Golden Strangers: An Adoption Memoir

Her husband, John G. Robison, was the head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts. Even though the marriage soured, she stayed in it because she felt she had to. I cared about him; I didn't want him to kill himself. Robison says Turcotte — who seems like an irresponsible quack in Burroughs' memoir — was, at least in the beginning, a stabilizing force in her life.

He saw the possibility that he could kill himself or some of us. No one had ever seen that before. Robison's memoir describes her psychotic breakdowns and the time she spent in mental hospitals, as well as her eventual realization that the psychiatrist was doing more harm than good. Although her oldest son, John Elder Robison, left home at age 16 to escape the chaos in his family, he still credits the psychiatrist with initially providing great help. Turcotte, before he spiraled into his own nuttiness, was a brilliant guy. My mother says that, I say that, we agree," he says.

Diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome as an adult, John Elder Robison says he used to be ashamed to talk about his childhood. Now he has written his own memoir and a new book on living with Asperger's called Be Different. He says it was his brother's book that changed the way he thought about his own life. John Elder Robison admits that the memories in each of the books about his family vary on certain details, but he argues that the inconsistencies don't detract from the bigger picture.

He cites one example of a vivid memory that everyone in the family remembers in a different way: John Elder Robison remembers his father burning his little brother on the forehead. John Elder Robison's wife says it was actually John who got burned — on his chest. And Margaret Robison doesn't remember the incident at all. Is it about my brother? Did both of us get burned with cigarettes? No matter what, it's an ugly tale.

And the ugly nature of their story is at least one truth that all three memoirists can agree on. From their different perspectives, the three Robisons took the same set of circumstances and told their own versions of the story. While Burroughs changed his name and applied a comic genius to tell a tale that millions want to read, John Elder Robison discovered that he had something to teach young people struggling with Asperger's. And in her forthcoming memoir, Margaret Robison found her salvation in the very act of writing it all down.

Abandonment Blues — An Adoption Memoir

Memoirs have been much maligned of late because they are all about memory. But while they may be notoriously unreliable vehicles for facts, they are endlessly fascinating sources of speculation about what really is the truth. Something Isn't Right My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Nate, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek.

Sebastian gave her a shag. People have always said she looks like a young Lauren Bacall, especially in the eyes. I can't stop staring at her feet, which she has slipped into treacherously tall red patent-leather pumps.

Because she normally lives in sandals, it's like she's borrowed some other lady's feet. Maybe her friend Lydia's feet. Lydia has teased black hair, boyfriends and an above-ground pool. She wears high heels all the time, even when she's just sitting out back by the pool in her white bikini, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking on her olive-green Princess telephone. My mother only wears fancy shoes when she's going out, so I've come to associate them with a feeling of abandonment and dread. I don't want her to go. My umbilical cord is still attached and she's pulling at it.

I'm standing in the bathroom next to her because I need to be with her for as long as I can. Maybe she is going to Hartford, Connecticut. Or Bradley Field International Airport. I love the airport, the smell of jet fuel, flying south to visit my grandparents. I love to fly. When I grow up, I want to be the one who opens those cabinets above the seats, who gets to go into the small kitchen where everything fits together like a shiny silver puzzle.

Plus, I like uniforms and I would get to wear one, along with a white shirt and a tie, even a tie-tack in the shape of airplane wings. I would get to serve peanuts in small foil packets and offer people small plastic cups of soda. I love flying south to visit my grandparents and I've already memorized almost everything these flight attendants say.

She turns to me and smiles. I grab the box and hand it to her. She takes two pads from the box and sets it on the floor at her feet. I notice that the box is reflected in the side of her shoe, like a small TV. Carefully, she peels the paper strip off the back of one of the pads and slides it through the neck of her dress, placing it on top of her left shoulder. She smoothes the silk over the pad and puts another one on the right side.

She is delighted with herself. It's as if she has drawn a picture and placed it on her own internal refrigerator door. Hot things do that. Sometimes when my father or mother comes home, I will go down and stand near the hood of the car to listen to it tick, moving my face in close to feel the heat. She takes her cigarette from the clamshell ashtray on the back of the toilet. My mother loves frozen baked stuffed clams, and she saves the shells to use as ashtrays, stashing them around the house.

I am fixated on the dryer. The vent holes on the side have hairs stuck in them, small hairs and white lint. How does it find hair dryers and navels? It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving. The orange light from the dehumidifier that sits next to the wicker laundry hamper is looking at me, and I look back at it. Normally it would terrify me, but because my mother is here, it is okay. Except she is walking fast, has already walked halfway across the family room floor, is almost at the fireplace, will be turning around the corner and heading up the stairs and then I will be alone in the dark bathroom with the dehumidifier eye, so I run.

I run after her, certain that something is following me, chasing me, just about to catch me. I run past my mother, running up the stairs, using my legs and my hands, charging ahead on all fours. I make it to the top and look down at her. She climbs the stairs slowly, deliberately, reminding me of an actress on the way to the stage to accept her Academy Award. Her eyes are trained on me, her smile all mine. She is not my father's dog or my older brother's. She's most of all not my older brother's since he's sixteen, seven years older than I, and he lives with roommates in Sunderland, a few miles away.

He dropped out of high school because he said he was too smart to go and he hates our parents and he says he can't stand to be here and they say they can't control him, that he's "out of control" and so I almost never see him. So Cream doesn't belong to him at all. She is mine and my mother's. She loves us most and we love her.

I am just like Cream, the golden retriever my mother loves. I smile back at her. I don't want her to leave. Cream is sleeping by the door. She knows my mother is leaving and she doesn't want her to go, either. Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around Cream's middle, around her legs and her tail and then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like it when she's shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donnie and Marie Show. Cream opens her eyes and watches my mother, her ears twitching, then she closes her eyes again and exhales heavily.

She's seven, but in dog years that makes her forty-nine. Cream is an old lady dog, so she's tired and just wants to sleep. In the kitchen my mother takes her keys off the table and throws them into her leather bag. I love her bag. Inside are papers and her wallet and cigarettes and at the bottom, where she never looks, there is loose change, loose mints, specks of tobacco from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can. She is just like that lady on TV, Maude. She yells like Maude, she wears wildly colored gowns and long crocheted vests like Maude.

She is just like Maude except my mother doesn't have all those chins under her chins, all those loose expressions hanging off her face. My mother cackles when Maude is on. My mother is a star like Maude. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl. Where is my father? It's a Timex, silver with a black leather strap.

The face is small and round. There is no date. It ticks so loud that if the house is quiet, you can hear it. The house is quiet. I can hear the ticking of my mother's watch. Outside, the trees are dark and tall, they lean in toward the house, I imagine because the house is bright inside and the trees crave the light, like bugs. We live in the woods, in a glass house surrounded by trees; tall pine trees, birch trees, ironwoods.

The deck extends from the house into the trees. You can stand on it and reach and you might be able to pull a leaf off a tree, or a sprig of pine. My mother is pacing. She is walking through the living room, behind the sofa to look out the large sliding glass door down to the driveway; she is walking around the dining-room table.

She straightens the cubed glass salt and pepper shakers. She is walking through the kitchen and out the other door of the kitchen. Our house is very open. The ceilings are very high. There is plenty of room here. She says this now. There is the sound of gravel crackling beneath tires. Then, lights on the wall, spreading to the ceiling, sliding through the room like a living thing. My father is home. He will come inside the house, pour himself a drink and then go downstairs and watch TV in the dark. I will have the upstairs to myself. All the windows and the walls and the entire fireplace which cuts straight through the center of the house, both floors; I will have the ice maker in the freezer, the hexagonal espresso pot my mother uses for guests, the black deck, the stereo speakers; all of this contained in so much tall space.

I will have it all. I will walk around and turn lights on and off, on and off. There is a panel of switches on the wall before the hall opens up into two huge, tall rooms. I will switch the spotlights on in the living room, illuminating the fireplace, the sofa. I will switch the light off and turn on the spotlights in the hallway; over the front of the door. I will run from the wall and stand in the spotlight. I will bathe in the light like a star and I will say, "Thank you for coming tonight to my poetry reading. It is long, black and percent polyester, my favorite fabric because it flows.

I will wear her dress and her shoes and I will be her. With the spotlights aimed right at me, I will clear my throat and read a poem from her book. I will read it with her distinctive and refined Southern inflection. I will turn off all the lights in the house and go into my bedroom, close the door. My bedroom is deep blue.

Bookshelves are attached to the wall with brackets on either side of my window; the shelves themselves are lined with aluminum foil. I like things shiny. My shiny bookshelves are lined with treasures. Empty cans, their labels removed, their ribbed steel skins polished with silver polish.

I wish they were gold. I have rings there, rings from our trip to Mexico when I was five. Also on the shelves: I love shiny things, I love stars. Someday, I want to be a star, like my mother, like Maude. The sliding doors to my closet are covered with mirror squares I bought with my allowance. The mirrors have veins of gold streaking through them.

I stuck them to the doors myself. I will aim my desk lamp into the center of the room and stand in its light, looking at myself in the mirror. From Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright by Augusten Burroughs. But she knew about my adoption papers long before my adoptive mother died, yet never told me about them. I took my first six-month sabbatical leave in the winter semester at Oxford University. I had a Rackham grant to study the question: I hope that you will come to see me when you get back from England.

I have a real surprise for you if everything goes well. Your father has expressed a desire to meet you, Richard, but here are the conditions. As you already know he and I cannot be seen together as it would only harm both of us. He said he would like to take us to dinner somewhere but would not want to talk about our situation. You are an intelligent person and can understand that.

I would introduce him as my boyfriend and we could have a nice evening. As he has to be at home on the weekend it would be nice if we could make it on a Friday night. Our lives are very complicated now. I hope that can be arranged. We never know what the future holds for us. True, I had a chance to meet my father in person; but I discovered that I had my own conditions. I was being treated like an object, to be admired, perhaps, but with no respect for my need to know whom my father was. I was being hidden inside the secret in which they were trapped. Homes, who was also kept a secret, wrote:.

I would have liked to have come out from the shadows, to be seen not as the product of an affair, but as a person, an adult who is more or less of them than they are of one another. And I never did see her again. Our contacts were fewer — occasional phone calls and several letters over the years. But my decision to refuse an incognito meeting with my biological father still haunts me. Betty Jean Lifton similarly had second thoughts about a proposed incognito meeting of some blood relatives that her birth mother proposed to her.

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But at the time, I was immobilized by the shameful power of the Bastard Moment, which threatened to extinguish the legitimate identity I had as a woman, wife, mother, and writer. My bastard self had rudely confronted the self that I had created, the one that studied the emotions in the Bodleian Library. How did my biological father feel about having a son at Oxford? I resented that he was getting so much but was willing to give so little.

I resented that they were asking me to compromise myself in order to meet them. I was left feeling that I had colluded in my own estrangement from my origins. Her husband, a wounded World War I veteran, was 17 years her senior. As I would learn later, my biological father owned a successful car dealership and a cattle farm. Their affair spanned 40 years. One year before the proposed incognito meeting with my biological father I had suddenly discovered my birth mother. Before then, as a lied-to adoptee, I was enchanted by the myth of self-creation. But it did not end my fantasy of self-creation; I did not see myself in this woman who looked nothing like me and who said things like:.

Peace with God is most important. I am about as happy as anyone can be now. I wish for you to find this kind of peace. With it comes understanding, tolerance and many blessings. Another famous phrase from Sartre comes to mind: What are they for except to hurt you. Maybe blood ties are overrated. Where lies the universal significance of an adoption memoir? Many people are or are touched by players in the adoption triangle: But beyond that the orphan of which the half-orphan and adoptee are subsets is a universal archetype in fairy tales and literature.

A striking feature of the myths and folk tales of the world is how often their central figure is an orphan. My non-adopted friends keep reminding me that fantasies are part of the human condition, even necessary to the imagination. They never fail to point out that they used to suspect they were adopted. But even though the family romance reveals the universal fantasy of having other parents, it is not a fictional romance for the adoptee for whom there really are two unknown other parents out there.

For natural borns, the family romance is a useful fiction in separating from their parents as they grow up; for adoptees, the problem of unknown parents persists into adulthood and leads either to a quest to find them or to accepting the myth of self-creation. The genetic bewilderment of adoptees may spark an archetypal quest for knowledge of their beginnings.

I am now, like Betty Jean Lifton, an advocate of the quest; my rhetorical question to self-creationists is: As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes:. As any parent of more than one child knows, children are not indistinguishable lumps of raw material waiting to be shaped. They are little people born with personalities. The Blank Slate , p. I write in my memoir that the blank slate assumption helped justify closed adoption practices, as well as leading to misunderstanding the origins of homosexuality, autism, and mental illness:.

In the flight from the evils of eugenics to a postwar blank slate bio-politics, homosexuals were not born that way, but were too close to their mothers; autism resulted from mothers being too cold to their children; and criminals were always produced by tough circumstances. As the Jets explain to the police sergeant in West Side Story: The existentialist myth of self-creation is a variation of the blank slate notion of a person; if we are blank slates to ourselves then knowing our origins is not necessary to our flourishing. Christine is the mother of her natural born eight-year-old daughter Rhoda.

She always knew that Rhoda was strangely different from other children: It must be something deeper than that…. It is something dark and unexplainable. Christine becomes increasingly suspicious that her daughter, Rhoda, may have secretly drowned a boy in her class on a school picnic near a lake because he won a penmanship medal she thought she deserved. Rhoda turns out to be a prepubescent femme fatale who murders three people. Christine had always felt that she was adopted even though her father, a retired journalist who covered infamous murder cases, denied that she was.

But she eventually finds out that her father adopted her after her birth mother, a serial killer, abandoned her while escaping from the police. So Rhoda, granddaughter of a serial killer, is a bad seed whose murderous nature was inherited.

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After we saw the film together I asked her if she knew anything about my birth mother. She said that she did not. Its story rudely confronted me with the problem of my existence: Who was I, really? I felt it as a sinister insinuation that as an adopted child I was suspect. One critic wrote, hyperbolically, that no one will now want to adopt children. Secrecy about my beginning kept my adoptive parents and birth mother from understanding me and me from understanding myself.

Their secrecy made me feel unloved. Their professed love for me did not seem authentic; I felt that they were loving my pretend self and not the real me, the one who needed to know his origins. Maybe my anger about this has kept part of me from fully growing up even though I have now grown old. Anger can be a kind of dark magical thinking creating the illusion of agency in a world of helplessness over the irretrievable losses that we suffer. It can turn a memoir into an indictment. Forgiveness, like the anger it is thought to displace, can itself be a subtle form of payback; in my case it would be to down-rank my adoptive parents moral status to that of a wrongdoers and elevate mine to that of a victim.

But does keeping me in the dark about my origins call for my forgiving them? Maybe they had good intentions, wanting to protect themselves and me. Perhaps their secrecy was the product of the closed adoption practices of the era. Secrecy was intended to help my birth mother go on with her life, however sadly. Secrecy threw me clear of wreckage caused by my birth. A memoir can be a form of grieving.

As I shall explain, grief is a species of what I will call abandonment blues. Hearing birth mothers talk of their lost children, it occurred to me that they have given them the same mythic quality that adoptees project onto their lost parents. The phantom child is always more golden than the actual one; its very absence makes it more desirable, and more there. It must be a hard sibling for the legitimate child to rival, being a creature of myth as it is.

Adopted children experience a moment of abandonment when they are surrendered by their birth mother and handed over to a stranger. Louis, Illinois, where I was given up at a bus station.

In Burroughs' Family, One Saga, Three Memoirs, Many Competing Truths : NPR

I was given away when I was tiny. Do I still carry hidden in my cells the blues that I felt then and that my birth mother felt from giving me away? Adoption begins on your own — you are solitary.

The baby knows it has been abandoned — I am sure of that. Two years after I was given up for adoption, my birth mother Cora had another son, Jerry, this time by her husband. She told me about her brother:. Jerry had a lot of depression. Mike told me that he loved his grandmother Cora. She taught him to draw and paint when he was a kid. She helped Jerry financially, but he just drank it up. He was a drunk. He beat my mom. He was a hung-up-on-himself type of person — a blow hard. He was hard to be around. Mike went to see his dad days before he died in Branson in I said that I thought that he was a good Christian who went to see his father before he died and forgave him.

That showed that he loved his father in spite of his faults. Before Mike and Connie left, Connie had us all join hands in prayer. Did her grief over her surrendered son cause Cora to treat my successor sibling Jerry as a surrogate for me, contributing to his downfall? With his father and grandfather gone, my father Arnold played the role of Mike, Jr. When I first met Mike, Jr. I felt affirmed, elated to be seen as having roots.

He has a tuft of hair goatee under his lower lip. With his Southern Missouri lilt he relished telling stories about Arnold. Dad had a cattle farm near Mountain Grove on which Mike, Jr. But he made most of his wealth in his auto and real estate businesses. Arnold loaned car buyers money and was his own repo man, carrying a. My biological father was what the Jews call a macher, a big shot. I compared my birth father to my adoptive father. Maybe it was his attempt to symbolically assert his role as my real father by perpetually treating me as a child.

Since he was not the impregnator, having an adopted son emasculated his power as a patriarch. Their marriage had ended after 35 years. He was virile and sexual; he produced a man-child. And he was a free spirit who refused to be tied down and hen-pecked; he had a year affair with my birth mother. My adoptive father would never have done that. Born in Mountain Grove in , Joyce Jean was my older half sister. Jack and Joyce Jean divorced when Mike, Sr.

And soon after that Jack was killed in an auto accident. His grandfather Arnold, my biological father, became Mike, Sr. Arnold confided to young Mike, Jr. He told of being visited in the night by the ghost of his dead son-in-law, Jack, about two weeks after his death. He heard a noise downstairs of his two-story farmhouse in young Mike, Sr. Dad looked at Jack and Jack looked at him. Then Jack turned and walked past Dad. Dad said it was just like a real person. He followed him and kept trying to talk to him: He followed as Jack went out the front door of the house and across the front porch and through the yard toward the fence, climbed over the fence, walked out into a field and disappeared into the night.

And that was it. Whatever one makes of this ghost story, with his father now gone, young Mike, Sr. But his mother Joyce Jean my half sister was a wild woman. She always drove a Cadillac although she never worked, smoked cigarettes with a long holder, drank heavily, and often went out and disappeared for the evening, sometimes with other men. There was a reason why Dad raised my father, Mike, Sr. She went to Kansas City right after Jack was killed; my dad was maybe five or six at the time.

When their son, Mike, Jr. He gave them his new Buick Riviera. They found romantic letters from my birth mother Cora to Arnold in the glove compartment. It was some cards and some love letters. They got rid of the letters. I was born in long before then. My half sister Joyce Jean was only nine. Arnold took Mike, Sr.