This is going to be one helluva night, I thought as she rocked forward on her barstool, grazed her fingertips across the back of my neck and put her berry-bronzed lips to my ear.
“Thank you again,” she said just loud enough to be heard over the new Pearl Jam CD blaring across the PA system in Plums Restaurant.
Setting her stool back on all fours, she smiled at me, then took a languid drink from her second bottle of Blue Moon. They were 50 cents a pop more expensive than my pedestrian Michelob Lights, but when she asked the bartender for one, I ordered a Blue Moon for myself, too, and paid for both. I did not care for the taste, but she was exotic, and I had to hide all signs that I was not. Besides, the additional cost seemed well worth my investment as I watched her mouth curl around the bottle bore and the beer pulse down her delicate throat.
The dinner hour was over and the lights dimmed. The sashes of the ceiling-to-floor windows were flung open, and the humid Lowcountry air barged in like a raucous partygoer. Servers scurried to carry tables off the floor as a band set up in the corner. This was the most magical interval of summertime Fridays for a single, young professional in Beaufort, S.C. — when a fresh buzz turns your every thought effervescent and your belly flutters at the prospect of stretching 15 minutes with a blonde enchantress into an entire evening.
Besides the Blue Moons, we had one other thing in common, if not mutual attraction. Somehow, I had worked up the nerve to approach her, and we moved quickly beyond small talk after discovering we both were adopted as infants. She was really into the topic and did most of the talking. This was doubly fortuitous: It significantly increased the frequency with which she had to lean in close so that I could hear her over the music, and it significantly decreased the odds I would say something stupid to talk my way right out of her knickers.
Nearly three decades on, I cannot remember the finer details of her story — or, for that matter, even her name. Yet, the impression she left was indelible. She was so beautiful.
And she was so sad.
The gist of her story was that her adoptive mother was vain and distant, her father more attentive but hypercritical. She clashed frequently with them both. Over her desire to take horseback lessons instead of piano. Over her decision to attend an out-of-state art college, rather than nursing school in South Carolina. Over the car she drove and how she maintained it, over her grades, her clothes and her taste in boyfriends. They did not “get” her, she explained, growing more sullen with each example and with each swallow.
She hadn’t been back in Beaufort long and wasn’t sure how long she would stay. She was taking a semester off to search for her birth parents — she had already enlisted a private investigator to help — and just knew that by finding them, she would capture the sense of identity and belonging that had eluded her all her life.
She paused as the bartender put a third Blue Moon in front of her. Her fingertip circled the rim; then she lifted the bottle by the neck for another long tug.
Setting the bottle back on its cocktail napkin, she dried her berry-bronzed lips by folding them slowly into her mouth. Then, she lazily lifted her eyes to me until I was staring into dark, mysterious pools. Her expression was soft but unsmiling as we locked gaze.
Damnit, I thought. I think I’m obligated to speak now.
Instinctively, I took a drink of my beer to break our eye contact and leaned away from her until my stool was on two legs. I could not think of what to say next. I had listened to her story with genuine sympathy … but not an ounce of empathy. Her experience — the contentious relationship with her adoptive parents, the desperate longing to find her birth parents, her pervasive and persistent sense of loss — it was all utterly alien to me.
My adoption might have been a handy icebreaker with this girl, but there wasn’t much acreage to our common ground. I felt none of her angst. My adoption was merely a fact about me that, while true enough, I dwelt upon no more than the socks I wore or the toothpaste I brushed with that morning. Back then, I figured my conception was a consequence of teenage indiscretion, and my adoption was simply the most sensitive and sensible way to make something good of it.
Crisis over. Why fret? My life was good.
Boy, the things I was too self-involved to understand back then.
That infant adoptees have no explicit memory of the separation from their biological mothers does not make it any less devastating, psychologist Nancy Verrier argues. In fact, this can intensify and prolong their trauma, since adoptees often suffer the harm with no clue as to its source and no adequate way to articulate their pain
Although I knew not every adoption was woven from rainbows and unicorn manes, I realized neither the number of adoptees whose experience was unlike mine, nor the depth of their despair.
For obvious reasons, children not adopted in infancy necessarily confront anxiety borne of separation and confusion. But even infant adoptees are more prone to separation anxiety, juvenile delinquency, academic underachievement, sexual promiscuity and impulsive behavior than children raised by their biological parents. Adoptees often display low tolerance for frustration and a fear of rejection, and many hoard or steal, as if preparing for a future period of want in which they will have to fend for themselves.
Psychologist and adoptive mother Nancy Verrier notes that infant adoptees share many of these predispositions with premature infants who spend their first hours and days in incubators, deprived of their mother’s touch and gaze. This is unsurprising, given what science teaches about life inside the womb. Research indicates unborn children can recognize their mother’s voice by the third trimester and her face within hours of delivery.
This all suggests that the mother-child relationship begins well before birth, and thus Verrier refers to this separation after 40 weeks of bonding as “the primal wound.” That infant adoptees have no explicit memory of the separation does not make it any less devastating, Verrier argues. In fact, it can intensify and prolong the trauma, since adoptees often suffer the harm with no clue as to its source and no adequate way to articulate their pain.
Indeed, many seem awash in despair and bitterness. In Facebook groups such as “Adoption Sucks” or “Anti-Adoption,” members commonly refer to their experiences as “thefts” or “kidnappings,” express loathing of both adoptive and biological parents, and describe depression, alcoholism or drug abuse that torments them in adulthood. They seem given to unhealthy fits of catastrophizing and binary thinking. Some flatly refuse to express any gratitude at all for their upbringing and advocate the abolition of adoption.
Their stories crush my heart.
But back when that blonde enchantress told me her’s, empathy failed me. So there I sat, fidgeting on my barstool and fumbling for words to answer her silent stare.
“I’m … I’m sorry,” I said, “It must be terrible to feel that way about your parents. Do you think finding your birth parents will make things better, though? Aren’t you afraid that might only make things with your folks worse?”
Before she could answer, the bartender paused the Pearl Jam CD in the middle of “Daughter,” and the band in the corner cranked out its first chord of the night. A loud cheer went up. Without answering, the girl rose, slightly wobbly on her feet, and excused herself to the restroom. On her return, she walked past the empty barstool I had saved for her and began swaying with some girlfriends on the dance floor.
I ordered a Michelob Light.
Later that night, she danced with a guy far better dressed and far more handsome than me. Over the next few weeks, this girl and I bumped into each other once or twice. We smiled and said hello but never had another genuine conversation.
Then, after a while, I just stopped seeing her around.
Looking back, I suppose the more satisfying thing to do with my mouth would have been to plant a kiss on hers, rather than express just how little we actually had in common. But there is no reason to fret over what might have been. Things usually work out for the best, if only you let them, Mom always told me.
And she was right again.
Two years later and three barstools down from the spot where I sat with that sullen adoptee, I worked up the nerve to strike up a conversation with another girl who was way out of my league. I’m still married to her.
But as I wrestled with the consequences of Mom’s death, I sometimes thought back to that girl on the barstool and wondered if she ever found her biological parents. And if she did, whether it brought her the happiness she sought. I hope so.
But that recollection raised other pertinent questions. Questions about me.
Why did I live at home through most of college? Why was I so circumspect about making choices, assuming risk and taking on responsibility? In retrospect, I perhaps suffered more from the primal wound than I ever realized.
Mom was no longer here to nudge me forward, but I realized taking on a level of discomfort, rather than running from it, might be just the sort of thing she would encourage me to do.
So after much delay, the search for my birth mother began.
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