Domestic Psychology

Little things

// January 20th, 2012 // No Comments » // Family, life

Every time we learn a new tidbit of information about my father’s adoption, there is an emotional process that unplugs the present. It feels like a giant box of archived files has been spilled into your mental inbox. Forgotten and fuzzy memories have to be replayed with the new information added, like a newly discovered color that makes the picture both clear and vivid.

Seeing pictures of my father’s birth mother was hard. My father is the victim I know and understand. Now, the other victim has a face. A face that we all stare at and question what we think we see in it. Not a case number or emotionless forms, but a real person.

I knew how much effort went into my father’s efforts to get clearance to work with certain agencies. I remember my father’s phone calls, letters, and constant interactions with government officials. My parents talked about Lamar Alexander as though he was a friend, but I never realized why until now. It took my father reminding me that he would not have gotten the passport and clearance he needed for work if Lamar had not personally intervened multiple times. Georgia Tann’s paperwork declaring my father dead effectively replaced my father’s official records with a mishmash of half-truths, lies, and facts. Lamar Alexander went above and beyond to help my father.

I have often heard my father lament the fact that while everyone around him was drafted, he was not. Anyone who has heard him talk about it knows that every word is saturated with guilt. He sincerely feels like he cheated his friends. I never understood his inability to stop blaming himself.

When he talked about it again this week, I finally understood his pain. He was never included in the pool of eligible men for the draft. He did not clearly exist in government records, but he didn’t understand that until Lamar explained it to him. My father didn’t deliberately cheat, but he was cheated out of any responsibility. He can’t let go of that. The stories and memories are clearer, but instead of being long ago accepted, they are fresh emotions that are too raw to be willing to be returned to the archives.

Little things, like a picture, open wormholes that make the past part of the present.

Pictures that made me cry

// January 19th, 2012 // No Comments » // Family, flickr

A new, old birthday

// January 5th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Family, holidays

Today is my father’s birthday. It wasn’t his birthday last year. It wasn’t his birthday for the past 68 years. His 69th birthday is his first January 5th birthday. It’s also the 69th anniversary of his death.

To say that this day is more contemplative than celebratory would be an astronomical understatement. My father is not the victim in this convoluted mess of social engineering. His life was both normal and remarkable. He was in the first generation in both his adopted and birth family to earn a college degree. He worked white collar jobs and enjoyed the benefits connected to them.

In the pile of paperwork that the state of TN finally released last year, there were a dozen letters written to Georgia Tann that are actually love letters from his adoptive parents to my father. My father was and is loved.

The tragic victim is my father’s birth mother. We will never know how different her life could have been without the unspeakable pain of losing a child. She never left her small, middle TN town. My father’s birth parents are old, frail, and alone. His half sister sits in a jail. It took an additional generation for his maternal birth family to access higher education.

Depending on your perspective, we are either protecting his birth mother from additional pain to the wound that never heals or taking the easy out by not letting her know that, despite what Georgia Tann said, her child did not die. I both hate and understand this. Her pastor knows that we want to help her and don’t know how to do so. Southern women have many strengths and faults but, accepting help from strangers is not something we do easily. I don’t expect to hear from her pastor until she is gone.

We can’t ease her pain. That is foremost on our minds today. On every other day, I am determined to fight against people and politicians who use religion to interfere with the lives of others. Today, I am sad. Not for myself, but for a grandmother I will never know.

Happy Birthday Dad. I love you.

staring us in the face

// October 6th, 2011 // No Comments » // Family, people

We spent so many years searching for information about my father’s adoption that we felt prepared for anything we might learn. Old records, news clippings and court documents were extremely descriptive of the modus operandi of Georgia Tann. Every single time the story was discussed, we talked about the multiple scenarios that could have described my father’s case. We knew.

Actually putting our hands on the case file took so long that it felt like the finish line. The documents, photographs and letters seemed like the end of our search. Everything was there. The tightly woven small town connections were reaffirming that everyone did what was right. Except… there was one thing that didn’t fit. One tiny blurb in a newspaper that we tried to justify with excuses.

Today, a small town pastor sat with my father and told him what we always knew, but never wanted to be true. My father’s birth mother published her child’s obituary in the newspaper, because she was told that her newborn son was dead.

Fair Fun

// September 17th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Family, video

Less than six degrees

// September 1st, 2011 // 5 Comments » // Family, relatives

Long ago and not very far away, two Phi Sigma Kappas with a long history of rivalry decided that the winner of a coin toss would be the one who got to ask out the sorority girl from California. The winner of the toss was my father and obviously, the girl was my mother. The story has been told dozens of times, but yesterday, a familiar name from the story, appeared in a pile of paperwork. Paperwork that we have been trying to get since the 1980s. Paperwork that revealed for the first time in his sixty something years on this earth, my father’s actual birth date.

Never knowing your birthday is a hard concept to grasp. Sure, there were home births in my Mother’s family that have mistakes on the birth certificates because of the passage of time between the arrival of the official who did paperwork and the illiteracy of everyone involved, but that was several generations ago. My FATHER didn’t know when he was born.

He knows now. He also knows that his college rival was is his first cousin. His rival’s father was my father’s birth father’s brother. My father probably looked his Uncle in the eyes and never knew it. He still wouldn’t know it if my brother hadn’t spent decades playing detective. My father was very happy with the family that chose him. He only agreed to search because his children wanted answers. We are extremely aware that any and all pain that my father suffers from the enormous amounts of information that have been revealed in the past twenty-four hours is our responsibility.

Several times at the beginning of this quest, my father tried to explain that he didn’t need answers and I always responded with overly dramatic scenarios that involved my brothers or I accidentally dating an unknown relative. My father would begin a long lecture about the number of people in the world and statistical improbabilities. “Bring me a pencil and paper so we can do the math together.” He was working from the wrong set of numbers.

Whenever people ask where my family is from, I answer that my Mother’s family is in Natchez Trace and my Father’s family is in Martin, but add that since my father is adopted, we have bonus family somewhere. Never ever, in my wildest histrionic scenario, would I have placed my father’s birth relatives in Martin and Union City. He really could have interacted with his birth parents or grandparents. As I try to sort all of this into something that my mind can accept, I find the facts that we have learned… comforting. My father really did grow up with both of his families. The rivalry between my father and his fraternity brother was like me fighting with my brothers. We only fought about the things that were really nothing. I can see that parallel because my father made a phone call today to someone he hasn’t spoken to since college. A call of love for a fraternity brother and to laugh at immature rivalries. In a few weeks, they will see each other again. Just the thought of that meeting takes my breath away and leaves me speechless.

for a fee…

// August 18th, 2011 // No Comments » // Family, TN

“Dad has a real problem with being sold as an infant and now he has to keep paying the state to get information. He says they should pay him and all the other people involved in the scam.”

I am less than amused that some Tennesseans can find loopholes to get around paying the state’s ‘pay us fees to get the services you are already paying for with your taxes’ fees while the rest of us have to send in check after check for information that SHOULD have been provided YEARS ago.

stick battle

// July 26th, 2011 // No Comments » // Family, flickr

Stormy sleeping

// June 24th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Family, flickr

This is how we have slept for the past three nights. If this week’s weather is the new normal, then I am going to add a twin bed to our bedroom. The children and dogs can twirl, kick and *pee in our bed. Doug and I will snuggle in the twin bed.

*There’s a very fine line between a hysterical weather dog and a Benadryl zonked dog.

keeping the ego in check

// February 14th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Family, me

“Dad, I really can’t chat about bathtub drains right now.”
“What’s so important that you won’t stop and talk to me?”
“I’m on someone else’s clock. Can we do this later?”
“Whose clock? What are you doing?”
“I’m just cleaning up some messy code.”
“I thought you just posted in chat rooms all day. When did you learn to actually use computers?”
“Several decades ago.”
“Wow. I had no idea that you know how to do something.”

- – - – - – -

Doug: “I thought Valentine’s Day was tomorrow instead of today.”

- – - – - – -

After several years of ignoring my hair except for the occasional bang trim that I did myself, I got six inches of length chopped off my hair today. Nobody noticed.