The Amazing Human Experience of Choice

As an adopted child, I've been extremely lucky on many, many fronts (that's my birth mother, Jeanine, with me in the photo at right). The one of which I am most conscious, however, is the awareness that adoption brings of the wondrous power that comes from choosing one's family.

Imagine the power of growing up in the early 1960s with your parents telling you they CHOSE you. Imagine the self esteem that creates; especially for a girl, who one day will have that choice herself. I believe that much of my sense that I can create anything in this world--including family--comes from being made aware, as a young child, that we are all, in some sense, chosen.

I think more children are raised this way today, in their birth as well as their adoptive families: because giving birth and having a family are at last, since 1972, more clearly about choice. I say "more" because I still know, both on my rural Maine island and the city in which I once lived, many teen age girls who don't feel as if they have a choice: who have babies at 15-16-17-18-19 because that's the only choice they feel they have, economically and culturally and ethically.

I've always felt so awed that someone -- my adoptive family -- chose me. Knowing that choice has allowed me to go into the world and create my own family. This big extended family--my lesbian partner and her children and grandchildren; my friends and former partners and their children; my adopted family, godparents, cousins, and their children; and most recently my birth mother, half siblings and their children--may not be traditional but it is a rich and diverse stew that feeds me to the extent I feed it. This is my family, and I am proud of it and honored and grateful to be a part of it. Thanks to all of you who allow me to consider you a part of this family.


I've only more recently become aware of the more difficult choices faced by my birth mother, thanks in part to an excellent book on the subject of these girls who, just after World War II during the "baby boom" years--which included a huge boom in babies "given up" for adoption--were confronted with increased sexual freedom and few ways to deal with the biological consequences of this freedom. This book, The Girls Who Went Away: the Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Years Before Roe v. Wade, prompted me, at 44 years of age, to seek out my birth mother. Getting to know Jeanine and her family has been another part of the wondrous ride of being a part of chosen family.


A lot of adoption stories aren't so happy, of course. (The photo to the left shows me in northern California last Sunday at my half brother Dale's house, with his family; my birth mother, Jeanine; and her husband of 35+ years, Don.) A lot of the women who had no choice about the fate of their bodies--women who were forced to have and to surrender their babies--did not fare as well as Jeanine; and the reunions between these children and their birth mothers, when they occur, don't bring the kind of love and joy mine has. Choice is one of the most fragile and amazing aspects of being human, and all too often we don't honor it, or attend to it. Choosing is an amazing and complicated act: each choice we make cuts in many directions.

In the context of having babies, the other side of "chosen" is "unwanted:" and children in that situation know their beginnings just as surely as I know mine. I'm not precious about the fact that I was born rather than aborted. When I talk about the critical role choice has played in my life, its power and importance, I'm not talking about being lucky because my mother chose to give birth to me (she actually didn't have other choices at that time): I'm talking about her choice to surrender me for adoption. I'm talking about the important power of each of us to choose life carefully and death equally: to not be afraid of death, but to choose it. To choose abortion where necessary; to choose to give birth; to choose our families from those we love, no matter their gender or color or genetic connection to us. The amazing human experience of choice.

"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people. To be born means that something which did not exist comes into existence. But the day we are born is not our beginning. It is a day of continuation. Since we are never born, how can we cease to be?" -- Thich Nhat Hanh, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment

Deep Blue

Beneath the sea, beneath the sea beneath the deep blue sea . . . we were at 170 feet below sea level in Death Valley. It feels a little as I imagine Jacques Cousteau might have, in his watery underworld, only without the gear. Here is the sea floor, here are the sand dunes. Here are the rugged, impassable and impassive mountains, holding it all in. Our 10-cylinder Ford purrs across the dips and rises that stymied horse drawn wagons. It takes us hours to go from below sea level to almost 9,000 feet in the Sierra's Tioga Pass; the gold rushing forty-niners spent days and weeks and months trying to traverse this salt encrusted landscape, many dying in the passage.

What's most interesting about Death Valley is that the reason for its existence is the constant, ongoing movement of the Panamint Mountain plate. It remains active, which is to say it is constantly pushing up; thereby pushing the floor of the valley ever lower. I close my eyes and can almost feel, in my pelvis, the gyroscopic quality of this see-sawing movement. We've made it to California, and the earth does still move here.

There's so much those of us who grow up and live 3,000 miles away just don't know about this landscape, and therefore about the people who live here. Maybe at one point in geography class I learned that Mount Whitney, pictured to the left with me and the two dogs, is the highest point in the 48 states: but growing up with Katahdin and Mount Washington, who thinks of these things?! Yet here it is, shadowing the Owens River Valley: a fabulously beautiful and mineral rich area, which Los Angeles's William Mulholland (think Mulholland Drive, those of you rich in LA or movie lore), a working class Irish immigrant who rose through the ranks to become superintendent of LA's water system, tapped as the giant aqueduct which travels down and across the state and makes LA the fabulous LA it is. The aqueduct pipe is 10' in diameter and buried for miles and miles; like the Blade Runner-ish Hoover Dam we crossed to get here, it is an engineering marvel and one that makes it difficult not to respect man's uncanny ingenuity--even when it is harnassed to sap the landscape and create plagues such as nuclear waste (buried just to the east of here, in Nevada) and global warming.

Judith and Linda's Excellent Adventure, Episode 10: No Pants in the High Chaparral

It's 5:30 a.m. at Sumner Lake State Park in eastern New Mexico. A thousand miles from nowhere. Made it through Texas stockyard row, vowing never to eat another Steak & Shake burger, the smell of death still clinging to our nostrils even as we slowly awake the next morning. Sun not up, although light is seeping over the edges of the plateaus. 40 degrees, high chaparral chill.

Gotta pee.

Both of us. Well, three of us, actually. Tosca jumps out, too, as JJ and I fall out of the van in our PJs: hers a full suit, mine -- well, mine just the top. I slide the van door shut behind us so the puppy can't escape into the dark.

We all pee into the creosote scrub. We come back to the van. JJ looks at me.

You closed the door.

Yeah, well, I didn't want the puppy . . .

We're in big trouble.

What JJ means is that the sliding door of the van has a broken handle. We can only open it by opening one of the other doors first.

And, because we're afraid of rattlesnakes, we locked all the other doors for the night.

I look at Jack, who is sitting looking sleepy and curly in the passenger seat.

I point toward the door lock. Open the door, I tell Jack.

Jack looks at me. We are locked out in the high chaparral, without clothes, in the 40 degree morning . . .



This is Yeso, where Judith's grandparents homesteaded before moving to Oklahoma City. "Homesteading" being a very loose term for what was possible in this desert environment, beautiful as it is. We passed through Yeso later that same morning, en route to Albuqueque, the roar of the dry wind in our ears through the garbage bags ducked taped across the broken van window.

We tried to get JJ's skinny arm inside the van to unlock it, but to prevent her from becoming stuck I pried the window a little too hard, and it shattered. We're gonna be delayed but . . . at least we have our pants on.

Despite the most recent episode in our excellent adventure, I tell JJ what I've thought a million times before: if I was ever forced to leave my beloved ocean and move into the desert, this would be the desert for me. Yellow and vermillion, the New Mexican high plains, ghostly Spanish land grants and abandoned missions, and native culture sing out to me.

Red Dirt

Red powder, really. Under our nails, coating our feet, dusting our hair and making all four of us, black dogs included, into strawberry blondes. We dust off each time before stepping into the van. The wind has worn Oklahoma sandstone--as illustrated by one of the famous rose rocks, above, given to us by Judith's cousin Judy--into such a fine powder it is difficult to believe anyone ever tried to farm here. But they did: they famously busted open the land with the plow, trying to plant as many fields of wheat as they could, even as the economic cycles and over supply forced wheat prices down. As prices went down, they . . . planted more. Not dissimilarly from corn today, which is another whole story and one told best by Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. And the more they busted open the red powder land, the more it blew, resulting in a red dirt dustball the likes of which my generation is lucky to have never seen.

But Judith's family did: they were homesteaders and sheep herders and her mother remembered moving around in a wagon until they landed finally in Oklahoma City. Shown to the right are JJ and her cousin Rodger, seconds before he jets off to Germany.
I didn't have time in my last post to talk about Rodger's wife, Judy (Oklahoma is populated by Ralph's and Judy's); she has been a journalist with the Tulsa Globe for almost 40 years, and is currently their book editor. Despite its empty downtown, Tulsa--called by Rodger and others an "eastern city" for the way it was developed by eastern oil men--Tulsa is a thriving intellectual center in OK, and Judy, proud of her city, is a great example of that. I'm always awed and proud to meet anyone who has been a daily journalist for 40 years . . .

Oklahoma City, the state capital and unlike Tulsa, is what is known as a "cow town." Populated and run by cowboys, it has a "western spirit" and design unlike Tulsa. This is where JJ grew up, in a small neighborhood just outside downtown with her mother's parents, whom she called Nanny and Dada.

Oklahoma is celebrating its centennial: it is very nearly the youngest state in the nation. Centennial sounds funny to my eastern ears, educated as they were at a college founded in 1796 . . . to prepare, the Oklahoma legislature raised the money to finish building the capital building, completing its rotunda in 2002! We use it as a landmark as we drive downtown. Downtown to the Oklahoma City National Monument: other than the World Trade Centers, this is the only other place in the U.S. where a bomb has killed significant numbers of U.S. citizens: and this bomb was created and detonated by a U.S. citizen himself.


The memorial, designed by a German artist, is eerily beautiful: the street that used to run past the Alfred J. Murragh Federal Building, the block used by Timothy McVeigh to drive his van into, transformed into a reflecting pool. Chairs for each of the 168 killed in the bombing. McVeigh did not like the way in which federal agents handled David Koresh's radical Christian sect at Waco, TX (and who did, since federal agents ended up firebombing the place) and decided to seek retribution. It's really a shame the Bible has that line in there about "an eye for an eye." The Christianity with which I was raised was one of forgiveness, not vengeance: the Christianity I know doesn't support putting more of our citizens in jail than does any other nation, nor does it support the death penalty. But that's just the point: everyone has their own reading of the Bible, and so many of these readings are not about love and compassion, grace and forgiveness; so many of them are simply deadly.

So we travel on, toward Texas and New Mexico, asking: what is the "western spirit?"

Oklahoma Deco, and the Blair ** Project

The further we drive, the more apparent it becomes that landscape is etched into our bodies and souls. What else could explain JJ's connection to this barren land of short scrubby trees, flat horizons, and endless dust?! But she loves it, the way I love the gentle salt marshes of southern New England and the rocky shores of northern. She basks in the heat, I wilt. We're in her country now.

The picture above is the Blair, an apartment building where Judith's father's sister, Marie, and her husband Ray, lived; and where Judith and her cousin Rodger (both shown as specks here in front of the building) spent much beloved time. The Blair used to be surrounded by lots of other apartment buildings and stores and activity; now it is surrounded by parking lots (I'm trying not to sustain a despairing theme here, about the abandonment of america, but it ain't easy). Downtown Tulsa is a ghost town, its gorgeous Art Deco buildings, built during the oil boom of the 1920s, largely deserted now, especially on weekends. It reminds me of downtown Houston: all the life is in the suburbs and the malls to the south. To use these incredibly beautifully ornamented structures for modern business or life requires rewiring and retrofitting that apparently few are willing to take on. So here we are, in the city where Judith and Rodger ran wild as kids, eating free cake and sitting in at courthouse trials: and it is largely an empty parking lot.

Rodger went on to be a long term state representative, and speaker pro tem of the house here in Oklahoma; and then major of Tulsa, pop. app. 330,000. He speaks Portuguese and Spanish fluently and is, how we say in our country, an interesting character. He is off this Sunday morning for Germany, where he is teaching a class in human relations. Currently he heads a department at the University of Oklahoma he self titled as Democracy and Culture in Human Relations. A good reminder that we all need to create our own dream jobs!

We head down to Oklahoma City later today. I am curious about the heartland location where a federal building was bombed: it is so abstract to me, I am eager to place it. Eager, too, to visit Judith's father's grave. More family pictures to come --