Me and Jesus, part three
If you haven't read part one or part two yet, you'll want to read those first, because this entry picks up where those left off, and builds on them. This won't make as much sense without reading those first. I started off writing about my background with the Catholic Church, and Christianity, and now it looks like I'm branching out into exploring where my spirituality comes from.
In order to fully explain the significance of that meeting, I have to backtrack a bit, because there are parts of the story that just didn't fit in well before this point in the story. And they probably didn't fit because I had no idea, while they were happening, that they would later become so significant.
One of the things I mentioned being angry about yesterday was feeling like I didn't fit in. This feeling went back as far as I could remember, and it was the little things as much as the bigger, more obvious things that all conspired to give me that feeling. There was, of course, the everpresent lack of connection between me and my adoptive family, which felt more like a jumble of ill-fitted parts than a cohesive unit. I also remember being quite young, in elementary school, and wilting like a forgotten houseplant when everyone else felt just fine; as hard as it might be to picture, for those who know me in real life, I had a very difficult time dealing with heat in early life. I would break out in sweat whenever the temperature got above 70F or so (~16C, I think), and my body didn't really adjust to the climate in Texas until I hit my early twenties.
Then there was my accent. I remember seeing a speech therapist when I was in kindergarden, because I could not pronounce my R's. (Not a good thing for someone named "Darren" in the south.) And even after that matter was dealt with, I constantly got asked where I was from. I found it amusing, when I worked for H.E.B. and I was chatting people up as I bagged their groceries, when we'd have a conversation that went something like this:
customer: "Whairr' yeww fruuum, boy?"
me: "Um... here. San Antonio."
customer (with just the merest trace of irritation): "No, but ah mean... whairr wirr ya born? Yeww don' sound laak yor fruum arown' here."
me: (feel relieved, for a moment)
At this point, sometimes I would say something vague about having family all over the place, and the subject would be politely dropped. And sometimes, I would ask them to guess. Quite a few guessed Mexico, of all places, perhaps because there are some fair skinned, green eyes Mexicans (and I have spoken Spanish with varying degrees of fluency for a good chunk of my life, learning my first Spanish words as a six year old), one person in desparate need of a clue guessed South Africa (!), a handful guessed I was British, and I think a couple of people thought I might be from California. The overwhelming majority, though, guessed that I was from the Northeast US, or from the eastern part of Canada. And all this speculation did a couple of things for me: on a conscious level, it made me feel even more like I didn't fit, and on a deeper level, it made me curious just where I actually did come from.
I was reminded of this piece constantly, at least weekly at work but usually more often than that. Part of my lack of a Texas accent could be explained by some heckling my Mom did about my "drawl" in my early teens (which was an attempt at a polite way of telling me to stop talking like a Valley Girl, because I sounded like a great big fag), but the accent I fell back on, the thing that I intended to sound neutral, seemed to be something hardwired into me. And it made me curious.
There were times when not fitting in went well beyond my accent, or lack thereof. In the worst part of my middle school experience, when I started getting picked on for being perceived to be gay (I guess my mom did have a point, even if the way she chose to "protect" me left something to be desired), I remember feeling like there was nobody in the world I could talk to about what was going on inside me, between the sexual confusion and my utter lack of popularity at school. To some degree I know that this is not a unique experience, but at the time I felt like I had it worse than anyone else. (I know that part is far from unique as well.) I felt totally, utterly alone, disconnected from all the people around me, not even human, a gangly, sick, pathetic specimen, completely wretched. I was sure that there was nobody who would understand me or accept me if they knew what went on in my head, between the conflicting sexual desires and the fantasies of escape and the feeling that I was always being watched, that at any moment my mom might find something new to yell at me about. Even the fact that her temper affected me so deeply and painfully probably marked me as some kind of sissy. And many times, when I found myself lost in this deep pit of despair, I got this sense, this creepy yet comforting feeling, that there was, indeed, someone out there who would understand me. I felt this presence with me, almost like another person in the room with me, and as I would cry myself to sleep (silently, so as not to awaken Mikki and have to explain what I was crying about) it was almost like this presence was in bed with me, hugging me, comforting me.
My gut instinct told me that this was my twin brother. I don't know why I went there, or remember how I came to that conclusion, but it fit. My twin would be enough like me to where he would get it, would understand how I felt, would share enough in common with me to where surely, he of all people would accept me and understand me. The possibility that I might have a twin is one of the things that sustained me during the darkest part of that first suicidal depression I went thru. I felt this inexplicable connection to him, even though for all I knew he only existed in my head.
I spent much of my early teens secretly obsessed with the hope that I would someday find him. There were times, like when I would see shows on television about twins separated at birth and reunited later in life, where I was certain that this would be my experience. I was glued to the television, as pair after pair told their stories, how they ended up very much alike, sharing many of the same habits and preferences, from smoking the same brand of cigarettes, to eating the same foods prepared the same way, to liking the same games, to having careers in the same field, even (in one case) marrying women with the same first name and sharing the same features. I remember my first day of high school, thinking that perhaps he would be one of the new students there too (since most of the students at my middle school went to a different high school, there was a completely different mix of people), and the first couple of weeks I busied myself between classes keeping an eye out for him, just in case. I remember my reaction, when someone I had just met would tell me something along the lines of "you look just like this friend of mine..."; I would eagerly ask questions about this other person, open to the possibility that I might have stumbled across my twin brother, finally.
The most vivid example of this phenomenon that I remember was in San Diego, in the summer of 1988. I was there for ticketing training with USAir. It was a three week course, and I stayed over the second weekend, spending it with a friend of Mikki's, and he took me to a party where someone broke out a copy of The Book Of Questions. And in the middle of one of the discussions, someone made that familiar comment, the "you look just like this guy I know" comment. Another person came up to me later, and told me that she noticed that I dropped the conversation when I found out that the person in question was about ten years older than I was. She asked me what that was all about, and it was the first time I had ever talked about it with someone else: I was looking for my twin brother. I didn't tell her all the details (like the crying myself to sleep part), but I gave her the jist of it.
I decided at that point that, someday, I was going to look for him.
There was another bit that comes into play as well. Because I am tall (although not freakishly so), I was constantly pushed into playing basketball. I suffered thru two and a half years of trying to play the game at least adequately in high school, more to please my dad than anything else. It seemed like the only time he really paid attention to me, and besides, I had to take some form of Physical Education anyway, and it was going to be humiliating and stressful to me no matter what I did. My body grew so erratically that I never developed any grace or coordination until I was much older, so sports just didn't work well for me.
When I was picking classes for my junior year, I was told that there was a conflict, and I had to make a choice. Spanish IV (I started high school with Spanish II, since I had taken the equivalent of Spanish I in middle school) and Basketball were at the same time. I was prepared to take the generic P.E. course and keep Spanish IV in the lineup, because I was in the Spanish Honor Society, and that was the year that they had a trip planned to Spain and Morocco for Christmas. It was a huge, huge deal for me to go. But the Basketball coach called my dad, who worked for the school district (at the time, he was the principal at another high school, but he was working his way up to being Assistant Superintendant, so lots of people knew him) and begged him to convince me to stick with Basketball. He told my dad that I was one of his favorite students, that I was a real team player, that my attitude had a profound affect on the rest of the team, that he wanted to work with me, yadda yadda yadda. So my dad pressured me into it.
At this point, I'm glad he did that, because in place of Spanish I took French (a subject I ended up loving), even though everyone thought I was a freak for doing so. I had already fulfilled my requirement for two years of foreign language; why take another one? But there was another affect on my high school career as a result of this choice that had a far-reaching impact on me (and actually brings me back to the subject, which I'm sure it sounds like I've totally lost).
The coach, that rat bastard, cut me from the team. After sacrificing so much to be there, after losing my place in the Spanish Honor Society and missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to Spain and Morocco, I didn't even make the fucking team. I had done it for nothing.
I was mighty pissed off about that. So I spent the rest of the semester in the bleachers with the other guys who didn't make the team, usually using the time to do homework, sometimes perfecting my paper airplane making skills, and toward the end of the semester I made an appointment with my guidance counselor, to pick another class to take for that hour. I wasn't going to waste another minute with this whole sports thing, since my physical education requirement was covered.
The class I chose was called Human Relations, a kind of intro to psychology course for high school students. I loved the class. The teacher was a total doll, and it was easy and fun and interesting.
One of the topics we covered was teenage pregnancy. We didn't cover it from the prevention end; that topic was handled, poorly, in my Health class, by a very twitchy, nervous, clearly lesbian Tennis coach. Rather, we covered the "how do you handle an unplanned pregnancy?" aspect. I think the class was unusual, considering both the time period and the location, for the level of thoroughness we were exposed to. We had a marriage unit we had to do (which I did with the girlfriend I mentioned yesterday, the second one) in which we had to research a career and figure out an income, plan out a monthly budget, shop for a place to live, figure out what kind of furniture we could afford, figure out daycare arrangements if both of us worked, and so on. We talked about abortion, about the long term implications, both psychological and physical, and we actually had a guest speaker talk to us about how having an abortion had affected her life.
And then, of course, we covered adoption. One might now grasp the relevance of this lengthly tangent.
We had another guest speaker day, where a birthmother, and an adoptee and her mom (not related to each other) spoke to us about their experience. And the birthmother had gone with an open adoption.
That afternoon had a huge impact on me, one that I ended up burying for a while but huge nevertheless.
I had never heard of open adoption, and I felt totally cheated. I was crushed by the unfairness of my circumstances, that there were adoptees out there who actually knew where they came from, who could ask real questions and get real answers to them. And even bigger for me was the concept that one could indeed search for one's biological family. I asked the birthmother a lot of questions after class, and she told me about Lutheran Social Services, an entity that performed searches. She also told me that it was mostly hit and miss, that I was too young to do any kind of search without my parents' permission, but she gave me the tiniest inkling of hope that someday, I might be able to look on my own. I think I probably filed a search for my birthmother away as an impossible dream, because five years seemed like an eternity to me at the time. (An adoptee in Texas cannot get any information, even non-identifying info, before the age of twenty one, without the participation of his or her adoptive parents, unless there's been a change in the law there.)
That evening, when I was talking a bit about my day, I very cautiously inched up to the topic with my mom. I admitted that I was curious as to whether or not I had a twin brother. She snapped at me that the whole idea was ridiculous. (She probably said the idea was "redundant," a word that she still doesn't know how to use correctly.) I asked her why she thought so, still treading carefully, because I could tell that I was dangerously close to setting her off. She replied that if there had been twins, they would have adopted both of us, as if it were a stupid question and the answer were obvious. So I asked her how she would even know. I mean, if they had asked for "a boy" when they went to the agency, why would they necessarily feel the need to tell them anything other than "we have a boy for you"? Who's to say, with the extremely limited information they disclosed about the source of said boy, that they would have volunteered that there had been two boys?
She was stumped, and silent for a moment, finally spitting out that I didn't have a twin, that I was stupid to think that I might have one, and it didn't matter anyway because those records are sealed by a court order, and I was to drop the subject immediately.
My mom probably still doesn't understand that handling a subject that way, especially with an inquisitive teenager, only makes the other party even more curious, even if said other party shuts up for the moment. All this conversation did for me was make me even more certain that someday, when I was old enough to do so on my own, without necessitating her involvement, I was going to search for my twin.
Still, I think that deep down I probably believed that I would never really know. It represented one of my mom's deepest fears, related to her unexamined fertility issues, that her claim to me or Mikki be questioned, so it seemed like every time she had the opportunity she emphasized the whole bit about "she must have loved you enough to realize that she couldn't be a mother to you, so she had the sense to give you up, and I'm your mother now" until it really became a part of my consciousness, one of those unexamined bits taken for granted, floating around in the background, like "the earth is round" and such. I didn't really dare to wish that I would ever know who my mother was, or what the circumstances were around my conception. Maybe I saw seeking my twin brother as a loophole I could exploit, I don't know.
In any case, by the time I reached my 22nd birthday, I had sufficiently developed initiative to contact Texas Cradle, and after going back and forth a couple of times I set up an appointment with a social worker to discuss seeking my twin. I decided that either I had a twin, and I didn't want to waste another moment not knowing who and where he was, or I didn't have one, and I needed to get over this silly fantasy and get on with my life. I think that the details of that meeting, and the whole process I went thru as a result, are a subject for another entry, because it does get quite involved (and this entry is already much longer than I expected it to be), but suffice it to say that this social worker confirmed that I did not have a twin, and that the agency knew where my birthmother was, and knew that she was open to establishing contact with me. I only hesitated for a moment before going ahead with a reunion.
I tell all this backstory to put into perspective just what a profound impact it had on me, and how it forced me to take a look at a lot of aspects of my life I had taken as a given. I had several illusions that I had built my life upon shattered with that reunion. I had no twin, after all. But I had access to not just a few miscellaneous details about my origin, but the full story, from the source. I had blood relatives, whom I looked like and spoke like and thought like, whom I could touch and see. And I think it naturally follows, when one has a chunk of one's foundation blown to bits, that it's a good time to build a new house.
Something like that happened when I met my mother. I think it would have happened anyway, no matter who she was, but the fact that she's a metaphysical healer (who at the time was a student at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing) made such an examination of my belief system even more of a priority. I couldn't avoid looking at the issue even if I had wanted to; it was up in my face, in a big way.
Initially, when she eased into the subject of her work, I had that same mix of fear and excitement that I had when I first read Travels. Part of me resisted it, felt sure that my church would never approve of such ideas, felt ambiguous about my ability to incorporate the reality of who she was with my experience of spirituality to date, but my heart resonated with it, pulled me toward it; I practically felt it jumping up and down in my chest, screaming, "yes! finally!"
So I approached the whole deal cautiously, and adopted the same mix of skepticism and openness that Michael Crichton described himself using. And there were three key points which, taken together, sold me on the whole New Age deal.
First, there were the discussions about how her work and her perspective fit in, philosophically, with my experience. It didn't take us long to start talking about the nature of the universe, and when we did, I found that looking at the Bible, especially key bits of scripture that were significant to me, took on an even deeper meaning from a New Age perspective. As she would say, hearing it from that angle rang true for me.
Secondly, there was the actual hands on experience, so to speak, with her work. She does energy work, clearing and charging people's auras, cleaning and balancing their chakras, and the first time I met her in person (about three months after my first meeting at Texas Cradle), she worked on me. And this was where having read Michael Crichton helped me. I took his approach to her work, equally open to the possibilities that I could find it to be real, phony, or inconclusive. I let her work on me, and paid attention to what it felt like and what I experienced, and then asked her (well, perhaps quizzed her is a more accurate way to put it) about what was happening. And every time, her explanation of what she was doing fit my experience. There was even a point, when I was on the table, eyes closed, where I... I didn't quite fall asleep, but I went into a dreamlike, altered state. I was aware of her in the room, and the music in the background, and I even remember being aware that I was snoring softly at a couple of points, but I was also watching this little movie in my head. It was like dreaming, in that it felt like I was really there inside the movie, but I was still somewhat aware of the reality outside of the movie, kind of like being in two states of consciousness at once. So later, when I asked her about what was happening with me on the table, she described what I saw to me, as if she had been in the movie herself, without any prompting from me that could explain all the details that she nailed.
But the real clincher for me, as convincing as all the other stuff was, came when we started talking a bit about this connection she's always felt with me. I hadn't really gone into much detail about my childhood, partly because I wasn't too keen on facing aspects of it myself, and partly because I didn't think it would make the best impression on her if I told her the agency fucked up, and placed me with a psycho woman for a mom, and a man who ignored me for a dad right off the bat. So I downplayed a lot of the unhappiness of my childhood with her, for a long time. But as we were talking, and this connection issue came up, she told me that she felt this really strong pull from me about two years prior, and in fact that was how the agency had such an easy time tracking her down. She had contacted them, telling them where she was in the event that I ever wanted to know her. The timing of that coincided with my parents getting divorced, a point in my life when I felt ripped apart, like the rug had totally been pulled out from under me. So I asked her if there had been any other time that she had felt that kind of pull from me, and she told me yes. After working out the timing (she's not the most linear person on the planet, which explains where I get that from) we figured out that it was around the time I was about twelve or thirteen.
It coincided with the time when I cried myself to sleep at night, feeling a connection to what I thought was my twin brother. I know in my heart that it was her I was connecting with.
It didn't happen instantly, but over the next several months I weaned myself away from the church. And for a while, my mother took the place of the church, as far as having an authority figure from whom I sought spiritual guidance goes. And for a while, after I stopped going to church (and especially when I started the process of coming out, about a year later) I had a lot of anger at the church. All I could see was how it didn't really accept me for who I was, how it offered what I called "conditionally unconditional love" that ended up making me feel worse than I had before.
It took time for me to leave behind the need for an authority figure to help me figure out what to think, and yet another person in the pantheon of people who've wandered into and out of my life to get me to look back at my experience with the church differently.
Don't groan, but there's more. But I really really really think that one more entry will do it, and then some
In order to fully explain the significance of that meeting, I have to backtrack a bit, because there are parts of the story that just didn't fit in well before this point in the story. And they probably didn't fit because I had no idea, while they were happening, that they would later become so significant.
One of the things I mentioned being angry about yesterday was feeling like I didn't fit in. This feeling went back as far as I could remember, and it was the little things as much as the bigger, more obvious things that all conspired to give me that feeling. There was, of course, the everpresent lack of connection between me and my adoptive family, which felt more like a jumble of ill-fitted parts than a cohesive unit. I also remember being quite young, in elementary school, and wilting like a forgotten houseplant when everyone else felt just fine; as hard as it might be to picture, for those who know me in real life, I had a very difficult time dealing with heat in early life. I would break out in sweat whenever the temperature got above 70F or so (~16C, I think), and my body didn't really adjust to the climate in Texas until I hit my early twenties.
Then there was my accent. I remember seeing a speech therapist when I was in kindergarden, because I could not pronounce my R's. (Not a good thing for someone named "Darren" in the south.) And even after that matter was dealt with, I constantly got asked where I was from. I found it amusing, when I worked for H.E.B. and I was chatting people up as I bagged their groceries, when we'd have a conversation that went something like this:
customer: "Whairr' yeww fruuum, boy?"
me: "Um... here. San Antonio."
customer (with just the merest trace of irritation): "No, but ah mean... whairr wirr ya born? Yeww don' sound laak yor fruum arown' here."
me: (feel relieved, for a moment)
At this point, sometimes I would say something vague about having family all over the place, and the subject would be politely dropped. And sometimes, I would ask them to guess. Quite a few guessed Mexico, of all places, perhaps because there are some fair skinned, green eyes Mexicans (and I have spoken Spanish with varying degrees of fluency for a good chunk of my life, learning my first Spanish words as a six year old), one person in desparate need of a clue guessed South Africa (!), a handful guessed I was British, and I think a couple of people thought I might be from California. The overwhelming majority, though, guessed that I was from the Northeast US, or from the eastern part of Canada. And all this speculation did a couple of things for me: on a conscious level, it made me feel even more like I didn't fit, and on a deeper level, it made me curious just where I actually did come from.
I was reminded of this piece constantly, at least weekly at work but usually more often than that. Part of my lack of a Texas accent could be explained by some heckling my Mom did about my "drawl" in my early teens (which was an attempt at a polite way of telling me to stop talking like a Valley Girl, because I sounded like a great big fag), but the accent I fell back on, the thing that I intended to sound neutral, seemed to be something hardwired into me. And it made me curious.
There were times when not fitting in went well beyond my accent, or lack thereof. In the worst part of my middle school experience, when I started getting picked on for being perceived to be gay (I guess my mom did have a point, even if the way she chose to "protect" me left something to be desired), I remember feeling like there was nobody in the world I could talk to about what was going on inside me, between the sexual confusion and my utter lack of popularity at school. To some degree I know that this is not a unique experience, but at the time I felt like I had it worse than anyone else. (I know that part is far from unique as well.) I felt totally, utterly alone, disconnected from all the people around me, not even human, a gangly, sick, pathetic specimen, completely wretched. I was sure that there was nobody who would understand me or accept me if they knew what went on in my head, between the conflicting sexual desires and the fantasies of escape and the feeling that I was always being watched, that at any moment my mom might find something new to yell at me about. Even the fact that her temper affected me so deeply and painfully probably marked me as some kind of sissy. And many times, when I found myself lost in this deep pit of despair, I got this sense, this creepy yet comforting feeling, that there was, indeed, someone out there who would understand me. I felt this presence with me, almost like another person in the room with me, and as I would cry myself to sleep (silently, so as not to awaken Mikki and have to explain what I was crying about) it was almost like this presence was in bed with me, hugging me, comforting me.
My gut instinct told me that this was my twin brother. I don't know why I went there, or remember how I came to that conclusion, but it fit. My twin would be enough like me to where he would get it, would understand how I felt, would share enough in common with me to where surely, he of all people would accept me and understand me. The possibility that I might have a twin is one of the things that sustained me during the darkest part of that first suicidal depression I went thru. I felt this inexplicable connection to him, even though for all I knew he only existed in my head.
I spent much of my early teens secretly obsessed with the hope that I would someday find him. There were times, like when I would see shows on television about twins separated at birth and reunited later in life, where I was certain that this would be my experience. I was glued to the television, as pair after pair told their stories, how they ended up very much alike, sharing many of the same habits and preferences, from smoking the same brand of cigarettes, to eating the same foods prepared the same way, to liking the same games, to having careers in the same field, even (in one case) marrying women with the same first name and sharing the same features. I remember my first day of high school, thinking that perhaps he would be one of the new students there too (since most of the students at my middle school went to a different high school, there was a completely different mix of people), and the first couple of weeks I busied myself between classes keeping an eye out for him, just in case. I remember my reaction, when someone I had just met would tell me something along the lines of "you look just like this friend of mine..."; I would eagerly ask questions about this other person, open to the possibility that I might have stumbled across my twin brother, finally.
The most vivid example of this phenomenon that I remember was in San Diego, in the summer of 1988. I was there for ticketing training with USAir. It was a three week course, and I stayed over the second weekend, spending it with a friend of Mikki's, and he took me to a party where someone broke out a copy of The Book Of Questions. And in the middle of one of the discussions, someone made that familiar comment, the "you look just like this guy I know" comment. Another person came up to me later, and told me that she noticed that I dropped the conversation when I found out that the person in question was about ten years older than I was. She asked me what that was all about, and it was the first time I had ever talked about it with someone else: I was looking for my twin brother. I didn't tell her all the details (like the crying myself to sleep part), but I gave her the jist of it.
I decided at that point that, someday, I was going to look for him.
There was another bit that comes into play as well. Because I am tall (although not freakishly so), I was constantly pushed into playing basketball. I suffered thru two and a half years of trying to play the game at least adequately in high school, more to please my dad than anything else. It seemed like the only time he really paid attention to me, and besides, I had to take some form of Physical Education anyway, and it was going to be humiliating and stressful to me no matter what I did. My body grew so erratically that I never developed any grace or coordination until I was much older, so sports just didn't work well for me.
When I was picking classes for my junior year, I was told that there was a conflict, and I had to make a choice. Spanish IV (I started high school with Spanish II, since I had taken the equivalent of Spanish I in middle school) and Basketball were at the same time. I was prepared to take the generic P.E. course and keep Spanish IV in the lineup, because I was in the Spanish Honor Society, and that was the year that they had a trip planned to Spain and Morocco for Christmas. It was a huge, huge deal for me to go. But the Basketball coach called my dad, who worked for the school district (at the time, he was the principal at another high school, but he was working his way up to being Assistant Superintendant, so lots of people knew him) and begged him to convince me to stick with Basketball. He told my dad that I was one of his favorite students, that I was a real team player, that my attitude had a profound affect on the rest of the team, that he wanted to work with me, yadda yadda yadda. So my dad pressured me into it.
At this point, I'm glad he did that, because in place of Spanish I took French (a subject I ended up loving), even though everyone thought I was a freak for doing so. I had already fulfilled my requirement for two years of foreign language; why take another one? But there was another affect on my high school career as a result of this choice that had a far-reaching impact on me (and actually brings me back to the subject, which I'm sure it sounds like I've totally lost).
The coach, that rat bastard, cut me from the team. After sacrificing so much to be there, after losing my place in the Spanish Honor Society and missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to Spain and Morocco, I didn't even make the fucking team. I had done it for nothing.
I was mighty pissed off about that. So I spent the rest of the semester in the bleachers with the other guys who didn't make the team, usually using the time to do homework, sometimes perfecting my paper airplane making skills, and toward the end of the semester I made an appointment with my guidance counselor, to pick another class to take for that hour. I wasn't going to waste another minute with this whole sports thing, since my physical education requirement was covered.
The class I chose was called Human Relations, a kind of intro to psychology course for high school students. I loved the class. The teacher was a total doll, and it was easy and fun and interesting.
One of the topics we covered was teenage pregnancy. We didn't cover it from the prevention end; that topic was handled, poorly, in my Health class, by a very twitchy, nervous, clearly lesbian Tennis coach. Rather, we covered the "how do you handle an unplanned pregnancy?" aspect. I think the class was unusual, considering both the time period and the location, for the level of thoroughness we were exposed to. We had a marriage unit we had to do (which I did with the girlfriend I mentioned yesterday, the second one) in which we had to research a career and figure out an income, plan out a monthly budget, shop for a place to live, figure out what kind of furniture we could afford, figure out daycare arrangements if both of us worked, and so on. We talked about abortion, about the long term implications, both psychological and physical, and we actually had a guest speaker talk to us about how having an abortion had affected her life.
And then, of course, we covered adoption. One might now grasp the relevance of this lengthly tangent.
We had another guest speaker day, where a birthmother, and an adoptee and her mom (not related to each other) spoke to us about their experience. And the birthmother had gone with an open adoption.
That afternoon had a huge impact on me, one that I ended up burying for a while but huge nevertheless.
I had never heard of open adoption, and I felt totally cheated. I was crushed by the unfairness of my circumstances, that there were adoptees out there who actually knew where they came from, who could ask real questions and get real answers to them. And even bigger for me was the concept that one could indeed search for one's biological family. I asked the birthmother a lot of questions after class, and she told me about Lutheran Social Services, an entity that performed searches. She also told me that it was mostly hit and miss, that I was too young to do any kind of search without my parents' permission, but she gave me the tiniest inkling of hope that someday, I might be able to look on my own. I think I probably filed a search for my birthmother away as an impossible dream, because five years seemed like an eternity to me at the time. (An adoptee in Texas cannot get any information, even non-identifying info, before the age of twenty one, without the participation of his or her adoptive parents, unless there's been a change in the law there.)
That evening, when I was talking a bit about my day, I very cautiously inched up to the topic with my mom. I admitted that I was curious as to whether or not I had a twin brother. She snapped at me that the whole idea was ridiculous. (She probably said the idea was "redundant," a word that she still doesn't know how to use correctly.) I asked her why she thought so, still treading carefully, because I could tell that I was dangerously close to setting her off. She replied that if there had been twins, they would have adopted both of us, as if it were a stupid question and the answer were obvious. So I asked her how she would even know. I mean, if they had asked for "a boy" when they went to the agency, why would they necessarily feel the need to tell them anything other than "we have a boy for you"? Who's to say, with the extremely limited information they disclosed about the source of said boy, that they would have volunteered that there had been two boys?
She was stumped, and silent for a moment, finally spitting out that I didn't have a twin, that I was stupid to think that I might have one, and it didn't matter anyway because those records are sealed by a court order, and I was to drop the subject immediately.
My mom probably still doesn't understand that handling a subject that way, especially with an inquisitive teenager, only makes the other party even more curious, even if said other party shuts up for the moment. All this conversation did for me was make me even more certain that someday, when I was old enough to do so on my own, without necessitating her involvement, I was going to search for my twin.
Still, I think that deep down I probably believed that I would never really know. It represented one of my mom's deepest fears, related to her unexamined fertility issues, that her claim to me or Mikki be questioned, so it seemed like every time she had the opportunity she emphasized the whole bit about "she must have loved you enough to realize that she couldn't be a mother to you, so she had the sense to give you up, and I'm your mother now" until it really became a part of my consciousness, one of those unexamined bits taken for granted, floating around in the background, like "the earth is round" and such. I didn't really dare to wish that I would ever know who my mother was, or what the circumstances were around my conception. Maybe I saw seeking my twin brother as a loophole I could exploit, I don't know.
In any case, by the time I reached my 22nd birthday, I had sufficiently developed initiative to contact Texas Cradle, and after going back and forth a couple of times I set up an appointment with a social worker to discuss seeking my twin. I decided that either I had a twin, and I didn't want to waste another moment not knowing who and where he was, or I didn't have one, and I needed to get over this silly fantasy and get on with my life. I think that the details of that meeting, and the whole process I went thru as a result, are a subject for another entry, because it does get quite involved (and this entry is already much longer than I expected it to be), but suffice it to say that this social worker confirmed that I did not have a twin, and that the agency knew where my birthmother was, and knew that she was open to establishing contact with me. I only hesitated for a moment before going ahead with a reunion.
I tell all this backstory to put into perspective just what a profound impact it had on me, and how it forced me to take a look at a lot of aspects of my life I had taken as a given. I had several illusions that I had built my life upon shattered with that reunion. I had no twin, after all. But I had access to not just a few miscellaneous details about my origin, but the full story, from the source. I had blood relatives, whom I looked like and spoke like and thought like, whom I could touch and see. And I think it naturally follows, when one has a chunk of one's foundation blown to bits, that it's a good time to build a new house.
Something like that happened when I met my mother. I think it would have happened anyway, no matter who she was, but the fact that she's a metaphysical healer (who at the time was a student at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing) made such an examination of my belief system even more of a priority. I couldn't avoid looking at the issue even if I had wanted to; it was up in my face, in a big way.
Initially, when she eased into the subject of her work, I had that same mix of fear and excitement that I had when I first read Travels. Part of me resisted it, felt sure that my church would never approve of such ideas, felt ambiguous about my ability to incorporate the reality of who she was with my experience of spirituality to date, but my heart resonated with it, pulled me toward it; I practically felt it jumping up and down in my chest, screaming, "yes! finally!"
So I approached the whole deal cautiously, and adopted the same mix of skepticism and openness that Michael Crichton described himself using. And there were three key points which, taken together, sold me on the whole New Age deal.
First, there were the discussions about how her work and her perspective fit in, philosophically, with my experience. It didn't take us long to start talking about the nature of the universe, and when we did, I found that looking at the Bible, especially key bits of scripture that were significant to me, took on an even deeper meaning from a New Age perspective. As she would say, hearing it from that angle rang true for me.
Secondly, there was the actual hands on experience, so to speak, with her work. She does energy work, clearing and charging people's auras, cleaning and balancing their chakras, and the first time I met her in person (about three months after my first meeting at Texas Cradle), she worked on me. And this was where having read Michael Crichton helped me. I took his approach to her work, equally open to the possibilities that I could find it to be real, phony, or inconclusive. I let her work on me, and paid attention to what it felt like and what I experienced, and then asked her (well, perhaps quizzed her is a more accurate way to put it) about what was happening. And every time, her explanation of what she was doing fit my experience. There was even a point, when I was on the table, eyes closed, where I... I didn't quite fall asleep, but I went into a dreamlike, altered state. I was aware of her in the room, and the music in the background, and I even remember being aware that I was snoring softly at a couple of points, but I was also watching this little movie in my head. It was like dreaming, in that it felt like I was really there inside the movie, but I was still somewhat aware of the reality outside of the movie, kind of like being in two states of consciousness at once. So later, when I asked her about what was happening with me on the table, she described what I saw to me, as if she had been in the movie herself, without any prompting from me that could explain all the details that she nailed.
But the real clincher for me, as convincing as all the other stuff was, came when we started talking a bit about this connection she's always felt with me. I hadn't really gone into much detail about my childhood, partly because I wasn't too keen on facing aspects of it myself, and partly because I didn't think it would make the best impression on her if I told her the agency fucked up, and placed me with a psycho woman for a mom, and a man who ignored me for a dad right off the bat. So I downplayed a lot of the unhappiness of my childhood with her, for a long time. But as we were talking, and this connection issue came up, she told me that she felt this really strong pull from me about two years prior, and in fact that was how the agency had such an easy time tracking her down. She had contacted them, telling them where she was in the event that I ever wanted to know her. The timing of that coincided with my parents getting divorced, a point in my life when I felt ripped apart, like the rug had totally been pulled out from under me. So I asked her if there had been any other time that she had felt that kind of pull from me, and she told me yes. After working out the timing (she's not the most linear person on the planet, which explains where I get that from) we figured out that it was around the time I was about twelve or thirteen.
It coincided with the time when I cried myself to sleep at night, feeling a connection to what I thought was my twin brother. I know in my heart that it was her I was connecting with.
It didn't happen instantly, but over the next several months I weaned myself away from the church. And for a while, my mother took the place of the church, as far as having an authority figure from whom I sought spiritual guidance goes. And for a while, after I stopped going to church (and especially when I started the process of coming out, about a year later) I had a lot of anger at the church. All I could see was how it didn't really accept me for who I was, how it offered what I called "conditionally unconditional love" that ended up making me feel worse than I had before.
It took time for me to leave behind the need for an authority figure to help me figure out what to think, and yet another person in the pantheon of people who've wandered into and out of my life to get me to look back at my experience with the church differently.
Don't groan, but there's more. But I really really really think that one more entry will do it, and then some