It was work but I shimmied myself up to my elbows, winching at the mind-bending pain. “More tests?” I asked. “Why? You just said he was great.”
The doctor pressed a firm hand at my pelvis as if to remind me to stay put. “It’s procedure,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get him back.”
Another round of laughter passed through the staff as if she had made the best joke, but my sense of humor was not tuned to the medical establishment and these incomprehensible rules. I was a mother now. I wanted my child.
The baby fussed and the nurse patted at his back as if he was hers.
I sent my husband my best “If you don’t get that baby, I’ll kill you” look. My eyebrows pulled together, my jaw was tight, and my eyes went narrow.
As he reached out, yet again attempting to fulfill my primal wishes, the nurse shooed him away. She said something about hospital rules and my being overly emotional.
Poor man, he lifted his empty hands and shrugged his shoulders. On his face was an expression of utter bafflement. Among all these women, the man was out of his element.
Between us, we had already talked about the possibility of the baby being separated from me. If something was wrong once the baby was born, our back-up plan was to make sure he stayed with the baby—no matter what.
My husband bit his lip, unsure if our back-up plan was still in place, so I was the one who said it out loud:
“I want my husband to carry him.”
A feeling of hesitation filled the room, confusion too. These people weren’t used to a mother calling the shots. The doctor did her own little nod of ascent and the nurse finally handed over the baby.
My husband, a little awkward, took our son into his arms.
“Watch his neck. Support his head,” I commanded, as if I was an expert on babies.
My husband adjusted his hands and three nurses swarmed.
What if something happened? What if these doctors made a mistake?
“Stay with him!” I called out.
“I will,” my husband said.
“Don’t leave his side.”
“I won’t.”
As the door closed, I eased back into the pillows again and looked between my legs. The doctor was a woman but she behaved like a man—professional and detached.
“Do you have children? ” I asked.
She laughed like having a child would be the last thing she would ever do and shook her head.
I directed my attention to the ceiling and chastised myself for being difficult and defensive and making all this worse than it was but I couldn’t help myself. I was so scared. What was happening to my son?
And that is when it happened. I began to awaken from a lifelong slumber.
As if time had split in half, I was back in 1963. I saw my own mother—helpless on a table. I saw myself being brutally separated from her. I felt a rush of intense emotion—shame mixed with fury.
And then I felt myself being dragged from her by unforgiving strangers. I felt sensations of movement that were swift and certain.
A series of jagged flashbacks took over then and flooded my senses: white light in my field of vision, laughing murmuring voices in my ears, and in my stomach there was a turn of nausea.
While being stitched up, I began to shake. My arms and legs were out of my control.
The doctor called out for the nurse and soon I was covered with warm blankets. I heard someone say I was in shock from giving birth and then I lost consciousness.
THREE
THE GIFT FROM GOD
AFTER BEING TAKEN FROM CATHERINE, I was deposited in the nursery at St. Mary’s Hospital.
Bud and Janet got a call from their doctor, a man named Smernoff, not long after he had washed his hands of my mother.
Although Dr. Smernoff is dead now, he is on record as saying he delivered 6,200 babies between 1929 and 1974. How many infants were taken in the way I was taken from my own mother? How many of us were given away on his advice?
“SHE’S WAITING,” SMERNOFF told Bud on the phone, as if I was at the hospital and tapping my foot.
According to family lore, Bud was Smernoff’s accountant. Smernoff’s daughter went to school with Bud’s younger sister and the two families were longtime friends. They went to the same cocktail parties, danced with each other’s wives, and shared stories over plates of barbeque.
Dr. Smernoff pulled strings to get Bud and Janet off a three-year adoption waiting list. He told the Catholic agency that in his opinion, the Laucks were special people and he recommended them with no hesitation. He didn’t mention Janet’s medical problems, which included a recent surgery to remove an eleven-inch tumor from her spine, a history of hallucinations, lacerated ulcers in her stomach, and kidney failure. He didn’t talk about Bud’s financial ruin, due to Janet’s medical bills.
The adoption was approved.
BUD AND JANET couldn’t get to me right away. I’m not sure why the time lapsed but there is a story of how they had a bowling match to attend that had been scheduled months in advance (Bud was an accomplished bowler with trophies on the mantel of their home). I also remember hearing there was childcare to arrange for their older child—a boy named Bryan—and that there was shopping to do in order to pick up diapers, a crib, and bottles.
Two days after I was born, they arrived at St. Mary’s and I was passed into Janet’s arms. “This one is a real handful,” the nurse warned, as if my incessant crying had gotten on her nerves.
Janet asked after the purple welts that were spread over the top of my head. “Forceps delivery,” the nurse said. “Very stubborn baby.”
This brief conversation became Lauck legend. I was defined as a “handful” and “stubborn” throughout childhood. My Auntie Carol used to say, “You are the most willful child I have ever met.” When I was small, I’d stay at Auntie Carol’s house and in no time, she’d position me in a corner between the living room and the front room. I’d spend hours with my nose against plaster studying the intersection of two right angles. Auntie Carol told me to think hard about my stubborn nature. She suggested I change my ways.
BUD’S FULL NAME was Joseph Everett Lauck. He was a tall, clean-cut man with brown eyes and hair. His shoulders were sloped and he stooped from the waist, as if to apologize for his height.
Janet was Janet Lee Ferrel and stood about five foot three. Her hair and eyes were almost black. Her complexion was quite fair.
Bud was an accountant who started his own firm in Carson City. As a young man in university, he did not attend lectures and still aced his exams. He was called a genius.
Janet was a homemaker whose ambition centered on family. She went to college, majored in art and modeled clothing for department stores. She was called elegant and glamorous.
Bud was the eldest son in a family of five children. He was raised Catholic. He had a reckless side—he drove too fast and liked to gamble. He also dreamed of being a millionaire by the time he was forty years old. His hero was Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner.
Janet was the oldest in her family of three kids. Her people were Methodists. Since childhood, Janet had been frail and sickly but she didn’t admit her condition to anyone. When she was “out of sorts,” as she called it, she kept any residual discomfort to herself and took handfuls of aspirin to manage her pain. “A lady doesn’t complain,” she used to say.
TO JANET, I was considered a gift from God and the answer to her prayers for good health. She was sure she wouldn’t be given a baby if she were going to die. My arrival felt mystic and important—my place in their world, as daughter, was called destiny.
I wanted to believe I could be someone’s destiny. I liked to imagine I was of the divine. I went so far as to build rough scaffolding that propped me up on the set of their lives where I tottered around as if I belonged, but if pressed I would admit I felt itchy and wrong, as if I wore a pair of tights that were too small and hung below my crotch. My life was like a series of tugs and pulls where I had to take
huge, wide steps across my interior rooms in order to fit, and still I did not find myself at home in their world. Perhaps the reason for this has to do with time. In the end, I had so little of it with Janet, Bud, and Bryan.
FOUR
THREE DEATHS
JANET DIED WHEN I WAS Seven years old. Bud died eighteen months later, when I was nine. Bryan ended his life when I was twenty. He was twenty-three.
For many years of my adult life, I snapped off this news in precise sentences whittled to the most basic facts. Having grown up to become an investigative television reporter and trained in the art of story telling, presentation, and delivery, I’d developed the belief that to tell it straight was the best approach. Why be elusive or even coy?
Life had been brutal to me and I’d go ahead and be brutal in return.
Dead, buried, gone.
That’s how I coped with all that loss and if you asked I’d tell you that I didn’t look back. I’d say, “It happened, it’s over, I’m past all that.”
For the most part, people believed me and didn’t ask me to elaborate on the gruesome details.
If they had, I would have been just as succinct: Janet died from complications associated with a tumor in her spine, Bud had an unexpected heart attack, and Bryan shot himself in the head.
This usually had folks take a step or two back, giving me room, as if my situation had some form of residual effect. Was tragedy contagious?
Before people went too far away, I was quick to reassure that I was doing just great. Look at me, I practically said. Look at what I have become!
I was the one who offered to shake hands first when introductions took place. I was the one who asked a man out—not the other way around.
I was the one who didn’t need anyone, who left the party first, and who was alone even when in a crowd of people.
I was a survivor, yes, but I didn’t want to be known as a survivor. I wanted to be known as the one with ambition to spare. I wanted you to see me as a busy person with important matters to think about.
Feelings?
What were feelings?
Who needed them?
AS SOON AS my son, Spencer, was given a clean bill of health and we were released from the hospital, we went home and every known emotion welled to the surface.
Before the baby, I had been tough, focused, sharp, and defined by my ambitions. After the baby, as I lay in the quiet of those lush days of sleep, breastfeeding, and skin-to-skin contact, I became primal mother—overflowing with a new desire to nurture and protect. I was also molten, raw, Technicolor love—this kaleidoscope of infatuation and devotion. And I was scared, paranoid, bitchy, unreasonable, and argumentative.
Here was my son, his warm body draped heavily on my chest after a drunken feast on my ample milk supply, and I found myself looking at him but also looking beyond him into the abyss of my own childhood and infancy. At times there would be great swells of sadness, loneliness, fear, and confusion. Other times, I would hear fragments of sound, experience splinters of recollection, and feel shards of sensation. Sometimes it felt as if madness circled overhead, not unlike the teddy bear mobile that spun above Spencer’s crib.
EXPERTS DIAGNOSED ME with postpartum depression and in part, that may have been correct, but it felt bigger than depression.
I was now feeling everything, and therefore, it became important to sort my feelings out.
This is when I began to write the book that would become my first, Blackbird. Just prior, there had been a spate of therapy but talking all this insanity out with someone who charged by the hour seemed ludicrous—and time consuming. I’d be in therapy until I was eighty. I didn’t have that kind of time! Spencer didn’t have that kind of time.
Instead I used my reporting skills to investigate Janet’s death, Bud’s death, and then Bryan’s death. I wrote everything I could remember and told myself that I did this writing, not for my sake, but for Spencer’s. He deserved a mother who was fully awakened and not a hostage to her past. He also deserved a historical account that hadn’t been reduced to a series of sound bites. Spencer, I told myself, deserved the full truth.
FIVE
GYPSY TRASH
“HERE’S THE TRUTH,” Bryan said. “Your real parents threw you in the trash.”
It was a sunny day in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1970. Our family, still intact at this time, had moved from Nevada a year earlier so Janet could get the best health care at UCLA Medical Center.
I was seven years old. Bryan was nearly ten.
It had been an ordinary day, like any other—school, peanut butter sandwiches, milk to wash it down, skinned knees, Barbie dolls, and episodes of The Brady Bunch. And then Bryan said, “You’re adopted. Your parents were gypsies. They tossed you in the trash.”
I remember standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment that had a view of the sea. Gulls hung in the sky like ornaments with no wires. Salted wind blew off the Pacific Ocean.
BY SEVEN, I had adapted quite nicely, thank you very much. As the designated special gift from God, I took up my role as divine caregiver with an earnestness that might be called either saintly or irritating. I didn’t really care what others thought of me though, I was my mother’s savior and Lord did I have a lot of work to do.
Janet was such a sick woman, most of her time was spent in bed where she withered away. Kidneys, bladder, bowel, liver, and stomach—all were put under strain by the persistent growth that lived in her spine. Although it wasn’t cancer in the way one thinks of cancer, it was a tumor and when it grew, it pressed on nerves and brought dreadful pain.
Many medications were prescribed and in the same way that some software programs will not interact well inside your computer, her medications did not interact well within her body. Pain meds brought on hallucination. Antihallucinogens brought emotional pitches. Other drugs had her sleep and sleep and sleep. Add in a few surgeries to remove a kidney and to scrape out bits of the reoccurring tumor and you get the picture. Janet was dying.
BRYAN MAY HAVE been so cruel in handling this news of my adoption based on a need to put me in my place. Perhaps he was jealous of my position of importance as divine interloper. How I wish I could have told him he need not feel such pettiness. Obviously, I was failing in my celestial work, and besides, it was no good night of sleep being me—the twenty-four-hour worry, the changing of the urine bag that connected to her catheter, the endless filling and refilling of her water glass, in hopes that each sip she took would turn her health around. The guilt. The gut-wrenching realization that I was not saving this woman but might actually be causing harm due to incompetence. Janet needed hospitalization—not the care of a child—and yet I tried so hard. I believed I had some otherworldly power to heal.
But Bryan, by nature, was a pissed-off kid. Anger was one of his defining qualities. There was good in there too but his light was hard to see through the darkness of his rage.
When he told me I was adopted, I felt dirty and bad—the opposite of God’s gift. In his declaration, “You’re adopted and gypsy trash,” I became a fallen angel.
In an act of recklessness, I raced into our apartment, slammed the front door and locked him out as if this might make what he said untrue.
Bryan banged his fists on the door and bellowed, “Let me in! Let me in!”
Despite a feeling of pure terror, I dragged a stool across the kitchen and under the phone that was screwed into the wall. Climbing up and getting myself steady, I tugged the handset from the cradle and dialed my father at work.
There were no push buttons in this day. Each number required a spin of a rotary dial, which took a month of Sundays to my own hard beating heart. Bryan’s banging became louder still. The door rattled under the power of his fists.
Finally, my father picked up on the other line and when he did, I began to cry and talk at the same time. “Bryan says I’m adopted,” I said in a rush. “He says my parents are gypsies and they put me in the trash.”
A long
moment of stony silence passed and then my father said he was coming home from work early. Something he never did.
IN THE HALL of our apartment, there was an unused place to toss extra shoes and hang winter coats. I wedged into the corner of that hall closet with my Barbie suitcase against my chest. I pushed my feet against the door, to keep it shut and sat very still.
My father and Bryan watched TV.
My mother slept, as she always did, in her room.
And I there I sat, undone.
My father had come home right away from work to give over the details. He said they had wanted a daughter; actually Janet had wanted a daughter most of all. When she couldn’t have more children—being so sick and all—well, they adopted me. He told me that my first mother was a young girl in trouble. It was a long time ago, in Reno, and that was all he knew.
In part, I felt such relief. It was as if I had been freed from the lie we were all living and taken off the stage. It was okay not to be God’s gift in the light of this news and my days of adapting felt as if they might be nearing an end. Another Jennifer was out there, another life to be lived.
I wanted to ask if he knew my mother’s name.
I wanted to know where she lived.
I even felt like saying, “No hard feelings but this whole adoption thing isn’t working out so great for me. I want to go home now.”
But my father didn’t entertain conversation. These were the days of children being seen and not heard. Speaking up was called back talk.
Once the news was out there, my father looked tired and old. He said it was time to have dinner and thus ended our “adoption talk.”
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