It's difficult to convey the immense inner pain of finally finding my son on Facebook 26 years after kissing him goodbye in the hospital nursery, then losing him again -- possibly forever -- before ever really getting to know him.
I imagine he wholly regrets our brief Internet interactions after getting in the middle of a horrible email fight with long-time friend and fellow birthmother, Sarah, only three weeks after he and I began corresponding.
He must detest me even more for contacting his adoptive parents after he'd made me promise to keep our reunion a secret from them. I betrayed his trust because I was worried about his safety and well-being. I betrayed his trust because I was afraid he'd resort to something drastic -- like my own birthmother 19 years before.
My birthmother's suicide in 1991 will forever haunt me. I will always feel partially responsible for her decision to slip out a 13-story window at Columbia University's physics building that rainy Manhattan morning December 4th. She had scrawled a few lines on the back of a postcard three days before and dropped it into a mailbox on her way to the campus a block from her apartment at Amsterdam and West 119th.
"Dear K-T,
Have a great life. I must go.
The pain must stop.
I love you,
SheMa
Be Kind.
Protect the Earth Planet.
It was wonderful knowing you!"
SheMa had called me at my Lakewood, Colo., apartment just before the Thanksgiving holiday, asking me to send her black leather gloves and an alarm clock, then telling me rather matter-of-factly that she was feeling suicidal. At the time of her call, I was busy getting ready to go on a ski trip to Steamboat Springs with my fiancee's brother and his wife. I didn't have time to listen to her tiring attempts to manipulate me into sending her more money. I didn't want to believe she was serious about killing herself this time. She'd been self-destructive for years, apparently. She had talked of taking her own life many times and, I later discovered, even discussed with her friend Paul the various methods of offing oneself, coming to the conclusion that jumping from a high place would probably be the least painful and most effective.
I just wasn't in the mood to talk to her then and subsequently cut the conversation short, failing to tell her how much I really did love her before hanging up. That was the last time I'd heard from her before hearing of her death from a Littleton, Colo., police officer who'd come to my newspaper office to break the news to me. I was completely numb, not fully grasping what had transpired -- and not hearing him tell me she had jumped to her death. I suddenly went into a daze, like you see in movies when people go into shock after losing a loved one and all sounds fade to black, like you're being sucked into some sort of vortex and out of your own body. It was all so unreal.
What the fuck just happened? Was she really gone? Or was it some sort of sick prank she was playing on me? I'd only just began getting to know her after she'd found me in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1987. I knew she wasn't stable. Our relationship was quite rocky because of her illness and my inability to handle it very well at age 24. But this was too much. Even writing about it now, it still seems a bit detached from my own life, as if I'm reading about someone else's twisted tale or watching a movie about someone else. I guess that's just my natural coping mechanism kicking in to keep me from losing my own sanity.
Now, dealing with my son's silence, it's bringing back some of those same feelings of hopelessness and craving -- like SheMa probably experienced when I began to push her away. I had promised myself I wouldn't put my son through the same psycho shit SheMa put me through, but I think I already have.
I had sent Michael (aka Bucky) a copy of that postcard and several photos of SheMa(aka Shela Marie Paul), my birthfather, their parents, birth uncles, and myself from when I was pregnant with him at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, as well as newspaper clips of Times-Picayune stories written about SheMa's search for me and our reunion in New Orleans in 1987, a copy of a cassette tape of the first phone conversation I'd had with my birthfather's brother, John, when he'd found me in Cleveland, Ohio, and various other items I thought Bucky would appreciate while getting to know me.
The over-stuffed, white padded envelope intended for his 26th birthday had to be sent to one of his friends in Jackson, Miss., because we couldn't risk his parents intercepting it at their Gulfport home, where he'd been living since graduating from Stanford in 2006. He'd had a breakdown and had been hospitalized before finally finding refuge on the top floor of the home he grew up in. His parents would have recognized the name on the package, which was the last thing Michael wanted. He didn't want to hurt his parents -- espcially his mom. He thought if his mom found out he was communicating with me on the sly, she would take it personally, thinking it meant he didn't love her or that he wanted a new mother or something.
Many adoptive parents have trouble understanding an adoptee's need to know where s/he came from. Even my own adoptive mother, Mona, who had always been supportive of my search for my birth parents, suddenly became insecure when I finally did meet my birthmother.
So when I reached out to Michael's father through his email address at his law office after not hearing from Michael in three months, I asked his father to please keep the contact just between us and not tell Michael about it just yet. I needed to know if he was OK, first of all. I didn't want to upset him. I knew he was quite fragile. Michael had conveyed to me how fragile he really was in his first Facebook note to me back in October of 2008.
Below is the first part of that note after I'd sent him a long letter via Facebook, telling him about my background and the adoption and anything else I could think of that would give him a glimps into my life at the time. I wanted him to know that I have always loved him and have never stopped thinking about him and hoping he's had a good life.
"Wow, that was a lot of information. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner. My apprehension has been partially due to the effect this might have on my relationship with my family here, combined with the fact that I'm considered to be somewhat of a strange character of late, and that not only am I somewhat afraid of being a bit of a disappointment to you at this point but whatever psychological strain comes along with this reunion might make it that much harder for me to get my life together and get a job and so on. Yet I think much of what's bothered me in the past few years is the question of who I really am, and it's occurred to me often that I would feel more whole, as you put it, if I could know more about you and my biological roots. It's worth a try. I want to say now, though, that I hope we can keep this a secret from my family for some time, and potentially forever. It was made clear to me on my 18th birthday, when my dad gave me a letter from you he'd had since my birth, that relations between us had the potential to break up our family, and that my mom would probably go to pieces if she found out I had gotten in touch with you. I don't necessarily believe that's the healthiest way to go about it, but that seems to be the way they want it to be. I have to admit it's strange to me when you say that you love me, since we're essentially strangers. I just want to be honest about that. But I can understand that after you took care of me up until I was born, and gave me life, and made sure I would have a family who would be able to take care of me, that love is the word for it. I don't know if I'll be comfortable using that word, but it will be nice to get to know you."
Getting that note from him three days after first contacting him was the happiest day of my life. It was something I'd wanted for many years, hoping he would be the one to initiate contact after realizing I hadn't "abandoned" him because I didn't want him. I had written him a note inside a Flavia card before leaving the hospital in early November of 1982, explaining to him that my love for him gave me no other choice but to give him up to a family that could provide so much more than I ever could.
During the adoption process, that card and what little information I had of my birth family at the time and what his own birthfather had provided about himself and his family were sent to his adoptive parents through the law firm handling the private, closed adoption. The lawyer assured me the parents would give him the packet of information when he turned 18. So I had a feeling he already knew the circumstances of the adoption years before I found him.
That first note from Michael was bittersweet, however, when I realized he had inherited the same sort of illnesses as my birthmother. I became quite saddened and concerned about him then, but tried not to let him know of my fears.
It didn't take long, however, before both of our unstable natures came to the surface and we began lashing out at one another -- just like SheMa and I had in the four short years I knew her. Below are just a few examples of that in his responses to me via email:
"Now you're attacking me and saying that I attacked you. I told you I wasn't attacking you. You're being defensive by attacking me and accusing me of being influenced by Sara to attack you. ===> The more irrational things you throw out there, the more it appears I'm defending her when I tell you that's crazy. <==== You see how that works, don't you? --Beware of what you're doing to yourself here.
And about the temper thing: you sort of revised that history a little bit. I felt bad that you would probably take that stuff pretty hard, and I apologized if it hurt your feelings, but I never said I regretted it, and I still don't, because I did not do it for malicious reasons and I thought those things needed to be made as clear as possible so that we could proceed on a common ground of understanding. I have a clear conscience about it, and I'm kind of miffed that you have interpreted it as me flaring up and striking out for no logical reason. I'm not a child. I don't do that stuff anymore. (I only let the "not your punching bag" thing go because I didn't want to keep fighting.) It occurs to me that psychologically you might have been showing a lot of hurt and victimization when I was honest so that I wouldn't attempt to draw lines between us like that again, so that I wouldn't try to "put you in your place" again. ---
I think that if we're going to establish some sort of relationship you should be open to me being honest about where I need your place to be for me to be comfortable with getting to know you.--- By making me feel so guilty for expressing myself, you make it harder for me to say "no" in the future, and that might only cause me to actually blow up and refuse you after I've surrendered enough lines to be nice and then I find that it is too far over the line. I'm trying to build a healthy friendly relationship between us, and I would not just flail out and hurt you for no good reason. I hope this doesn't seem like salt on your wound, but I have no intention of causing harm. I'd hope you could accept this without flinching if you'd first accept that I'm not malicious and I hope for the best for both of us."
I only heard from him once after sending his birthday package about a week after the above email. I didn't even know if he'd received it until I resorted to contacting his Jackson friend through MySpace and he confirmed he had given Michael the package. A few weeks after that, Michael sent me a short email to tell me he was stepping away from our correspondence for awhile to "reset his batteries." He said it was taking up all his spare time. He said nothing of the package and to this day I don't know if he even went through its contents. He could have tossed the entire envelope in a trash bin, for all I know. Or he could have burned it in a bonfire on the shores of the Gulf Coast, rejoicing in the symbolism of ridding himself of me forever.
It makes me angry, in a way. It seems incredibly selfish of him to just cut me off like that, knowing how much pain he's causing me. But I have to remember he's not well, either, and is fighting against the dibilitating forces of mental illnesses passed down through generations. I must remember to put myself in his shoes, seeing things from his perspective. That's fairly easy, after all -- He's in the same place with me that I was with my birthmother 20 years before.
Only this time, he's the one in danger of permanently retreating from this world.
