Unbound Ties

Part 1: An Adopted Heritage

Unbound Ties: An Adopted Heritage, Part 1

Based on the Prologue and other excerpts from my memoir I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls.

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

Upon my dad’s retirement from the military, he took a government post in southern California, sold our permanent home in New Jersey, and prepared to move without warning me. Twenty-one, mother of a toddler, I lived in the area. My marriage was faltering, and I was distraught. My parents, grandmother, and my much younger adopted sister were abandoning me. I had few friends and connections, having married young; pulling up stakes several times in as many states. Military family separations and transience, the loss of friends, and school changes punctuated my childhood. Through the 1960s, nerves and anxiety, and shaky self-esteem became chronic. No wonder this adopted girl lacked focus.

My adoptive mother and I were strikingly dissimilar in appearance, her ethnicity was Polish, and mine, Scots Irish. She wished for me to follow her career path, steering me toward nursing. As a young adult, I worked in health care, but I didn’t start college part-time until twenty-one. I re-entered to study horticulture at age forty. Having found my passion, I started a small independent landscape gardening business, proving to myself I was capable of focus and hard work. I’d grown into stick-to-it·ive·ness.

The two-year search for my birthmother required persistence in those pre-internet and pre-DNA days, and I needed guidance from adoptee advocates. I didn't allow myself to falter, or let obstacles set by adoption law stop me. The reward was in finding her. Our heart connection hadn't ceased with relinquishment. Acceptance was immediate, and yet, we were strangers. Our lives couldn’t have been more different, nonetheless, we were mother and daughter. We were granted so little time to learn about each other; who we were to each other. My birth mother seemed to settle for my presence, asking nothing of me in that year. I urged her to tell me more, and she said she would have, but had few answers. Such were the times: 1951, Post World War II in South Carolina, a time of high birth rate among single mothers, and coerced adoptions. We lost each other again in 1994, a lifetime later.

After Dad died in 1999, I picked up long-distance signs of my mom’s struggle to take care of her ninety-seven-year-old mother in their California home. As a child, I sometimes balked at Mom’s direction, but I was happy to help her now that she was alone. So, I located a new home for them not far from where my second husband and I had settled in Pennsylvania and persuaded Mom to move east. I arranged the purchase of her new home, cleaned out and sold their California home of twenty-seven years, and packed and moved the women nearest me back to me in their birth state — Pennsylvania.

When I found my birth mother and her ancestry, I came into my heritage with the indefatigable push to survive, characteristic of my newly found Scots-Irish and German pioneer-farmer ancestry. That energy and determination would save my life after a major stroke at age fifty-seven, just as genetics also played a dire role.

This bitterly cold Pennsylvania January, I’m immersed in one of the mammoth projects I’ve assumed on Mom’s behalf, completing her move to assisted living. She can’t help me much now. The accumulation of life’s treasures had been her work. I spill the contents of a circa 1950s shoebox, black and white photos, onto her double bed. Once, this bed belonged to her now-deceased mother, my Nana. On its matched, mirrored, mahogany bureau: several stacked photo albums I’ve never perused, and more scattered photos, sepia through Kodachrome. All have passed into my care. The baby photo scrap book is testament to my new adoptive parents’ devotion. I juggle their memories with my own.

Etsy

Nana’s photos are tucked into sewn and tied binders where the mucilage of memories confines them safely in black paper corners. Who are these people? When did they last see daylight? Bundled into rubber bands, stuffed into shoeboxes, in frilly brag books, her siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews, portraits in crinkle-edged black-and-whites. I recognize the faces of some who have crossed my plane in tangent, as I turn over the coarse corn-colored album leaves, searching captions, the places and names of folks who have lived ordinary lives, like mine, but who were never mine. I’ve taken on the memory of my adoptive ancestry.

How to solve the quandary I hold in my hands? Although we share no heritage, I’ve ached for such a bond!

Thank you for reading…Continued next week.

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