Family Ties

Tomorrow I head out to California again to catch another visit with my aunt, the last member of my immediate family who has known me from childhood. I've written briefly about this here, but I guess I really need to look at this future loss. Scratch that, I want to look at it.

Actually, my MO is to cruise along in life, oblivious/asleep or totally unaware of what's happening around me, until the shit hits the fan and chaos abounds. Luckily, since I've matured a bit, that doesn't happen very often.

But I digress. My Aunt, my favorite aunt, my only aunt and she's not even my blood (I'm adopted), but she's all I've got who can pass on history about my parents, the people who raised me, her older brother John, and his wife Leah (the name passed from eight previous generations to me and then I passed it to my daughter).

But even my aunt's not great at helping me connect to my childhood, because she wasn't there much. We were in Michigan and she was in California pursuing a career as a psychology professor, and only came to visit for Christmas. So as I listen to her, I get only snippets of fact, interwoven with family gossip or lore, but it's better than nothing. And I do so love to hear her tell tales about my father who in my mind was very upright, but to her he was a brilliant and mischievous brother.

It's probably hard for you all to understand this hollow yearning I feel unless you are an only child whose parents (who were only children) are dead, as are any caregivers or neighbors who interacted with the family in even a remote way.

Unsetteling isn't it, to think about your history so attached to others? And you thought yourself so autonomous. My husband gets upset when I occasionally point out how very much a particular behavior he is doing at the time, is like his fathers. I think he prefers to think he was hatched and grew up like Mowgli of Kipling's Jungle Book, rather than to have been influenced by his parents. But there is no denying his heritage, just a look at a family picture gives it all away.

My youngest daughter looks very much like me, but she has ears and feet that don't belong to her father's family or to me. My children can look to their father's family and see aunts, uncles and cousins with familial characteristics, but where do I look to find my heritage?

I used to daydream about my birth mother. A favorite was: I imagined she worked at Kresge's (a dime store for those of you too young to know) behind the lunch counter, and I would saunter up to the counter place my cute little butt on the swivel stool and say, "I'll take a coke, mom." Oh, I worked that one for years. Can you imagine! But I loved to create little scenarios like that - particularly when I was angry with mom or dad. And no, the agency won't release the records, and yes I've tried to search, even hired a search company, and they had no luck.

In order to sign up for search it took me many years to let go of the fear I had surrounding my birth mother and to be able to deal with the possible reality of who she might be. What if she was homeless, or ill, or insane, or hated me, or famous? Anything she was, would effect me and (knowing myself) I would feel a need to somehow act on that information. This would set in motion a chain of events I would have no control over, that's what took me so long to give up - the feeling I could completely control my life.

It was good that I went through all that and I'm now reconciled to not ever meeting or even seeing her, or my birth father, but I do wish I knew what they looked like and if I had any half siblings or cousins.

It's not as if I think like this all the time mind you, it's just now I'm a bit sensitive and vulnerable to the lack of kin. I have my children, and still my aunt, as well as a husband and numerous friends, so I consider myself very blessed, very blessed indeed.