offer any identifying information much less contact information to people before then. Perhaps they do, perhaps if your adoptive parents see the benefit of openness, of identity, of knowing. Perhaps if my parents had pushed. Perhaps if it didn’t feel so threatening to them. The barrier of infertility grief that so many infertile adoptive parents do not fully engage and process before adopting is a type of generational trauma. It prevents openness at every level. My parents would tense up at any mention of adoption. My mother looked sickly and exhausted at the mention. Defensive and angry, she would question my motives behind any inquiry. My father would scrunch his face and contort his body, so visibly uncomfortable. He was slightly more open, only in that he didn’t begin centering himself in the entire conversation. Though the awkwardness was too uncomfortable to endure. September 11, 2015. The 14 year anniversary of 9/11, and my initial phone call to Erik. He didn’t even know I existed. He was elated. He said within one phone call he was upgraded from Uncle, to Father, to Grandfather. While it’s been an ever evolving relationship and reunion, I will say that I feel very grateful that things have gone, overall, as smoothly as they have. The level of genetic mirroring that my paternal side offers has been profound. My only wish is that the openness could have happened much sooner. My grandmother died in 2006, and my grandfather in 1999. Those are two people who I would have loved to meet. When my birth dad and my two aunts speak of them, I know I would have found so much identity and spiritual connection within those relationships. My only consolation is that it wasn’t my own delayed search that prohibited our meeting; I was still under 21 when both of them passed away. I think this helps me not feel a sense of regret for my own actions. Truthfully, I don’t think I was really ready to meet my birth mother when I did. I know that if I had been a more healthy, healed, whole individual, I probably would have approached her in a different way. It was a strange reunion, one where I was the last to even know that the search for her was happening. My brother, biological half-brother, who I was raised with in the same adoptive family, had decided to begin his active search for our mother, and my parents were not only supportive of him emotionally, they had also started to investigate avenues of information on his behalf. I felt so betrayed; I initially engaged in the search in a sense of competition or reactivity. That wasn’t healthy at all. I had just given birth to my second child, and had a toddler in tow as well. I was not in the mental headspace to take on that kind of journey, however I’m not quite sure how much of my healing now could have happened while still in ambiguous identity, without being in reunion with my biological families. Perhaps that sense of “I wish I could have been different for her” would never have been possible, because in order to grow, we needed that tricky time of uncertainty, guarded bonding, questioning each other’s intentions. There are so many ways that I would have said things differently, evaluated conversations more deeply, responded more wholly. The reflection on that experience with the first part of reunion, the maternal reunion, perhaps is why the paternal reunion was able to go much smoother. There’s also the complete lack of trauma from relinquishing a baby that my birth dad was salvaged from—that definitely played a part in our ability to be more authentic, less threatened and threatening to each other. Hindsight is 20 20. And the 9 years since that impulsive day has certainly offered much hindsight. I had planned to wait until today to write this reflection. I started off the morning at the gym, a healthy routine and a blessing in my current much more emotionally stable life compared to where I was 9 years ago, and certainly a stark comparison to the constant crises of my teens and early 20s. While at the gym, my little child from 2015 texted me, “Mom. I got my period.” A milestone. A celebration! So significant, this passage of time. This date has another whole new meaning. Can I close the chapter on “early reunion?” It that was Spirit is signifying with this synchronicity? I can tell you one thing for sure—I will always remember this anniversary for one reason or another.