Playing tennis
There are several entries for me to write about tennis but this one is going to relate to adoption. Somehow. I’m thinking out loud here so bear with me.
This is how I started playing tennis. I would go outside and hit tennis balls against the garage. Because it was all we had I used one of my mom’s old racquet ball rackets. I did this every day after school in ninth grade unless I had to babysit and then I would come home in the dark and do it then. (Even in winter, as long as there wasn’t snow or rain.)
You know how it is when you’re a teenager and you can spend hours doing one thing in order to do it right. The rhythmic thonk-thonk-thonk of the ball would lull me into a daydreaming mood where I could contemplate my life or tell myself stories. Sometimes I would count to see how many times I could hit the ball before I missed and sometimes I didn’t. For Christmas that year I asked for and received an actual tennis racket.
I don’t know how I decided to try out for the tennis team because my family, we aren’t joiners. And most of us are not athletic. (Certainly not in my then-family of my sister, my brother, my mother and me.) I also wasn’t much for school spirit so playing on a team for my school was another reason not to do it. I can’t remember how or why I made my decision to try out but I did decide to do it and so one summer morning I biked the five miles to the high school for practice and then I biked the five miles home. I did this every day until try-outs and somehow I made the team (junior varisty, doubles) even though I’d never actually played tennis, didn’t know the rules and didn’t know how to serve. I was proud of myself.
Now — no one in my family ever came to one of my tennis games. I paid for my own uniform, arranged my own transporation whenever possible, and gave up trying to get my parents excited about my being on the team. I did it for one year and then quit. I never did learn how to serve. (Still don’t know how to serve.) It’s what you might call a sore spot for me because no one seemed to care what I was doing back then. I was smacking that ball around in a vacuum and eventually it wasn’t worth it.
Later my dad’s fifth child (out of six) with his third wife decided she liked tennis. She was about two when I was playing and her arrival is probably one of the reasons why my dad was too busy to come to my games. (The other reason is that my dad was just a pretty neglectful dad but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here.) When she got into tennis my dad got her: private lessons, the best racket, tennis whites and fancy shoes. He also had formal pictures taken of her with her racket sent the picture to me. Then he invited me to go to one of her games because being so into tennis myself, surely I’d want to see my little sister play.
Ouch.
Here is when this gets to be about adoption. (Or at least this was what I was thinking when I was hitting a tennis ball against a wall last night while Brett and the kids were playing at the park next to the courts.)
I think my troubled relationship with my dad and my little sisters has a lot to do with how I’ve come to think about openness. My relationship with my dad has, for most of my life and certainly most of my adult life, been very painful for me. There’s a whole lot in it that can make me cry and cry I do — on the way home from his house, after hanging up the phone with him, etc.. There have been times when I’ve had to take breaks from him — both long (two years not speaking) and short (when I beg off from an invitation to see him). I don’t really have relationships with either of my little sisters. I don’t know them very well, don’t understand them very much and sometimes the symbolism of their existence is enough to make me want to avoid them. I have a hard time making sense of what they mean to me. They are not quite family to me (I don’t relate to them by virtue of age and background) but they are most certainly family and I know that I will need to come to terms with that somehow. So far it’s been a long (two decades) process.
So I can see that family is sometimes like family and sometimes not. I can see how it is to be related to someone and yet not know them. I understand that pretending that biology doesn’t matter doesn’t make the complications of a relationship any easier to bear.
I think sometimes that it’s being a writer that makes me dwell on things. My brother and sister don’t feel as fractured in their relationships with my little sisters (quick aside: when people ask if I have siblings, I usually forget to mention my two youngest half-sisters and almost always forget my oldest half-sister who I haven’t seen in 23 years) although they’ve had to do their own work around it. The three of us have very different experiences of the divorce, my father, his other families. For me it’s always been harder. I have always come undone more quickly and more severely. Frankly, being around my dad has caused me a lot of angst that sometimes I wish I could avoid. But I can’t. He is my father. And those are my sisters.
When I think about Madison having contact with her first family I think about how people sometimes say closed is better because we need to protect our children from pain. Or people will advocate being … careful with the truth because it will cause pain. But pain is just part of the legacy of some families. It’s not that I want Madison to hurt (or that my mother wanted me to hurt) but this is the truth of things. My father is not the father I would have chosen had I gotten to choose but he’s my dad. I resented him bitterly for hurting me but I also (as an adult) understand why it happened. It trampled my self-esteem to be rejected by him but it also made me stronger. I will always miss not getting to be closer to him but I am grateful that I have found a way to love him for who he is.
I’m not comparing Jessica to my dad. I’m talking about this misguided idea that we can or should protect our children from knowing the truth about people. Someone said, “I know an adoptee who had an open adoption and he doesn’t like his birth mom and wishes he hadn’t had to have a relationship with her” as an argument against full openness. But how lucky this guy was to find out he doesn’t like her — on his own! How much worse to have a fantasy that is smashed if/when they reunite. How lucky to have the freedom to know his first mom and know that he doesn’t like her! I have friends who are adopted and who are afraid of reunion because they’re afraid of this guy’s story — what if they don’t like their first families? And that’s sad because what if they would?
Reunions look so damn hard. I don’t want Madison to have to “reunite” with Jessica. (Bad enough that it looks like she’ll have to reunite if she wants contact with the paternal side of her first family.) It looks much more difficult than struggling with but learning to accept the inevitable flaws of actual human beings. It might have made my teen years easier if my dad had just disappeared but I still would have been haunted by him.
(You know, I just thought of something. My oldest half-sister was adopted by her stepdad when she was very young. My dad disappeared from her life for a long time and I think haunted really is the best word for how that was for her — at least from what Erica has learned from her. Erica, you’ll recall, is my whole sister as opposed to one of the halfs. And Erica was haunted by this oldest half-sister, too, and by a baby my mom lost at birth. Erica has always felt haunted by the sisters who might have been.
And that reminds me of something else. My mom used to say that I looked a lot like my oldest half-sister. When I was a teen-ager this fascinated me. I thought it must mean something and I also had this fantasy about meeting her and what that would be like and how she would really like me because I looked like her. Then when I was thirteen she flew out to see us all — she must have been 20 or so? — and she didn’t like me much at all. Looking back I realize that seeing us must have been like what I have with my littlest sisters only to the nth degree, since she was harboring her own fantasies. The visit, as I remember it, was a total disappointment for everyone and I haven’t seen her since. She quit talking to my dad for about a decade after that and went through her own troubles. It was all so half-there. So not one and not the other. Everyone’s heart cracking into little pieces because what we were pretending wasn’t true.
My meandering, rambling point is that you can’t get away from this. You can’t just excise people from photo albums and pretend they don’t matter. You have to let your kids have that opportunity to make sense of it themselves. For all my misery with my dad, it’s nothing compared to the misery my oldest half-sister has had because I had more of him. I knew what he was and she didn’t and so she always thought it was her, that something was wrong with her or why wouldn’t he be there?
Hmmm, I started this writing about tennis and look where I ended up. I’m not going to re-read — I’m just hitting publish. Sorry that this is so disjointed and ridiculous.
September 15th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
I so agree with this. The more I’ve been reading in the adoption blogosphere of late the more I’ve been struck that there is a whole lot of unexamined idealizing that goes on. *What* gets idealized depends on who is doing the idealizing — sometimes it’s the first mom, sometimes it’s the adoptive family. In this case — the case of adoptive families that are leery about openess out of a desire to spare their child painful truths, I think there is an idealization of “normal” family life. It’s a strange assumption to me that the adoptive family [the "real" family] will automatically not be the locus of painful truths. When the reality is that the vast majority of us — adopted or not [as you post here]– find our families of origin to be messy places that leave us a legacy of hurts as well as love. Why should we espect first families to be any different?
September 15th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
In talking about reunion you said “It looks much more difficult than struggling with but learning to accept the inevitable flaws of actual human beings.”
I this this is true, although I can’t speak from experience since our kids haven’t been able to reunite. But I can speak of the difficulty the presence of a phantom, unknown family has - and it’s hard. I’m realizing now that what I have fantasized and what our kids have fantasized are different things - and then there’s DH who doesn’t fantasize at all. We’re all in different places, and all our places are based on imaginary people.
Although I can’t speak from experience, I know in my gut that it is better for our kids to know their families and deal with their imperfections than to have to manage their imaginations all the time.
And this was absolutely not disjointed at all.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
My daughter told me that reunion was emotionally difficult for her. I know if she’d had some contact with me growing up she wouldn’t have had to go through that. Plus she wouldn’t have had to imagine what I looked like or who I was, wouldn’t have had to have some fantasy person in her mind.
I’m sorry about your dad. I can relate.
The other things why openess is important is if you read Another Amy’s blog she writes that her daughter loves her parents but always felt a bit different, genetic mirroring is really important.
Things like the sound of voice, the rythm of speaking, the way you move, taste in things, phrasing, mannerisms are all genetic. It’s important to see those things and see where you come from.
When I picked up my daughter from the airport I couldn’t see her but I could see a shadow moving through a chink in the glass, it was someone moving like I move and I knew it was her.
Not only for the child is opnenss important, I suffered enourmously not knowing how she was and where she was. I literally pined for her. If you are too scared to have a civil relationship with the child’s mother, if you are too weak to be able to set boundaries or work conflicts out with the family of origin then you are not strong enough to be an adoptive parent. Then you are not worthy of the job.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
I like the way the post was written - I like the transition. All children want to be loved and appreciated by their parents-present or not. Even though we may never get the support we crave or bond with them the way we hope, I believe it is impossible to turn off the desire for support and connection. I am waiting for an international adoption and the part that worries me the most is knowing that the child will not have a chance at finding her birth family. And I worry about the pain and hole that will create for her. It would kill me, and I am sure it would torment almost anybody. The great empty unknown. Messy or not, helping your daughter maintain as much as you can of her history, her world, herself, seems like the healthiest path.
September 15th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Weird. Your dad sounds like my dad. I had a very similar experience with a younger stepsister. I’ve also gone through similar changes in my relationship with my dad.
The thing is, he’s my dad. There are a lot of things I really like about my dad even if he wasn’t a great father.
Anyway, before I go on, I just wanted to say that I got that whoa feeling reading your post.
September 15th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
I have an older half-brother (through my mother; he is a bit over a year older than me) who was given up for adoption at his birth. I have a younger sister (2 years apart) with both the same parents, and a much younger (11 years) half-brother (different father).
Our older brother didn’t find us until 5 days after our mother died (two years ago). I don’t know him at all: he looks like family but doesn’t talk or act like family. However, I am severely estranged from both my mother’s and father’s family (I really only see my sister and her kids), and I understand other members of our mother’s family are getting to know him very well.
I am a difficult person, and my childhood was only made more difficult by the way my family behaved toward me. I’ve chosen to cut off contact (after years of therapy, and I have a happy and succesful adult life) rather than deal with the issues they refuse to admit even exist.
My brother who was adopted out didn’t contact us earlier because his sister (also adopted) was rejected completely by her birth mother when she attempted to reunite. I know how much our mother wanted to know him, and it is such a tragedy that he didn’t call until after she died.
September 16th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Type your comment here.
September 16th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
amen. so much of your experience reminded me of my own. familial relationships have always fascinated me. it makes perfect sense that i adopted domestically.
September 16th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
It’s not ridiculous, it’s lovely. I don’t have any experience with adoption, but a little with foster care, and I agree with you a hundred percent. You can’t change the biology…but you can support your children as they learn how to manage it.
September 16th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Lovely & thoughtful. Thank you.
September 17th, 2006 at 10:44 am
Type your comment here.
I’m a stepmother and I can really relate to what you are saying. It’s really hard watching my stepdaughter choose which relationships she will have with which child. She rings religiously for my older child’s birthday but has never rung for my younger child’s birthday. She was around in the early years of my older son’s life but not my younger son’s.
It’s hard. I don’t like her relationship with her dad in that they are so rarely in contact but when they are it’s like they never had a break. I don’t get it but it works for them.
Messy messy stuff esp when I want to make them behave according to my emotional needs.
September 17th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
I just read this. NOT disjointed! NOT ridiculous. It resonated on so many levels with me. It’s a beautiful, powerful post and it TOTALLY all ties together - the symbolism of the tennis, and the little sisters… and the big half sister. It made me think, a LOT, about my two half siblings (my birthmother’s kids after me). We had a brief time of good relationship for a while, but then when things got tough, they just disappeared and it hurt a lot; I felt so, I don’t know, disposable. I had been longing for them my whole life, but they hadn’t had any idea about me, and I think that I was also, symbolically uncomfortable for them. So when we hit little bumps in the road they were not a fraction as much committed to connection as I was. It was so painful. But something about your post made me somehow see things from THEIR side. It still hurts, but I think I understand a little more. Thank you.
September 18th, 2006 at 2:30 am
What a beautiful post, Dawn.
September 18th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
“You can’t just excise people from photo albums and pretend they do’t matter. ”
I might still have the photos my ex-husband sent me of a family (his) gathering — with himself and our kids cut out of it. He also sent me a blank picture frame, one that had an adorable picture of the kids in it.
I would like to write a big curse word about him here, but it’s a family site.
September 18th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
[...] Also, thank you for giving me encouragement on my tennis post; it means a lot to me. Truly. [...]
September 18th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
wow…I missed this when you first posted. Damn skimming of Bloglines!
1) Tennis: I wish I had a backboard to go hit balls again. I use to ride down the street to a local school & use a high brick wall for practice. I did try out, but got my ass whooped by all the preppy girls who did have private lessons.
2) Dads: Seems like we have a simliar relationship with our dads. Of course, mine has been with me my whole life, but still distant. People say I should give him some slack because he didn’t have a dad to show him the way. But I don’t buy it too much as the hubby didn’t have a very loving dad either, but the hubby’s a great father.
I could go on and on, but I won’t take up more of your space. Think this would be a good op-ed for LM? How my father figures into my mothering? LMK.
3)Family: def. the people around you who love and support you. Blood or not. My immediate family is made up of only one blood relative and that’s Ella.
*hugs*
June 23rd, 2007 at 9:30 am
[...] What sports did you play? tennis my sophomore [...]