Daily Blague

Return receipt requested - my papers, seeking reunion with my mother, have been received by the right people. I expect that nothing much will happen for a while. Any suggestions?

"Adoption" is now a subcategory of the Daily Blague's archives - you'll find it under "Yorkville High Street," which is where I shunt everything of a remotely personal nature. If this development had been foretold to me a year ago, in some miraculous vision, I'd have been bewildered. Searching into my origins was something that I'd long ago decided not to do. And nothing has happened to change the feelings on which that decision was based. I still have no real desire to know the people whose conjunction produced me.

But since Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v Wade (Penguin, 2006) came into my life, my desires have taken a distinct back seat to a mounting sense of obligation. Now I must do everything in my power to put an end to the anxieties of the woman who bore me and who was, almost certainly, not allowed to keep me. It is possible that she has put me out of her mind as an unhappy chapter. That's what the social workers in the adoption racket would like us all to believe. If she managed to do that, then I'm honestly happy for her - worrying about me has not been a part of her life for nearly sixty years. But if she's like any of the moms whom Ann Fessler interviewed for The Girls Who Went Away, she may have tried to put me out of her mind, but she has never been able to pull it off.

Three Daily Blague entries mention this remarkable book already. It first came up in June, in the course of business, when it was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, and I completely declined to assess Kathryn Harrison's review in favor of making my own remarks, rehashing my old, "not interested" position on adoption clear. And yet I began the paragraph by stating that I'd already ordered the book. On Independence Day, I wrote about the change that it had wrought in my thinking. And then, two days later, I mumbled an apology for not having started sooner, laying out the reasons why I'd thought it would be a bad idea to seek reunion. Then, nothing happened for over a month. It was a glitch involving the safe deposit box, where the papers that I'd been given after my father died were parked. The glitch was resolved  in the middle of August, and a week later I received a form to fill out. I fiddled with it last week, writing my answers in pencil on a copy so that Kathleen's kind secretary could type them onto the actual form. (I have an electric typewriter in a box somewhere, but I never use it, and the form was way too hot an item for me to type competently.) My first move was completed yesterday, with the mailing of the form and the attachments.

Continue reading about my The Girls Who Went Away at Portico.