I emerged from the womb of a fourteen-year-old girl.  She had gotten into some trouble in the tiny Mormon community of Raymond, Alberta, where our ancestors had gone to practice polygamy outside the long reach of the US government.  The fourteen-year-old womb belonged to my aunt, a small-town beauty who for reasons she has never explained to me (but for which I long to know more, and to which I am quite sure I would be entirely sympathetic), she just couldn’t live a ‘normal’ Mormon life.  I’m only aware of her circumstances by second-hand accounts.  She slept around, maybe for cocaine (her bouts with drug abuse, and visits to rehab, would become family legends), maybe for money, and maybe out of pure youthful rebelliousness.  The details are sordid, the juicy bits of a complex situation filtered through a gossipy family living in a small, ultra-conservative Mormon town.  Her brothers and sisters, nine of them all together, knew my story before I did.  I would attend massive family reunions where I would walk and play among these people, never knowing that I was the family’s dirty secret.

Abortion was never an option, as far as I know.  When my aunt became pregnant, before the town could find out, my grandfather made arrangements to send her away to Israel to live with my uncle who was then laying down the groundwork to establish a branch of Brigham Young University, eventually to be known as The Jerusalem Center (for which my uncle, David Galbraith, a person of modest celebrity status in the vast Mormon leadership hierarchy, would later serve as the first president).  There in the Holy Land, far from the small-town gossip circles of Raymond, I gestated among the Jews.  That was the summer of 1973.

The choice for my aunt had already been made for her by her siblings and my grandparents.  She would give up her baby for adoption to her sister who was struggling to conceive naturally.  Everything would be kept in the family, including the secret of my paternity.  When winter came, and my birth was eminent, my aunt flew to New York.  I was conceived on the windswept prairies of Alberta, baked in Jerusalem, and on December 6, 1973, I was born in Manhattan.  That same day my birth mother handed me over to my aunt, who became my adoptive mother.  Though I would always know that I had been adopted, I would not learn about the details of this exchange for 19 years.

I have yet to meet an adopted person who struggles to accept the circumstances of his or her birth.  The lore of adoptive misgivings, of children feeling abandoned and betrayed, doesn’t make sense to most of us (at least to those of us who were lucky to be adopted as infants), though I have known plenty of future adopters who would distress over when and how to reveal this critical information to their children.  When asked what should be done, my answer is always the same — raise the child with the knowledge of the adoption.  It is a simple thing for a child to understand.  Some people are not prepared to be parents, and choose to give up a child for adoption so that the child might have a better life.  As long as the adopted child doesn’t feel mistreated or discriminated against by the adopting parents, the adoption will seem like a lucky break.  On the other hand, if the child were to discover the adoption by some less forthright avenue, the concealment of such an important fact might feel like a betrayal.

My aunt was one person who went on to adopt a child, and who sought my advice on when and how to tell her son the truth.  She came to Great Falls on a summer visit, and our two families decided to float the Missouri on homemade rafts.  She, on some inflatable contraption, paddled over to my lashed pontoons and slung her leg over part of my craft, linking us together.  She went on to tell me that she and her husband were trying to figure out when to tell their adopted son the truth, and that she wanted to know my opinion.  I told her, “I think you should tell him right away, while he is still very young.  I’ve known my whole life, and it has never bothered me.  Kids can understand that some people just aren’t ready to be parents, so they give up their children for adoption.  I think your son will accept that.  Since you love him, and don’t treat him differently than your other children, he will accept that.”  She listened to my advice, though her thick glasses magnified in her eyes an undercurrent of emotion that seemed ready to drag her to the bottom of the river.  “Thanks Rogan .  I really appreciate hearing that.”  Then she pushed off with her foot, launching us briefly in opposite directions, and paddled back to her husband and children.

I learned that my aunt had been my birth mother from my adoptive mother.  I was home from Brigham Young University, preparing to go on a religious mission to teach Mormonism to strangers, when my adoptive mother approached me in the family room.  It was time for her to unburden herself of this metaphysical weight.  She asked if I had not wondered, because she had sensed that I had.  She meandered around the point for a while, with the sound of her voice becoming more grave with each passing moment.  I had no idea what was about to happen.  Then she choked out the words through a crescendo of tears, “She was so young when she had you…  She was only fourteen… She was all wrapped up in some trouble… and there were men… and drugs… and…”  I put my arms around her and embraced her, because this is what she needed, but the drama of the moment was hers alone.  “Mom, I’m really glad that you and dad adopted me.  You have been great parents, and I love you both very much.”  Then she said to me, “Thanks son.  You will always be my first born son.”

Through the entire story of my adoption, I had sat in stony silence.  It wasn’t until she said those words, “You will always be my first born son,” that I felt anything more than intense curiosity about my own origin.  I believe I speak for many adopted people when I describe the sense of utter detachment in a moment like this.  Empathy can only take a person so far.  For we, the infant adopted, the upheaval of our coming into being, and the life-altering choice to bring us into your lives is not something we remember.  But in that moment, choking on her tears, when she declared her maternal love for me, I gained a conscious knowing of what my body had known ever since she first cradled me in her arms — this would be the only mother I would ever know.

Before departing on a mission, a Mormon will typically have a special church meeting held in his or her honor, called a ‘missionary farewell.’  The farewell is actually a normal Sunday service except the speakers, who are typically called from the church’s immediate congregation, will consist of the missionary’s friends and family with the missionary him or herself being the final speaker.  It is common for family members to travel some distance to attend a missionary farewell.  My aunt had driven the three hours from Raymond down to Great Falls to see me off.  As nervous as I was to speak and leave for the mission field, I also knew that she now knew that I knew that she had given birth to me, and that there would be an awkward conversation in which we would have to mutually acknowledge this.  The farewell was a success, and the frightening conversation came after church, in the same family room where my mother had first revealed to me the facts surrounding my birth.

When I write about conversations that happened so many years ago, I either remember specific phrases, and let them stand in with a bit of filler for entire conversations, or I remember the gist of a conversation well enough that I’ll take a stab at inventing dialogue that is a true enough reflection of what was said.  These conventions have their limitations, most significantly the abandonment of literal accuracy, but I have decided that it is better to get some version of the past down on the page before time can erode away any more of the details.  I don’t present a conversation as a literal recording of what was said, but rather as a true reflection of how the memory of a conversation has been internalized and made personally concrete.  I could obviously avoid dialogue all together, but I like it too much, so I muck around with it and take some creative liberties with the hope that interested parties might eventually add to, reflect on, or even vigorously reject my presentation of memory.  I’m reminded of a scene in Lost Highway, where Bill Pullman’s character explains to the police why he doesn’t own a video camera:

Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

I simply can not invent the dialogue that took place between my aunt and myself that day.  The gravity of the situation seems to outweigh in my mind the benefits of taking creative liberty, so instead I will paraphrase.  The conversation was brief.  She told me that she was glad that I knew, and that she was proud of the person who I had become.  She was grateful that she could live close enough to see me from time to time, and watch as I had grown and developed.  She told me that the choice to let me go was one of the hardest things she had ever done, and that she had been haunted by regret over that choice for most of her life, but that in seeing me at the podium, preparing to leave for my mission, she had new found confidence that she had made the right choice.  I told her that I was glad to know that she had given me life, and that knowing that someone so close to the family had been watching and caring about me was better than never knowing at all.  I told her that I loved her, and that I honored her difficult choice, and that I had never resented her giving me away.  The most notable point that I did not bring up was the question about who was my biological father.

Since that time I have learned a couple of things about my birth mother.  For one, I wasn’t her only ‘mistake.’  A couple of years after my birth she had a second child with a man who abandoned her mid-pregnancy.  She was still in her teens, but she was now determined to keep the child.  She sacrificed, and made it work.  She married a good man, very different than the people she had been running with all of the years before.  He stayed by her side through multiple journeys through rehab, and he helped raise her children.  I can’t help but wonder how giving up her first child colored her choice to later adopt.  Years later, when one of her younger daughters became pregnant as a teenager, my aunt guided her daughter to keep the child, even though doing so would make college education more difficult to pursue.  She told her daughter that she would help raise the baby, and would help her every step of the way so that she could keep her child.  It is difficult to see all of this and not read into it a deep sense of regret over a choice she was pushed to make at age fourteen.

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Ok, it is almost 6am on the east coast, so some Whatsit readers could be waking up any moment now to find nothing new on the site.  This post is a followup about my dogs, and the choice I ultimately made to abandon them.  I’m cheating here by submitting the background of my own adoption as an emotional proxy for abandoning my puppies.  Quite frankly, in many ways the adoption is an easier topic.  Ten Cents and Cain came into my life unexpectedly, and I had hoped to accommodate them, but ultimately decided that our prior lifestyle was more important.  I regret that choice, and believe that I will probably feel guilty about it for the rest of my life.  I will now meet the minimum obligation I feel I defined for myself in the original dogs post by hiding behind a clinical list and my camera.  The following photos show Ten Cents and Cain playing rough.  It is in their breed’s nature to play rough, but I assure the viewers that these photos do not depict any harm.  These puppies love each other, and enjoy play fighting.  I can’t look through these photos without nearly bawling.

Reasons we took Ten Cents and Cain to the pound:

• Ten Cents bit (nipped really) my mother, who swore she would never visit again so long as we had them.
• Susan’s parents had already said they wouldn’t come as long as we had the dogs.
• After two years of working with him, Cain would still pee every time he was shown any affection.
• Cain’s uncontrollable bladder meant that he had to be an ‘outside dog.’
• Cain would not allow Ten Cents to be an ‘inside dog’ while he was left outside.
• Ten Cents was then required to be an ‘outside dog’ too
• Ten Cents started to get really depressed about this.
• The dogs were too big to travel with us.
• The dogs were too expensive to put in a kennel.
• We tried leaving the city with massive piles of dog food left for the dogs, which technically worked, but made the dogs depressed.
• We couldn’t afford to feed the dogs good dog food.
• Cheaper dog food resulted in extremely stinky dogs with skin problems.
• We couldn’t afford Frontline tick and flea medicine.
• Cheaper tick and flea products were not working.
• Being lazy about cleaning up after your dogs catches up with you very quickly, and the yard would turn into a stinky dog toilet.
• The dogs would bark at night and the neighbors would complain.
• I suggested that we keep Ten Cents, but Susan said we needed to keep them both, or get rid of them both.
• This remains a point of marital conflict, but we deal with it.

So that is the list.  We found ourselves unable to leave town, unable to receive guests, and unable to afford these massive dogs.  The responsibility became more than we could handle, and we realized that we were not ready to have our prior lives defined by these two animals.  So we traded the dogs for regrets, only now I wish we had chosen the dogs, or at a minimum, just Ten Cents.  I miss her so much.