The Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned

I was adopted as a baby, a fact I have known since I was old enough to understand the concept.  Just about everyone in my life throughout the years knows this as well.

Eleven years ago, I republished an essay entitled “Happy Mother’s Day,” which was essentially the story of my search for my medical history back in 1990 that took a left turn when I thought it would take a right. It went like this:

Many years ago, I became an adoptive son and brother.  Being told of my adoption by my parents at a very early age, I felt special indeed— I, as was my sister, was chosen specifically by my parents, giving me a definite leg up over the rest of my friends.

As I got older, my adoption was something openly discussed among my family and friends.  Nothing special, just a fact of my life.  My parents were my parents, my sister was my sister, my relatives were my relatives.  I could think no other way.

I started to get curious about everything around the time I got married and began considering having children, about nine years ago now.  I felt like I needed to know more about my medical background, to see if there were any medical unpleasantries that needed preparation.  With my parents help, I started my search in the summer of 1990.

The contact began the Tuesday after Labor Day 1991, when I got a call at work from the Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia telling me that they had finally received a response to their inquiries.  The nun I had spoken to said that they had heard separately that morning from my bio-mother, my bio-father, and my bio-sister.  I was stunned.

I grew up with the knowledge that I was adopted, but I was always told that my bio-parents had split up immediately after they brought me into this world.  Now-- for the first time— I was finding out that not only did they not split up immediately, but that I had a sister!  In fact, as I was soon to learn, I had four sisters and a brother!

After much letter writing and telephoning, the latter taking me more courage than I thought I had possessed to initiate, I finally got to meet a blood relative (other than my son Matthew who was born the summer before!) on January 30, 1992:  my sister Donna, born less than a year after me, came up for a visit.  There was an instant rapport, making it (almost) easy for me to then plan and execute my pilgrimage to Georgia to meet the rest of the bio-family, which I did three months later.

How did it feel?  Well, I had to give up the adoption fantasies that most adoptees have, such as that maybe my bio-family is rich, or royalty, or whatever.  So I lost that part.  But what I gained surpassed even my most far fetching fantasies on both sides of the issue.

I've gained four sisters and a brother, all of who had known about me for most of their lives.  Until September of 1991, I was Michael to them. They "feel" right, like actual brothers and sisters.  This feels good to me, since we were separated by circumstance, not choice.  It seems that in their cases blood is indeed thicker than water.

I met the people who brought me into this world.  After hearing their story, I have a tremendous amount of respect for their decision to put me up for adoption.  It took a lot of courage, but they did the right thing.  I have a good life.

I also got to meet my bio-grandfather— the first grandfather of any kind I've ever met.  This was a singularly rare and strange pleasure, as both of my grandfathers were long gone by the time I came on the scene.

And finally and most importantly, I've discovered just how much my parents really mean to me.  While in Georgia, I actually tried to imagine my bio-parents in the role of my parents, but I came up empty.  To me, this was a very satisfying feeling, an affirmation of the feelings I have for my parents.  It's funny to have had to travel through twenty-nine years and thousands of miles just to realize that the grass on my side of the fence was green enough.

After I had established rapport with my biological family and they began coming up fairly regularly to visit, my Mom and Dad pulled me aside and told me how happy they were for me that I had found such a large family in my search.  They said that they were comforted by the idea that when they “go” I would have this whole other family.  My parents were older than the average parents, having not adopted me until they were 40-41 years old respectively, so they knew they would pass while I was still relatively young.

These words, over the years, brought me much comfort.  Not wholly from awareness that I would have a supplementary family when my folks passed, but mainly from the example of unconditional love my parents had for me to have thought such a thought in the first place.  And how they knew at a visceral level exactly what their son would require one day.

I’m a teacher by my nature, and one of the cornerstones a teacher bases his philosophy on is to attempt, to the best of his ability, to teach from example.  The official, “education-speak” way of saying it, is modeling. Modeling behavior, modeling metacognitive techniques, modeling reading, writing, everything.  The notion is “do as I do.”  It works, at least from the standpoint that the student cannot use it against you if you don’t do it.

Imagine the modeling lesson my parents put forth that day; what a perfect example by which to live!  I don’t think I will ever be able to reach that lofty standard, but it’s certainly a mark to aim, and if I miss, I’ll still be well above any mark I might have set for myself.

The Greatest Generation indeed.

I digress.

Growing up Cattie, I grew up in a very tight nuclear family.  Yes, sometimes it was too constricting, like a beloved shirt that has spent ten minutes too long in the dryer.  But it was always there, for good, for bad, for everything— to be stretched back into shape at need.

One heck of an emotional safety net.

To expound, every Friday night and Sunday afternoon the family would gather at my grandparent’s house for happy hour, dinner, and then television. This assemblage generally included my Mom, Dad, Sister, Aunt Sadie, Uncle Lou, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Tom, Aunt Sis, Uncle Bill, Aunt Kay, my Gram, and a myriad of cousins who would inevitably pop over each week to say hello, have a drink, something to eat, or just sit and watch TV.  I remember the kitchen table packed with people— kids and adults— filled with food, voices, and in the early days, cigarette smoke that, apparently, used to be healthy for a body.

Those Friday nights and Sunday afternoons were like touching base for me.  When I was there with those people, I was safe.  As I grew older, I had my times when other things would supplant these sacrosanct assemblages— I would have a date or hang out with friends.  What happened in these circumstances more times that not was that my dates/friends were inevitably drawn into that ritual.  Ask the people who have known me since those times, they will tell you.

A few paragraphs ago, I called these people and these times my “emotional safety net.”  Let me flesh out this idea.  When I started working, I was mostly able to deal with the daily stresses of the job by going over to Clifton, as we called stopping over my Gram’s house, or popping over Mom and Dad’s to sit at the kitchen table and eat grapes and drink iced tea, or retreat to my basement office where I went on weekends to write, or plop on the living room couch to watch whatever my Dad was watching.

Sometimes, aside from requisite hellos and goodbyes, nary a word was exchanged.  We had an economy of language in my family as I got older that became the norm rather than the exception.  For those who knew and were close to my family, you might find it incredulous that a family who communicated by shouting at each other for so many years could have an economy of anything. Rest assured that the shouting was more given to the comforting volume level rather than the volume of number of the words.

Anyway, this was my outlet, to retreat into the warm embrace of Family.  It empowered me to withstand the stresses— whether real or imagined— that I would have not else been able to endure.

…death is inevitable, but it is never expected. Being corporeal, it comes for us all, ready or not.  We expect to die, and we expect loved ones to die, but we are never ready.  To this extent we are equipped...

When the Family started dying off, it opened an eye in me that for the first time saw that I in fact did have a comparatively older family.  This brought home a lesson of mortality that could have only been comprehended upon beholding the death from the third person perspective.  Over the years, most of the family passed; the lines between third person and first person blurred considerably.

However, 2005 came and the Core was still there: Mom, Dad, Aunt Sadie, Uncle Lou, Aunt Sarah.  Time and tide had taken Aunt Sis, Uncle Bill, Aunt Kay, Gram, and Uncle Tom.  Acute, painful losses made tolerable only by the fact that the Core was still there, imparting its support.

…but then:

Things fall apart; the [my] centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the [my] world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of [my] innocence is drowned…

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  That line cuts so closely to the core of truth that truth itself bleeds.  My perceptions of innocence, buoyed by my Core, was about to be drowned.  My Core began to pass.

…death inhales: August 2005, Uncle Lou— Godfather— passes.  December 2005, Dad passes.  April 2006, Aunt Sade— Godmother— passes.  Death pauses, then: Valentine’s Day 2010, Aunt Sarah— lifelong friend and confidante— passes.  Death exhales, and on it’s breath, the reek of mortality, and with it, the last of my innocence: September 2011, Mom passes…

Stress is pressure, nothing more, nothing less.  The bulge of a squeezed balloon, the creation of a diamond.  Pressure on things, pressure on people.  It does not always come in a bad way.  High pressure can be good— we get a high-pressure system, we have clear weather.  You get a new car, a new job, a new marriage.  All good things, all stressful things.  It is without prejudice that I tell you that during the afore-mentioned years while all of that death was going on, so too were a lot of other things, and not all of them were bad.

Never the less, here’s my five-step recipe for calamity:

1. Have 52% of your paycheck garnished to pay back support that you accrued when you were working per diem with no benefits and your wife was diagnosed out of pocket with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.  Get a second job to make up the difference in lost wages, so that you are working from 7:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night.

2. Add to this a school that is foundering on the shoals of high-stakes testing year after year after year.  As the district scrambles for purchase amidst the wreckage, one incompetent administrator after the other micromanages their mark in the jetsam and flotsam of your career.

3. Next, move every year because the wife can’t seem to get along with the neighbors or the landlords or the very air that she breathes. Nothing ever being enough, of course, she leaves— right after Dad suddenly dies of a brain hemorrhage in the middle of the above-mentioned chaos.

4. Divorce. Oh, and make sure that when she unexpectedly leaves one afternoon while you are at job number one she completely cleans out the apartment, steals $4,000 in cash, and files her taxes before you, without telling you, so that she changes your filing status and ends up costing you $6,000 that you will owe the IRS in perpetuity.

5. Once the garnishment lets go, celebrate-- get a new car.  Confidence high, head back to school to finish the PhD.  Make new friends. E-publish three novels.  Start writing again.

…shit happens, I know.  It’s called life.  But prior to 2005, I had lots of boards to stand on, lots of options.  After 2005, the board space was getting narrower and narrower as dark waters rose…

Let me reiterate— all of these things were going on at the same time my Core was passing.  By the time we come to the fall of 2011, they are gone.

…things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

I no longer have a levee against the storm tide of emotion.

Things at school begin to take a physical toll, as I have no emotional safe-haven from which to deal.  I push through, but finally— inevitably— my body rebels.  I miss 42 days of the 2011-2012 school year.  I am forced to leave my second job.  The fall of 2012 sees me going through a battery of tests trying to figure things out.  By March of 2013 I am on pace to miss over 50 school days.  Mind you, after my 10 sick days, that’s over 40 days without pay.  And while I am not physically there, I am still managing things: sending in plans for the substitute, grading, trying to keep the pace to get through the curriculum.

Ultimately I am convinced to go on leave, a medical sabbatical.

I began to think about those words my parents had spoken to me, how when they passed that I would have this whole “other” family. I began to think that my biological siblings and I had always talked about what it would have been like growing up together and, since we did not have that, perhaps someday we could be together as adults.

I began to realize that I needed a Core.

Don’t get me wrong.  I still had people in my life, people I would miss, who would miss me.  I still had my Son.  But he is busy with his own family now, and working, and pretty much all of the same stuff I spoke of here, only from his perspective.  And my Sister.  But she too is busy with her own life, her own areas of high and low pressures.  And several good friends, with whom I hope I am always a friend, but at the end of the day, they all get to go home to their own families, their own Cores.  And I am glad for them.  But more, I am glad for myself at having them in my life.

…when we die, we die alone.  We face the visage we see in the mirror every day.  And in the end, after all, we are beholden to no one but that face…

I needed to rebuild my Core, and I needed to rebuild my Core immediately.  It had become— and always was, if the truth is to be told— a matter of my very existence.  I needed to (re) build those close familial relationships and sacrosanct traditions.  Links to life.  Something in me unequivocally needs that, much as I need air that I breathe.

We don’t often get a second chance, but when we do, we need to do what needs to be done.  For everyone we love, now and from then.  But mostly for that person in the mirror.

…the ceremony of my innocence is drowned…

Today, I wake upon the shore of a distant place, having crawled bedraggled and scarcely alive onto the warm sand.

© Ray Cattie