Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Life as Fiction

Closed adoptions yield open possibilities.

by Lex Runciman

A dozen or so miles south of McMinnville on Highway 99, the Bethel-Lincoln road offers drivers a back way into Salem. The pavement runs straight through grass fields before it makes a series of sweeping turns, including one that skirts a hillside pioneer cemetery.

Whenever I've reached that corner, I've thought of stopping to wander among the headstones with names less common now--Eustace, Ephraim, Walter, Maude. And though they would all be strangers to me, at least some of them must have descendants alive today, descendants able to match lived history with the names and dates on the stones. I have no such names in my past, because I have no knowledge of my parents or grandparents, where they came from or where they are buried.

What I know of my past starts with what my parents told me: I was born in St. Vincent's Hospital in Portland in the early 1950s and was very soon thereafter adopted. My adoptive mother had been stricken with cancer and her treatment had made it impossible for her to conceive children, so she and my father had sought to adopt. As a child, I must have had many questions that I voiced from time to time, but like all children, I learned to read my parents' moods and realized that the question of where I came from was both an important and painful subject. Many years later, my wife asked my adoptive mother what she knew about my birth family, but there wasn't much to relate. In those days, the entire adoption process depended on secrecy.

In recent years, Oregon laws have made it possible for adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates, which I have done. No father is named there. A woman's name is hand-printed in the box for "mother," but the cursive signature, by an entirely different hand, does not fully match the printed name. I can guess that a nurse filled out the form, and that my birth mother signed it. Her birthplace is an Oregon town I've never visited--one so small that I had to consult a map to determine its location.

Closed adoptions like mine rest on the daily embrace of fiction--an embrace that parents and children must learn to share. From the parents' perspective, their children are not really their children--yet they are. And the adopted child knows that his parents are not really his parents--yet they are. For me, this openness to fiction has led to a sort of openness toward the world: anyone of the right age could function as a mother or father figure, as a sibling, as a distant cousin. A long-running, thoroughly stale joke in our house claims my real parents were Marilyn and Elvis.

This willingness to embrace fiction is similar to other beliefs affirmed in our daily lives. We believe there is value in green pieces of paper in our wallets that carry almost no intrinsic worth. Yet a twenty-dollar bill gets me into a movie I want to see and buys me something I'm happy to eat. We believe in property lines, even if we cannot always see them. We believe, sometimes now less fully, in our ability to make astonishing promises, like "until death do us part." We affirm such fictions because they bring order to our worlds.

Yet fictions can be incomplete. While others have knowledge of common things, I have only absences and blanks. When a doctor asks me about my family's medical history, I can't offer any information. I can't look at photos of my mother's grandfather to gauge how much more hair I might lose or keep. I've never had the experience of seeing an aunt or uncle and finding in their faces some resemblance to my own. Of course, I have photos from my adoptive family--and the stories to go with them. But, really, what is my relationship to those ancestors and their stories? How do I affirm this adopted history even as I know that there is another that remains utterly unsaid?

When people learn I'm adopted, they often ask if I want to know more about my birth parents and family. Unlike many adoptees, I haven't tried to find my birth parents.

Knowing nothing has its advantages, including the freedom to imagine whatever I wish: For months, my birth mother, a small-town resident, holds tight to the secret of her pregnancy, though many of her friends and neighbors, eyeing her growing belly and her thickening waist, surely guess at the truth. Her father, my grandfather, knows, but so long as nothing is said, he pretends not to know. Her mother learns early about her daughter's pregnancy and feels a disappointment she dares not acknowledge. Yet she helps her daughter travel to stay with family friends in Portland. My mother lives with those strangers until I am born and taken away by the nurse who filled out my birth certificate. There's no father in my version of this story, though biology says there must be one.

Though I'm keen to know the actual stories--the stories that led to my birth and the decision to put me up for adoption--I'm daunted by the prospect of meeting and somehow establishing a relationship with a family and a history I've never known. In this way, maybe I'm merely repeating the decision my birth mother made to create and affirm a fiction.

My adoptive parents are both dead now; I wouldn't have written this otherwise. It would have pained them to have the subject discussed. While they were alive, we maintained the secret of my past by fully embracing our daily lives together. I've called it "fiction" here, but it is also the foundation upon which I've built my life, become a partner in a long marriage, and a father to my own children. It's been, thus far, a durable foundation that has made possible my own family and all the love I feel for them.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities