Once the news was out there, my father looked tired and old. He said it was time to have dinner and thus ended our “adoption talk.”
I felt that he wanted everything to be as it was before—as if the adoption didn’t matter—but such a scenario wasn’t possible.
I was like one of those fake snakes that had exploded from a faux can of nuts, the gag gift any child can purchase in a prank joke store. In Bryan’s declaration and my father’s confirmation, I had been freed from my own confining space and learned how I was someone else’s child with a story beyond Janet’s rotting sickness, Bryan’s seething anger, and Bud’s long days of work. These people were living their lives, not mine. My life was out there, somewhere.
But since my father wasn’t going to talk this out and help me sort the story, I had to figure it out myself. That’s when I slipped into the closet, covert and quiet. I plotted my escape.
AS THE LIGHT of the setting sun fell through the slats of the closet door, I opened the lid of the Barbie suitcase and dumped out doll clothes, Malibu Suntan Barbie, and a few pairs of plastic shoes. The junk tumbled over suede loafers and patent leather pumps.
By my estimation, the little case could hold a couple pair of underwear, an extra pair of pants, and a sweater. I’d put the rest of my clothes on and head out the door.
I told myself that maybe the trouble had passed for my first mother and first father. Maybe they wanted me back. I could see myself in Reno, standing in front of Harrah’s casino and surveying the main drag. But then my vision faded and it was just me in the closet again.
I asked myself some very adult questions next: How in the world are you going to make your way to Reno? What if your real parents aren’t there anymore? And—think about this—what if they don’t want you back?
It is said that an adopted child has two identities—that of being the child who has adapted to the family where she has been placed, and that of being a shadow baby of the mother who gave her life. The baby part is waiting to be fully born. The growing child is conforming and shaping and bending to fit the adoptive family in order to ensure a secure place.
I distinctly felt these two worlds at play within my small body on that day in the closet. I had been awakened to the reality of another life—yet to be lived—and I was also forced to accept, for my very survival, that I could not yet access that original life.
A FEW MONTHS later, Janet died. The date was September 19, 1971. This was Bryan’s birthday. Like me, my brother lost his mother on the day he was born—only ten years later.
I hurt for him in a way that couldn’t be spoken. It was empathy. I knew something about how Bryan felt on that hard day.
JANET AND I never spoke about the adoption or that I had been told the truth.
When she died, I felt great empathy for Bryan but I did not feel sad the way many children do when they lose their mothers. Grief came inevitably; it was actually expected. But for me sadness was not the first emotion. At the age of seven, I felt defeat. Janet’s death became my first failure. I had been God’s gift and had let her down.
SIX
COME LOOK
IT’S FUNNY THE way we lock our stories down in the past and walk away, as if memory will be obedient and stay put. I’ve learned, the hard way, that it doesn’t work like that. Unless you are Peter Pan, the shadow you cast stays pretty close to your heels.
As my son Spencer grew into a fine little boy—fast smile, curious mind, and an eagerness to take things apart and reassemble them again—I tripped in and out of the canyons of memory and excavated quite a bit of my story. I typed everything on the page. Mornings were walks to the bagel store at the top of the hill, afternoons found us on park swings, and evenings were for splashing together in the hot tub, eating dinner, building LEGOs, and reading books. During naps and early in the morning, I wrote my life. Next to being a mother to Spencer, writing into the past was my job.
As my husband traveled a lot, in fact most of those first three years, it was just Spence and I.
It seems a little odd to say it this way but Spencer and I were like best friends—or maybe twins. He was the baby I delivered and I had become the phantom baby I had carried in my own mystery bag of water. I had given birth to myself in the form of a shadow—a ghost—and now, Spencer and I were growing together.
WHEN SPENCER WAS four years old, I had my daughter—wispy blond hair, heart-shaped face, and eyes that were a dove-soft shade of medium blue that might be called gray. I named her Josephine Catherine.
Where Spencer’s birth had been urgent and scary, Jo arrived in a state of relative calm. She was two weeks late. I hired an unruffled doctor who told me to take my time pushing and I watched Jo enter the world thanks to a mirror positioned near the end of the bed.
Once my daughter was born, we were apart for just seconds and then she remained in my arms for most of the next several years. On our first night together, she stayed in my room, ten pounds of sleeping baby snuggled close to my side, and I found myself studying the shadows of our hospital room.
I was taken back to that day Bryan told me I had been adopted. I thought of that young girl my father had told me about, the one he said had “gotten in trouble” by being pregnant with me.
Before having my own daughter, I hadn’t allowed myself to give much thought to that person—that birth mother. I had told myself that she really didn’t matter much to my story. After all, the biggest part of the past was what I could remember, right? I told myself that what mattered most had been the deaths of my family and the years of striving to survive.
In the way that Spencer’s birth began my awakening process, Jo’s birth continued to unfold my psyche and reveal the many dimensions of truth. My thoughts now jumped from their rigid linear tracks and swirled like currents of air to become like a dance, or a prayer, or maybe even a song.
My first mother felt very important to me in light of Josephine Catherine. Jo was a link in the lineage of women that connected me to my mother and my mother to her mother and on back through the generations. I wanted to tell my mystery mother, that troubled young girl from so long ago, that Josephine was here—a granddaughter. I wanted to say, “Come look!”
SEVEN
KARMA
ON THE SURFACE of things, it seemed I had named my daughter after my dad. He was Joseph and so, she became Josephine. She was born in the same month he had been: February. I would tell people that I named Jo as a way to keep Bud close and to keep me on task when it came to thinking about the man, his life, and his choices. There was so much about my father I didn’t understand. The name Catherine was just a favorite I carried around through childhood, a fancy and a secret.
AFTER JANET’S FUNERAL in 1971, my father moved us to L.A., and we lived in a sprawling bungalow with a wide porch, hardwood floors, built-in cabinets, and an impossible number of rooms and floors.
The owner of the house was a woman who had three children. She was known as a divorcée.
At first, the divorcée was just a friend. Soon she was upgraded to my father’s fiancée. Then she became his wife.
This transition took place within six months of Janet’s death.
What of loyalty?
What of grief?
What of the mourning period?
AUNTIE CAROL CAME to visit us in L.A., just before hasty nuptials were exchanged. She wanted to meet this new woman and had a plan to clean out the old apartment in Hermosa Beach.
Auntie Carol dragged me along as assistant—she said the work would do me good.
AUNTIE CAROL WAS my father’s older sister and was an awesome no-nonsense presence—a powerhouse of full-bodied womanhood with thick thighs and a wide behind. Her breasts were so huge, they were like lampshades under her sweater. When she walked, her steps made the earth move and her voice was a booming drum that rattled the bones.
Auntie Carol was also considered a bit of a mystic. She read Tarot cards and palms. My cousins said she could see the future.
; The woman scared me to death.
DURING OUR DAY of scrubbing and sorting, the apartment was bleached free of our smells, and our clothes, toys, and household goods were sorted into storage boxes. While we worked, Auntie Carol talked. She said my father wanted to put the past in the past and move on with his life. She said it was good he had a healthy woman to love. And she said that Janet had been sick for all of their marriage—which had taken a toll on him.
“He deserves a little happiness,” I remember her saying, as if my father had been very unhappy before.
WHEN THE JOB was done and it was time to go back to the divorcéelandlord-fiancée’s house, Auntie Carol gave me a few treasures: Bud and Janet’s wedding album, Janet’s wedding ring, and a necklace of perfectly matched freshwater pearls.
I did not want these things. I told Auntie Carol to give the stuff to Bryan. “He’s her son,” I added.
In the old days, Auntie Carol would have swatted my butt and pressed my willful face into a corner but on that day, she seemed almost impressed.
“Look,” she said, “if I wanted to give these things to Bryan, I would have. I am giving them to you because you are the daughter.”
I eyed her with a look that said I wasn’t the daughter and she knew it. Again, Auntie Carol paused. She must have realized that I knew I was adopted.
She cleared her throat and pulled herself up.
“You listen to me little girl. You are the daughter,” she said, “and it’s your job to remember your mother.”
To remember was an intriguing and even tantalizing assignment. I thought, I can do that! I can remember.
Auntie Carol, without the benefit of Tarot or palm, had predicted my future.
MY FATHER’S NEW wife had a name. I won’t write it here. Nor will I write the names of her children.
The stepmother I will call Deb, and her kids I will call Christopher, Veronica, and Kendall. I’ll say Veronica and Kendall were twins, just a few days older than me and were like wild alley cats—red hair and freckles everywhere.
I’ll say Christopher was fourteen years old with curly blond hair and was skinny and pale, as if he had been sick.
Deb was like every evil stepmother in every fairytale I have ever read. She was skinny with wide bony hips and a flat, unimpressive chest. Her face was long and narrow too. She was downright unattractive but that’s not how other people remembered her.
I have been told she was pretty and quite smart.
At eight, I didn’t see it. I considered Deb to be a major step down.
My mother had been Jackie Kennedy.
Deb was a cross between a haggard Jane Fonda and perhaps an older version of Jennifer Beals in Flashdance—headbands, leg warmers, and big sweatshirts that hung below her hips.
My mother had been patient, gentle, and kind. I don’t remember her ever being angry or cruel—especially to a child.
Deb seemed to go out of her way to be cruel, which was likely the result of a distressing childhood of her own, but when I was eight years old I wasn’t considering the woman’s psychological profile. That wasn’t my job.
My father’s state of mind was my primary concern and the only explanation I could find was one I had borrowed from the fairytale Snow White. That father, the king, had lost his beloved queen and in a mind-bending state of ruinous grief, he married the evil stepmother. I concluded that my own father, in the same predicament as the king, had temporarily lost his mind.
BRYAN DID NOT fit into the new family. Now and then, Christopher, Kendall, and Veronica included him in their trio but then they’d turn against him with a snide comment or a collective snub. No matter what approach Bryan tried—as bully, as charmer, as cooperative player—he was never accepted.
Deb called him fat and inferior and fed her contempt to her children. They gobbled it up and called him fat too.
In order to cope, Bryan took refuge in music. Led Zeppelin became a favorite band. He wore bubble headphones that made him look like a bug and disappeared into lyric and sound.
BY 1973, WE had moved from the big house in L.A. to a house in Fountain Valley and then to a house in Huntington Beach. By the time I was nine years old, I was given a bedroom set from the catalogue pages of Sears. My room became a fairytale of white furniture with gold trim, a canopy bed, and every shade of pink for the curtains and bedspread.
In this sacred place, I discovered sanctuary and the power of solitude. I listened to soundtracks from West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof—two of my favorite movies. I also listened to my father’s old Cat Stevens’s tapes and learned all the words to “Morning Has Broken,” “Peace Train,” and “Wild World.” I was crazy for The Beatles and The Jackson 5. Soon I discovered books that had been recorded on albums. The Lorax, The Sneetches, Yertle the Turtle, Horton Hears a Who, and Green Eggs and Ham. Holding a book, I’d follow along with the narrator’s voice and like magic, random letters became words and words shaped sentences. Paragraphs emerged and knitted themselves into chapters. Finally, whole stories revealed themselves and I gained entry into a world that would serve me for the rest of my life. Reading.
ON DECEMBER 4, 1973, my father had a heart attack.
No one saw it coming.
He was just gone.
Deb said it was my father’s own fault. She said the word “karma” at a time when very few people were using that term. “He had wished such a death on his business partner,” she said. “It was karma.”
KARMA IS DEFINED as a noun and is often interpreted as “fate.” In the eastern sensibility, the word karma is Sanskrit for action as well as for cause and effect. Karma—when you really look at it—is a verb. Cause and effect are active principles—changing constantly and largely impacted by the focal point of “intent.”
Philosophers, scholars, and great masters will debate, for hours, the issue of karma. Understanding karma is a jumping off point for some of the greatest mystic teachings. I know, I’ve been there listening to these teachings and have taken copious notes. I likely became a student of the word “karma” in order to scour all evidence of Deb’s perspective from my own thinking like one scrapes the remains of a splattered bug from a windshield.
And yet Deb remains one of my most vivid teachers. When a lesson really sinks in, it is usually the result of a hard moment in life that has been fully brought to light. Deb blaming my father’s death on karma was one of these moments.
Let me imagine my father did wish a heart-attack death on his business partner. Let me invent a scene between my father and Deb, in their marital bedroom with rumpled sheets and whispered pillow talk after the five kids were asleep, and he says, “I hate my business partner, I wish he’d just die.”
If he did say such a thing, did he truly intend for his business partner to die? Did he go on, after he was out of their bed and dressed for his day, to strategize a way to induce a heart attack in his partner?
I certainly didn’t know my father well, but he was no killer. The man loved the ocean and longed for his own sailboat. He was searching for meaning and security. He listened to the songs of Cat Stevens.
My father was flawed—all human beings are. But I’m pretty sure his death wasn’t the result of a bad feeling, or even a dark statement made about a business partner.
I’m quite sure my father did not intend for his words to be used as a sword against his own children either.
It is likely that my father died from years of bad thoughts, heavy thoughts, worried thoughts, and more, the mounting debt that took him further away from his dream of being a millionaire by the time he was forty.
My father died when he was thirty-nine years old.
EIGHT
THE LESSON
“HOW MUCH DO YOU love me?” Spencer asks.
“I love you over the moon, around each and every star, and back to planet earth where I turn over every rock until I find you,” I say.
“How much do you love me?” Josephine asks.
“Well, I love you up to the
sun, down a rainbow, all the way to the bottom of the ocean, through a meadow of wildflowers, and into the center of your heart,” I say.
By the time Spencer is ten and Jo is five—this is how it goes—the two of them want to know how much I love them again and again and then one more time. I have crafted little tales of my love to fit their unique personalities. Spencer has a penchant for playing hide and seek and he loves space travel. Jo has become an artist who draws and paints landscapes that include sunshine, oceans, rainbows, and flowers.
When we all lay together at night, reading our books and drinking pots of mint tea that Jo makes from the garden out front, they ask me these questions about love as if my answer will change.
“Do you love Spencer more?” Jo asks.
“No.”
“I know you love Jo more than you love me,” Spencer tries.
“Not true,” I say.
They look at each other across my body. Jo is under my left arm, Spencer is under my right, and they are just sure, this time, I’m going to slip.
“Come on,” Spencer says, “Jo was the easier baby.”
“That’s true,” Jo nods.
“Nope, not easier, different.”
“But Spencer didn’t sleep like I did,” Jo counters.
“He slept enough,” I say. “And sleep doesn’t equal love.”
“I know you love her more because she does better art,” Spencer says.
“Not true,” I say.
“You love him more because he was first,” Jo points out.
Finally, I laugh out loud because they are so funny and silly and deluded!
“To say I love one of you more than the other is like saying my left arm is better than my right, or that I like one leg better than the other. I love you both. Both of you are essential.”