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The Pretty Little House Built on Loss


How do you explain the hurt

underneath the happiness that happens

when a baby finally finds a family

(was the baby really looking for one,

or merely happy for a new one?)

How often does adoption go wrong

or turnout badly

or bring heart ache and disappointment?

Almost always.

What is the fairytale told to terrified teens

about how these fairly odd-mothers

would make it all better

would make their "problem" go away

and make their babies legitimate

in other people's eyes

Women with children of their own,

or infertile women who can't help

casting aspersions on young girls

with inconvenient fertility.

Oh, how times have changed.

The unwed mother swallowed whole

by the Stand alone single mother

One wears a cloak of shame,

the other a superwoman's cape.

Eerily similar our scripts

no matter where the adoptee is from

for the best, given what others couldn't give

Chosen, selected, winning prizes in a baby bonanza

Never be able to find out.

For your own good.

And I am a can of worms, pandora's box

a sleeping dog, the hidden past materialized in living color.

Bringing the past crashing through to the present,

a dare to face the future without the mystery.

My mother wanted babies.

The death of her firstborn

in an overseas tragedy of mythic proportion,

stirred her mother hunger

until she convinced my dad

we would make the perfect accessories

for a business man on the rise.

Hers, not so much his.

Her letter filled with the want of a daughter

and completeness that she might bring to their

socially engineered family

his filled with passive voice,

focused solely on the image of perfection.

A family with one of each.

And what of that “re” union?

Never saw her, never saw him,

there is no Re about any of it.

Well, they said, They certainly could understand my curiosity.

Curiosity? Like the cat? Nosing into everything?

No, it's dismissive to dismiss

a burning desire for knowledge of self

to mere curiosity.

Starring in the role of myself,

I missed the whole first act,

the entire exposition.

How will I know how to act,

how to be, when to step forward?

I ask questions and discover

I am not to ask questions; I am not to know.

Just be satisfied with most of your story.

Just watch the show from here on out.

What happened before isn't important.

Of course not—insignificant enough

for baby showers and baby blankets

and congratulations and cigars all around.

If you want to know who you are,

you have to know where you came from.

If you don't know where you came from,

how can you know who you are?

Nature provided nurture

in motherhood's nurturing nature.

Genetics and experience molded and shaped

and filtered and polished into something more

than what you might have been,

more than the sum of your parts,

and less than too, because the models you have

are not really your models, but stand ins.

My parents never recovered

from the loss of their first daughter

their daughter never got over

the loss of her first mother.

The baby's first mother hid her pain

for 44 years, afraid to trade 3 for one.

Who here didn't lose, at least for a little while?

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