Adoption Stories: Dear Henry

After the final court hearing for Eleanor's adoption, our marvelous lawyer Raegen Rasnic told me it was the smoothest adoption she had ever seen. At the time I thought she says that to all her clients.  Twelve years later I realize it's true.

I've been meaning to write about the roller coaster experience of becoming an adoptive parent, but I didn't know where to start. Then while going through old computer files I found this – the "Dear baby" letter our social worker suggested we write to help work through our grief after the birth mother we supported through her pregnancy told us she had decided to keep the baby. This happened just days before we were supposed to fly to Nebraska and get a newborn baby for Christmas. (I'll tell more of the tragicomic story in another episode of Adoption Stories.)

Reading it still brings tears to my eyes. I haven't changed a word since I wrote this a decade ago:

December 19, 2007

Dear Henry:

I don’t know what your parents will call you, but just last week you had become “Henry Graeme” to us.  We had crossed some line from planning to adopt another child to planning to adopt you. Physically we’d finally taken big steps like getting out the cribs and telling everyone we know about the upcoming Nebraska trip. Emotionally I’d taken even bigger steps, letting myself believe in you and in the future that contained you in our family. Nothing in my life had fully prepared me for the joy of being Eleanor’s papa, and I let down my guard and dreamed of magnifying that joy with you.

Now you’re gone, or at least the dream and future with you has vanished, and all I can see ahead is darkness.

I’m trying to be happy for your parents and wish them well in their choice to add you to their family instead of ours. Everyone knows that things will almost certainly be much harder for you there than they would have been here, but it’s not fair to be a snob and make fun of their trailer park life. You’ll have big brothers and lots of people to love you, and kids are tough, so you’ll grow up and be yourself. Just a very different self. 

I am angry at your father, and a little bit at your mother – partly to distract myself from being so sad, and partly because I feel abused and stupid, and I don’t like that.  I don’t really begrudge the $8000 we chose to throw away on this always-imperfect opportunity (well, other than the fact that we’re broke and can’t afford to try this again right now), but I’m bitter about the extra $1500 that Shawn cheated us out of, and can’t help wondering if he’s secretly sold you to someone else, or when exactly Carrie changed her outlook so dramatically.  I kick myself for joking last week that they would go through with it just for the last $200 Wal-Mart gift card. And I dread the inevitable recriminations and eventually disclosure of what happened. Hopefully the vindictive impulses will end soon – getting either of your parents in trouble with the authorities isn’t going to bring my dream back, and the real victims would be you and your poor siblings. 

Out of all the adoption books I’ve read, right now I’m drawn to the story of the supportive adoptive parents who were rejected after the birth, but still sent flowers to the birth mother in the hospital. Is that a magnanimous or a pathetic gesture?  

Jason says he always felt there was something not-quite-right. I was the opposite, seeing parallels with Eleanor’s arrival, and I was all too willing to believe that everything was working out just right.  I resisted my ordinary impulse to assume the worst, and instead let myself want something. It’s experiences like this that send me back into my shell.

Almost a week letter I still am in a daze. I feel the kind of loss I’ve rarely experienced before, only on other occasions when I passionately wanted a different future to unfold – not getting jobs or scholarships I’d counted on, or losing vital court battles, all times when I wanted and believed something would happen to the point of dreaming about it. 

A “disrupted” adoption placement is like a miscarriage, a profound near-parental loss. All three of my sisters in law have had difficult miscarriages, including losing the first grandchild after nine full months. They leave a hole in your family where something was supposed to go.

In other ways this is most like the couple of times when I’ve been unexpectedly dumped by a boyfriend – the same feeling of rejection, the impulse to argue uselessly for a reprieve, the willingness to utterly humiliate yourself, the foolish hope that they’ll change their minds, the shock and disbelief and grief over the lost future. Time heals all wounds, they say, and the immediate pain indeed fades, but this will leave a tender scar.

After decades of school and even longer away, a relative handful of lessons have stuck with me. Several are from my introductory class as a college English major a quarter century ago, including my professor’s vivid example of an effective poem title:  “To the Little Girl We Didn’t Know We Weren’t Going to Have.” The author writes of her confusion and loss at having a miscarriage before she even knew she was pregnant. 

I don’t remember the poem, just the title, but it fits my feelings now. I didn’t know we weren’t going to have you – obviously if we’d known it wasn’t going to work out, we never would have let it get this far. Too far.  But now we’re not going to have you in our future, and in our family. You’re not here – you never were here – you’ll never be here – and still I miss you terribly and always will.

From the Papa you’ll never know you weren’t supposed to have.

Click here for more episodes of Adoption Stories.

Reading Again

I can’t remember a time before I was a voracious reader. As a child I would sit on the heating vent in the corner of our living room, reading books for hours. I once negotiated with the Tooth Fairy to get the next installment of my favorite Enid Blyton series instead of cash. I have cut myself shaving because I couldn’t put down my book. 

My whole family and extended family are also notorious readers. You will walk into a room and find multiple Leishmans or Phillipses, each sitting silently with his or her book.  In the 1990s I spoke at a conference in Utah. Every day I would make my pilgrimage to the Salt Lake Roasting Company.  It was a caffeinated oasis in the Mormon desert, back before Starbucks was everywhere, and before Mitt Romney made Utah liberalize the state's quaint liquor laws so they could host the Winter Olympics. One morning as I clutched my Americano, a stranger approached and asked if I was one of the Leishmans from Brigham City. I told her our family had moved to Bellingham years before, and asked how she remembered me. She said she worked at the local library, “and your family were the only people in that town who read books.”

As years went by, books got longer and days got shorter, and my tally of multiple books a day became merely multiple books a week. Paper and online magazines (and life) competed for my time, but I would always read for pleasure. I continued to be a reader throughout college, grad school, law school, legal practice, and parenthood. 

During those years, I observed an inverse correlation between my anxiety level and my book consumption. My longtime colleague Steven, who is personally responsible for Amazon’s dominating position in the book market, had the same experience. Being a litigator at a large law firm means relentless stress. Steven would try to compensate by compulsively running every day, grinding his knees into dust, just to make it through one of those three-part New Yorker profiles. 

“Anhedonia” is the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable. It is a symptom of various mental disorders, but it is a core clinical feature of depression. Last year as I descended into darkness, I completely stopped reading for the first time in my life. (Obsessively checking political news is the opposite of pleasure. And of reading.)

When the fog lifted a bit at the end of October, I still couldn’t read. Instead, I found myself binge-watching all kinds of TV shows, most of which I had never even heard of: Veep, The Crown, Empire, Man in the High Castle, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, etc. I still couldn’t pick up a book for more than a few minutes. But I was encouraged, correctly hypothesizing that binge-watching was reading-adjacent. 

This spring when my mood substantially improved, I again started binge-watching.  (This is Us, Legion, The Magicians, Feud, Class, Riverdale, Super Girl….) Meanwhile I kept a close eye on the carefully-chosen books I had placed on the shelf next to my bed to entice me. Finally I actually read one. John Cleese’s autobiography, So, Anyway..., is 375 pages of witty anecdotes about post-war life and the Golden Age of British television. Over the next few weeks I started reading several more books from the shelf and managed to finish one, as well as a couple of new books from Amazon I couldn’t resist. (I needed them for research.) 

This week I took the kids to the Bellingham Public Library to sign them up for the summer reading program. I also got my own library card and checked out three books. (Funny, the library didn’t have a record of me from the summer I lived with my parents during college, in 1982.) One night after the kids were in bed, I stayed up till 3 am because I just had to finish my book. The next day I went back to the library and checked out its sequel. 

It’s summer vacation now, and my children begrudgingly put in their 30 minutes of minimum daily reading. Two weeks ago, instead of doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen, I began sitting together with the kids and reading my own current book. In a break from family tradition, most days I’m the only one reading for pleasure. But I’m hopeful. Last night Eleanor stayed up past midnight with the book she chose for her birthday. Life is pretty good.

(From Grandma's refrigerator door)

Hasty Generalizations

Like Garrison Keillor, I am a lifelong member of the Professional Organization of English Majors.  I was blessed with extraordinary English teachers, starting at Gilmore Elementary School in fourth grade with Nora Gessner.  She had such a gift for reading aloud that whenever I re-read many of my childhood favorites today (Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit), I still hear her expressively voicing each distinct character.  

When I was twelve, we moved from glorious Vancouver, Canada, to dreary Brigham City, Utah.  It ruined my life.  Five years later my parents came to their senses and moved back here to Bellingham, but the damage was already done.  One of the few bright spots in those wilderness years, however, was my good fortune in attending Box Elder High School together with an exceptional cohort of honors students and gifted educators.  Jordan Larsen (everyone called him “Jordie”) was a master English teacher.  To a fourteen-year-old sophomore, he seemed ancient – although in reading his obituary, I realized Jordie was exactly my current age when we first met.  (I also discovered he was a graduate of both South Cache High School and Utah State University, just like my father fifteen years later.)

Mr. Larsen (of course we didn’t call him “Jordie” to his face) was old school.  No one else in my academic career ever made me memorize passages of literature, a skill that proved useful later in theater, chorus, and public speaking.  I can still recite the first forty lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English.   (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote….”)

Like Mrs. Gessner, Jordie Larsen was also a gifted elocutionist.  Later I studied logic in both college and law school.  But what I remember best about the subject comes from Mr. Larsen reading aloud Max Schulman’s classic short story “Love is a Fallacy,” from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.  It’s about a conceited first year law student teaching his bimbo girlfriend the most common fallacies of reasoning.   (Spoiler alert – he doesn’t get the girl in the end.)  For example:

“Next we take up a fallacy called Hasty Generalization.  Listen carefully:  You can’t speak French.  My roommate Petey can’t speak French.  I can’t speak French.  I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University of Minnesota can speak French.”

“Really?” said Polly, amazed.  “Nobody?”

I hid my exasperation.  “Polly, it’s a fallacy.  The generalization is reached too hastily.  There are too few instances to support such a conclusion.”

“Know any more fallacies?” she asked breathlessly.  “This is more fun than dancing even.”

I will never forget the staid Jordie Larsen reciting Polly’s dialogue as if he were Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

My home library includes five shelves of LGBT books, culled from a quarter century as a professional and amateur homosexual.  One I have found particularly helpful is called “…And Then I Became Gay:  Young Men’s Stories,” by Ritch C. Savin-Williams, a psychology professor at Cornell.  He writes about what he calls “differential developmental trajectories,” and identifies several common patterns of how men “come out to themselves” in recognizing their sexual orientation.

I have listened to countless gay friends tell their stories.   Each individual’s coming out is unique.   But they usually fit into one of a handful of common basic narratives.  Many guys will say they “always knew.”  Conversely, others come out in midlife after marrying a woman and having a family.  Grade school and puberty are two other common inflection points. 

Some report they had a sudden epiphany, while others endure years of denial and repression.  Or cluelessness.  (We are the ones who are most likely to say “duh” afterwards.)  Some individuals describe sexuality as a spectrum, like the Kinsey scale, while most see their orientation as a dichotomy, like a light switch.  (“Turn it Off!” as they sing in The Book of Mormon.)  Similarly, there are those, less often men than women, who experience their sexuality as fluid.  But most describe the process as coming to recognize a fundamental and immutable truth about themselves. 

Like Polly, I am fascinated by Hasty Generalizations.  As with so many of life’s experiences, we assume – usually without realizing it – that everyone else came out in just the same way we did.  The “always knew” crowd insist everyone else is either lying or in denial.  The essentialists accuse the social constructionists of heresy, and vice versa.  Everyone bashes the bisexuals.  “Bi now, gay later” is a stage in one of those developmental trajectories that, while very common, nevertheless is hardly universal.  It certainly shouldn’t be used among ourselves as an epithet in cultural civil wars.   

Of course, projecting your own narrative onto everyone else is hardly a gay monopoly.  “Heterosexual privilege” is just one example of the various kinds of implicit bias that stack society’s deck against outsiders.  But unlike sexism or racism, heterosexism often denies the very existence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or trans people.  For example, the Mormon church refused to even use the words “gay” or “lesbian” for decades, instead insisting we were merely afflicted with “same sex attraction.”  Other homophobes deny they or anyone else has a sexual orientation at all, like fish unable to conceptualize the existence of both water and air.

We overcome bias by listening to others, and by being mindful of both similarities and differences.  And even when we land in what seems like the same place, it’s helpful and humbling to recognize the different trajectories that got us here.