Some Magic

Wishes and Dreams

“ Some Magic” magical-thinking word cloud by Mel

Hello all! Here’s my last April weekend post. I’m so grateful to you for joining me here.

Some Magic: Wishes and Dreams

Memories form after the words. I suppose the sisters in the hospital and the infant home comforted me with whispers. I was safe, they might have said, that someday someone would rescue me and bring me home to a happy life. Be that as it may, the “primal wound” theory or hypothesis* is that a newborn is imprinted with her mother’s scent, her touch, her heartbeat, and her voice. Separation from the mother at birth causes harm to both the child and the mother. The infant has an innate, inherent curiosity and desire to collect messages that may one day lead her to explore her origins. The vague longing, the urge to reunite with the one from whom she was severed will surface in time; the need to love and be loved by someone she might never know.

When language was bursting forth, forming experiments in thought, my preschooler mind, was learning the word, adoption — what it was telling me, and what it was keeping from me. It was magic. Make-believe. A murmured story that hadn’t yet broken through the noise. Adoption was a passing whisper.

The home they bought when I was three in the New Jersey suburbs with my grandparents was our “permanent home”. Dad left us for Iceland's N.A.T.O. base for a year. At three, I was learning the limits if not the causes. I was part of a preformed family of parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I knew I had come as a gift, like a charm, a tag attached with a blessing. Their attention came more from some, and less from others, and as I learned things had to be a certain way, I sensed I wasn't fully theirs but couldn’t grasp why. Trying hard, my mother tried hard but was tentative, her hesitancy was a warning.

My mother and grandmother allowed me ample time and space for quiet play. Nursery rhymes and rhythms filled the hours. I sat on the rug amidst my growing collection of books and records. I controlled the music and guided the arm, the stylus, and the needle onto the first groove. As it revolved, melodies and words of post-war songs, impressed in bright yellow plastic, yielded emotion, feeding my fantasy and imagination. I read books with golden bindings: amused by Richard Scarry, fascinated by the Brothers Grimm, warned by Aesop’s Fables, and romanced by Hans Christian Andersen's tales. Both good and evil figured in fabulous Disney retellings of princes and princesses, fairy godmothers, interfering stepmothers, murderous witches, jealous sisters, and helpful dwarves depicted in the long-playing record books, like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. I sang and sang, and there were stars to summon for wishing, fueling longing, embellishing belief: No matter who you are, one day love and happiness will come to you. But time and reason instruct privilege, and reality and disappointment come with hard truths.

When my first mother abandoned me to the care of the nuns in the Greenville charity hospital birthing ward, luck was not conferred on me. I suppose they baptized me then, but a re-do was warranted, officiated, and certified in a new record of Baptism and Birth at the time of sealed adoption, one year after my new parents took me home. Still, no special protection was granted, only my sure release from Limbo without more immunity.

I was four when time’s passing gave itself to me in a song of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks were words not understood. Would he come back? I wondered but didn’t cry for my dad when he was away for weeks and months. I feared my grandparents might die. I wished until I believed I could keep my granddaddy alive. I could see he was the oldest and worked hard. Don’t leave me! Don’t go. It was then I realized death was the end — going away and not coming back — but I couldn’t think of my mortality. Someone had left me as a baby. I couldn’t imagine who. My little body sometimes suddenly gripped with the fear of love lost, and I panicked early. I countered when able, with wishing, with control. I somehow could reverse my powerlessness. At Sunday Mass I learned to pray but my babyish devotion was distracted, and I distracted my family, raising my father’s ire and his expectations.

Transitions — so many for a separated infant. From birth to nursery without mother. Two months with the sisters, when at last, my first mother, having been located, signed the relinquishment paper, releasing me to Catholic Charities. I was driven across the State to the Rock Hill infant home. At five months, in February 1952, my new parents collected me from the infant home to begin our Air Force family life. The adoption was certified in October, and my mother and I left the state by train for New York City. I had met the family there in July. In the new year, we drove to the midwest — the first of two apartments near the University of Ohio where Dad taught Reserve Officers. Mom always missed her mother, and it reflected in extreme nervousness and misgivings about the care of a child not born to her. While Dad flew back and forth for training in Alabama, she and I flew back and forth more than a few times to New York.

The Air Force adventure was a series of disruptions through high school. When he returned from Northern Thailand after a year in 1968 while I was a Junior, he retired. It was a life of change, unfamiliarity, separation, coping with lost friendships, and increasing identity confusion. All disappeared in the blowing dust of our frequent moves, the car trips in our 1953 Buick Special. My parents admonished me and wanted to strengthen my spine, toughen me, and harden me to the reality of impermanence. I had to learn that everything I encountered was temporary — ‘Friends are here today and gone tomorrow’. Wishing would not relieve my disappointment. An only child until the age of eight, by the time another infant girl was adopted, I‘d largely let go of magical thinking as a way to cope with my natal trauma. Trusting had proved to be unreliable. Fantasy gave me control. Rational thought would take time. After two years in Tokyo: fifth and sixth grade in an international convent school for girls — if only I had stayed through high school, through college, but once again, a move, and a change to a base Junior High.

Upheavals and complications persisted when we returned to the States, through adolescence. What was that weakness, a sense of privilege that protected me from harm, that said I was immune, invulnerable, lucky? What was it, if not misguided, foolish, risky behavior? Far from fading, my longing for an unknown home and family, a place in a dream, the fable of lost origins was a make-believe that shaped my facility with truth with untruth. My struggle went untreated except for years of self-medication and scant therapy until I was diagnosed at forty. I described a long history of what were likely dissociative episodes, severe social anxiety, mood swings, dread, panic disorder, and emotional and physical collapse with more cortisol than my mind and body could handle, I was prescribed appropriate treatment. The doctor suggested I search. I needed that validation. I searched from our Pennsylvania home, pre-internet and pre-DNA, old school paperwork and letters, research, search advocates and angels, landline, local historian's snippets, and cemetery surveys. My quest brought me to my half-sister’s door, and our mother. In Greenville, South Carolina, a wish of a lifetime came true. The internal ping signaled it was time. She told me she had always wondered. And she had wandered, too, resisting settling, a restless soul like me. The State seal on adoptee birth records made reunion unlikely. It would take some magic.

Central Park, NY

The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier

Magical Thinking as Trauma Response by Laura Farrell in Recovery Diaries.

Demystifying Magical Thinking and So What is Magical Thinking? by Matthew Boland, PhD in Psych Central

Magical Thinking Nature's Way of Dealing With Trauma by Steve Sternberg in U.S. and World Report

Magical Thinking Starts at a Young Age Staff Report Psychology Today

Understanding Anxiety/Social Anxiety Disorder Anxiety and Depression Association of America