Note from Elaine: November will soon be gone. “Busy” doesn’t begin to describe life. I am leaving my home of …Continue reading ?
Note from Elaine: November will soon be gone. “Busy” doesn’t begin to describe life. I am leaving my home of 50 years, moving to a Santa Fe senior living community. De-acquisitioning 80 years’ worth of accumulation, starting with books. Holding garage sales, I’m whittling down a 1,000-book collection – finding good homes for cherished volumes. It fills me with joy to see my books go out in the arms of fellow bibliophiles. I’ll keep my top hundred books for the future, smaller new digs. In the meantime, I am re-running a post from the past. Clara Jordan, the protagonist of All the Wrong Places, is ME. She’s gone to India in The Hand of Ganesh, and she and her soul sister Arundati, will reappear in the newest novel, about which you’ll be reading more. Stay tuned!
It’s been said that trauma is not a mystery, that it attaches itself to you in a way that’s hard to undo. My story, as related in The Goodbye Baby, offers living proof. Being an adoptee has added melodrama to my life, created a passion for writing, and ultimately inspired me to take off the masks and to discover who I really am.
Though I was fortunate enough to land in an adoptive family who loved and cherished me, it could not make up for losing that first “mother connection.” My birth mother and I said goodbye before I started first grade, and I waited 38 years for her to come back into my life. I was deeply wounded by the separation.
My struggles have been with feeling abandoned, isolated, and rejected. I’ve worried for years that I will be misunderstood and that I’m simply not good enough- as a daughter, a friend, a partner, a mother, or even as a human being.
With my infant son in GreeceBecause of being adopted, I felt small and insignificant. Probably because adoption wasn’t something my family discussed, my negative assumptions became deeply embedded. Throughout my adult years, I accomplished a great deal, but in my mind, I was never admirable. Harmful pangs of inadequacy took root and shaped my outlook, my decisions, my disastrous romantic choices. Until I re-read my diaries, I never realized that I myself had invented the self-damaging myth.
How did I deal with my adoption-induced complexes? My adoptive parents had to raise a delinquent teenager who drank excessively, stayed out too late and attracted bad boyfriends. As I grew older, I tended to be an over-achiever: running nine marathons to lower my finishing time, yet always “keeping score” and endlessly coming up short.
Thirty years ago, when I first started to write about my adoption, the title of my book was Reunions. My plan was to meet both my biological parents and write about finding the missing puzzle pieces. I met my original parents, but the reunions were not what I hoped for. The pieces were in place but the puzzle remained. Only writing The Goodbye Baby completed the picture.
After both sets of parents died, I found that looking into the past gave me the wisdom to see where I’d been and how to go forward.What my adoption has taught me is that the world reflects my inner reality, that my happiness or unhappiness depend on my actions and not on outside forces. I’ve learned that it is never too late to make a fresh start.
I have always known I would be a writer. In the summer of 1962, I wrote in my diary,
“Some of this frantic recording is wasted energy. How can I have a future as a writer?…I need to find something to say.”
The theme of adoption is that “something.”
Join Elaine on monthly Mondays for reflections on adoption and sneak previews of her newest novel, The Ganesh Girls find Happiness.
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