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.

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