The intention of this blog is to talk about genealogical inheritance and disruption. The temporal reality and implementation of that intention is that I have begun my research and writing during a time when I happen to be engaged, with no preparation, in reunion with my genetic family. The first few posts and those to come are going to be naturally over focused on the role of adoption in genealogical disruption. As everything, every waking moment, is consumed with this disruption-reunion.
Disruptive Reunion.
The tearing apart of a life and a person - through reunion. I am not reunited. The very person I was has been murdered.
Through Reunion.
I was not prepared. I had not been able to imagine that the DNA test my son asked me to take to determine our ethnicities would lead to connections to genetic family. I also could not have imagined that those genetic family members would simultaneously be over joyed and racked with guilt. I didn't expect to meet people for the first time that looked like me. I wasn't ready to have grown folk cry over my dislocation and adoption. I didn't know that there would ever be people related to me that would want to find me... find out who I am and actually search for the answers of how and where I *fit* in their genealogical family tree. I couldn't have hoped to hear "I love you" so many times. I also had no way of predicting that I would turn one day and, simply, disappear.
Baby Girl has Disappeared.
Through my emerging reunion experience, I find there is also very clear evidence for my pre-existing suppositions about how genealogical inheritance might work. I have met cousins that look, sound, share interests and careers with me. My interests and talents are now directly connected to my genetic others. I have never liked or subscribed to conversations about nature versus nurture. Those questions have always been nonsensical to me. I cannot deny, however, that I have found my people. There is no denying that the best parts of me are predicated on genealogical characteristics evident in my cousins. They live in my blood. I know them. I have been found. And, at the same time, I am grieving being lost.
This blog is part of my theoretical pedagogy - my writing process. That was my intention from the beginning... to start writing here toward a book project. I am interested in putting memoir, narrative articulation and self-location/articulation in conversation with ideas of genealogical inheritance and disruption. As it would turn out, the framing of this work is more than critical response and thinking... this is soul level lived reality. Even though there are chronologically trackable "events" that function as the starts and ends of different contributions to my lived experience, this work is coming from my sub-conscious as well. As I think more about the impact of genealogical and intimate realities on my and other peoples socio-psychic development, I am also living in those realities. That might make this work more vulnerable to intellectual critique, but what it contributes to a communal investigation of things like adoption far outweighs those risks.
At the risk of being a poor researcher, the auto-ethnographic relation of this moment in my life is inevitable. I might as well share it. I am committed to fleshing out this theoretical possibility around genealogical inheritances and disruptions, but today, I am an adoptee in reunion. I am an adoptee in disassociation. I am an adoptee in divestment. I am an adoptee in community. I am an adoptee in isolation. There is nothing else the disruption of this moment, of this life, will allow me to be. So, that is pretty much what you are going to get from me for a while. I think my co-contributors (if you are interested in being one, let me know) are willing to sit back and let me work this out in front of you for a few posts. I hope you will come on this journey with me as well. And, if you are also an adoptee in reunion... welcome.
Since January 6, 2019, I have connected with genetic relatives from first through third cousins. I have met a sister (all assumed at this point ... we are doing DNA tests to confirm), and met cousins in person. I still am not certain who everyone is because we need to confirm these relationships through additional DNA testing and because my brain is too overwhelmed to understand the genealogical locations of every person. I do not understand a 2nd cousin from a 1st cousin twice removed. Many of my cousins feel like parents and siblings in their energy, emotion and psychic connection with me. Several of my first cousins have connected (social media, through their children, etc.) but kept their distance and not attempted direct contact with me nor I with them. This is painful and is magnifying the impacts of disruption and dislocation in my life. I feel found and perpetually lost all at the same time. I feel found and abandoned all over again.
The disruption has found its way into my relationship with my adoptive family with damaging speed. I have closed the door on my engagement with them as my adoptive mother's racism and abuse reach an all time high. Everything is swirling around me and all I can do to not lose the very last morsels of who I was before reunion is to keep impossibly still. I hear people talking about me lately as kind, quiet, grounded, patient, healing and safe. The disalignment between how people are experiencing my current trauma - adoption reunion trauma - as positive energy and some weird service to them, and what I am actually experiencing as death - a dying - adds to my sadness. Why can't anyone SEE me? The person I was before my adoption reunion - a person I was so very fond of - is slipping away. I am losing something so very dear to me. The child that survived interracial adoption, domestic violence and familial isolation to go on to be a successful higher education professional and a PhD has wilted and is in deep decay. I am the only person who is mourning. I am the only person who can see - me - fading away.
I think it is both good and bad that I had no expectations about what adoption reunion would be like. I am participating daily in my adoption-twitter community. My experience is not dissimilar to those of other adoptees who have entered, and some who have violently exited, adoption reunion. I cry every single day. I feel loss every single day. I feel the weight of having to be "a good person" and not upset my genetic family. It is crushing me. I have replaced pleasing and protecting my adoptive family to attending to my genetic family with loving patience and kindness. Sometimes I just want to tell them how selfish it is to ask me to wait until others are ready. Haven't I, at 48.75 years old and counting, waited long enough.
Not only do I float in the cacophony of loss - the loss of identity, the loss of orientation, the loss of direction, the loss of intimate others, the loss of realities, the loss of self-agency, the loss of grounding narrative - i live in fear of future loss. What if my genetic family re-disappears? That is the most horrific and crippling question. My genetic family forgets that I don't know them. They remember and perform self-protection around the ways in which THEY don't know ME. I am so terribly alone in this. There is no going backwards. There is no replacing the lid. And, I am not even certain I want that - going backwards. But this is not a straight line. This is not a linear experience. This is a distopian liminality - a literal circle of life. There is nothing but suffering here.
I was socialized as a transracial adoptee to be grateful. The last thing my adoptive mother said to me was that I should be thankful that her white family took me in. It was also, potentially, the very first thing that woman said to me. I have run out of graciousness. I know people are expecting me to thank them for letting me in, for letting me back in, my genetic family. I was most certainly cast out, thrown out, given out of my genealogical position as their daughter, sister... niece. I don't think i have it in me to thank anyone right now. All I seem to be able to do... is write.
More soon,
Baby Girl