 by Ruby Barnett Truth. I’ve learned that we all have our own truths, sometimes overlapping, intersecting, sometimes not. Many of them can be, indeed are, true at the same time. And some cannot. (NOTE: Some names have been changed.) “This is my daughter,” she says, as she pulls me in closer, her hand in the arch of my back. Gentle but firm. Gentle as long as I don’t resist. Her smile is plastered across her face. Other people remember her from her smile, but I know the differences between them. This one has gritted teeth behind it.
I move as instructed, flash my smile, shake hands, nod demurely. “Oh, she looks just like you. Beautiful.” My face drops. I don’t know how to do the face I’m supposed to have in response. I want to scream. Adopted or not, I don’t look anything like her. I wish I did. Then we could put our hair up together, put on lipstick and perfume and talk about clothes. Instead, I have unruly curls that can’t be controlled, I don’t wear makeup, perfume makes me gag. And clothes are a boring societal necessity. “Thank you” she responds, graciously. My internal scream continues. Aren’t we supposed to tell the truth? oooOooo When I started searching for my birthmother, I found her brother Shaun first. Shaun, Sean, or Shawn—it had some kind of unusual spelling. He hadn’t heard from Janice in decades and gave me his, their, her mother’s number. Shirley had not had any contact with Janice in fifteen years. We chatted on the phone a couple of times. She told me that she had wanted me to be called Melissa, she had wanted to adopt me. Years later, she’d adopted her other daughter’s child and named her Melissa. Shirley proudly boasted of then seven-year-old Melissa’s achievements in school and dancing and extra-curricular math and drama … and … and…. oooOooo When I found my birthfather, he said that he was never sure there actually had been a baby. He knew Janice had said she was pregnant, but she said all kinds of things. It didn’t mean they were true. She wanted one of his brothers but still ended up with him. She was mostly always high or drunk or both. We should do a DNA test—on him, he said. Sure. We both swabbed our cheeks, thousands of miles away from each other, and sent them in. In the meantime, we emailed every day. Sometimes twice a day. First and last thing. The time difference kind of lent itself to that. It builds a rapid (feeling of)intimacy. oooOooo When one of my sixty-something letters to women with my birth mother’s name finally landed in the correct mailbox, she called. “Is that Susanne? This is your bio-mum!” I was stunned, quiet for once, having picked up the phone unsuspectingly on a regular Tuesday evening. She carried on, “But you got some of that stuff wrong. Like your birthday. You weren’t born on July 23rd, 1969. You were born on the 24th of July, 1968.” What? I had just been beginning to consider the one-day difference. After all, it would have an effect on my sun sign, I was on the cusp anyway, so this would change my sign. But did she just tell me I was born a whole year earlier than I thought? A year and a day. Could that be possible? My mind flicked through various scenes of my childhood, my adolescence. I was one of the last girls in my year to get my period and it was even later that my ever-to-be-small tits would develop. A full year older? I thought of some of those in the year above at school. I would have been even more awkward and inadequate if I’d been expected to keep up with them. She’s not the most reliable of truth providers. She’s had a rough life. A hard knock to the head from a heavy swing when she was three years old. Physical abuse at home from her father, her stepfather, and maybe her brother. Maybe the abuse was sexual too. Drugs, drinking, juvenile hall, then me. Giving birth to me, taking me home, keeping me there for …well, that we don’t know, but somewhere from three weeks to five months. No information currently available to me at least, to pinpoint any more accurately. I’d like to know. Those first few months in an infant’s life are pretty important. Now they call them the fourth trimester. I don’t think the date is right. I think the birthday I grew up with is the real one. But I don’t know how to be sure anymore. I don’t know what is true. oooOooo One of my tires blew out while I was in the fast lane, overtaking a big lorry. We spun in circles, crashing into the central barrier, eventually coming to a stop with the oncoming traffic coming straight towards us. Miraculously we were all ok. The tow truck took us all the way home – although we’d set off on a seven-hour journey, we hadn’t got very far. They wouldn’t let the dog ride in the cab of the tow truck, so she had to sit in the car as it was pulled. She sat upright in the driver’s seat the whole way. I arrived home to an envelope on the doormat. It was from the lab. With 99.09% accuracy, he was my father. Ten years after that, he remarried his first wife, who had been his girlfriend at the time I was born. She told us both that he had definitely known that I existed. He’d even visited me, when I was a newborn, at Janice’s house. His parents had told him he must, and that he couldn’t go empty handed, so she had gone with him to pick out clothes for me. I was definitely real. oooOooo Janice’s younger sister, the one whose daughter is the next Melissa, told me she remembered my father fondly. “Oh, we loved being in that kitchen. There was always food and we were always hungry. Don’t you remember, Janice, the bread? Just out of the oven?”. They both swooned a little, then looked into each other's faces as they exclaimed “The cheese!”. “Dan’s father made cheese and he hung it from the ceiling in the kitchen!”. They both laughed. “I guess it was drying or something. All these wheels of cheese, hanging down on strings, all over the kitchen”. Dan says neither of them ever came to his house. His father did not make cheese. There was never anything hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen. Or any other room. oooOooo My birth certificate shows my adoptive mother as having given birth to me, in a hospital that she has never set foot in. A legal document deliberately recording a falsity. My original birth certificate remains sealed by the California courts. I am not allowed to see it. I could petition the court if I had extraordinary circumstances to exhibit. Such petitions are rarely successful. oooOooo Like so many of us, I decided to search because I couldn’t stand the not-knowing anymore. An attempt to fill the vast abyss of nothingness. Instead, I found multiple truths. Only some of them can really be true and I’m not sure how to work out which. About the Author: Ruby was born in California, adopted by English parents, and brought up in North London. She’s spent most of her life so far over-achieving, then abandoning her achievements. She spent some years searching for and eventually finding her birth parents. Over the twenty years since then, she has been learning how to deal with some of the trauma from being relinquished, adopted, and never-quite-belonging. The path to healing is long and labyrinthine. She is currently living in self-imposed exile less than twenty miles from the place of her birth, working on a collection of writing. AKA invites you to hear from members of the extended family of adoption and the surrounding community. While we take great care in curating the content, please know:
3 Comments
Ruby
4/28/2024 10:53:22 am
Thank you 💚
"Multiple truths - only one of which can be true." Leave a Reply. |
Back to Main BlogNewsletter ArchivesBlog Archive
December 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed