Daily Blague

All right: here's why I had a big day on Tuesday. (Did I spend a minute on the Book Review? I don't think so.) Last Thursday, a parental figure by the name of Z - she is only a few years older than I am (two? three?), but she rocks - asked her daughter about my adoption search. That would be my plan to make contact with my birth mother, should she be interested, just to let her know that I'm okay. Until reading The Girls Who Went Away a few months ago, I had no intention whatever of learning more about my birth parents, but Ann Kessler's book changed my mind about that within the space of three chapters.

Here's what happened: Z wrote to her daughter, "How RJ's search for his mother going?" This was passed on to me in a very neutral way, but I understood, as if at the wrong end of a stun gun, that Impatience was being Registered.

I'll spare you the part about how I had to have birth certificates or whatever before I could proceed. It was all nonsense, but I didn't know how much it was nonsense until I finally had what I thought I "needed to have" before beginning the search. I didn't. On Tuesday I got the documents from the safe-deposit box. On Wednesday, there was a Joan-of-Arc moment in the blue room, where I write. I didn't see any angels, but I certainly heard the voice of Z. "Well, honey, it's nice that you've got your papers now. What's next?" It was a voice that, without being insistent, laid down an ultimatum. What it really said was, "If you think that you can give yourself the kind of credit for getting those papers yesterday that will allow you to do nothing for a few days until the middle of next week, you, mister, are full of shit!" Not that Z would ever put it that way. But it was the message.

I dropped what I was doing (writing to Z's daughter about my day) and Googled the Foundling Hospital, the organization that placed me with my adoptive parents way back in 1948. It took a bit of determination - they can't be actually happy about answering the requests of people like me - but I did find, finally, a contact whom I could call about my records. Ms Josephine Wintz was pleasantly straightforward about the form that she was going to send me, which I would fill out and have notarized - pretty much what I expected to be the next step, and a sensible step it is, too. She asked for the name of my adoptive parents, and a few other details. Conceivably, there could be a "no records" screw-up, but I don't expect that.

Everyone in my circle says, Bravo, RJ! You're so courageous! But bravery has nothing to do with it. I want my mom* to know that I'm okay - that's all. I'm not planning to find meaning in a new family. That may well be what happens, but my objective is simply to assure a woman who took from 6 January until 15 March 1948 to sign surrender papers that, wow, I'm still here. A middle-aged creakopotamus, but still good for a few lines. She will, if the anecdotal information is correct, be 77. Not so old these days. At 58 I feel a lot older. But as Christine Lavin sings, I was once somebody's baby, and if she is worried about me, this mother of mine, then I must do what I can to still her anxieties.

(And then, sound Irishwoman that she probably is, she'll find out that I'm resolute about the need for gay marriage, and have a fatal heart attack.)

My good friend Susan was here for lunch. "But of course it's got to be disturbing. You were part of a project, short on experience but long on agenda, that hardly knew what it was doing, something like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study." Oh, not nearly that bad. But perhaps that irresponsible.

* And this is far from the least interesting detail. I called my adoptive mother "Mother" from about the age of eleven on. I couldn't call her "Mom." In this I was partially echoing my adoptive father, who called his mother "Mother" until the day she died. But the woman who gave me birth seems like Mom to me.