Heartlines

by Susannah McFarlane

  Pressing pause

  Susannah

  Things are all getting a bit much on both sides of the family fence as both Robin and I wrangle our tribes and each other.

  Yet now, in early December, I am about to step off the wonderful but giddying carousel by travelling overseas with Oskar to reclaim our children, see my brother and his family in Cambridge and then celebrate Christmas with our family in Sweden. We have planned to bid farewell to 2014 and start what we hope will be a calmer 2015 at the very top of the world in the Arctic Circle. The four of us reunited in a glass igloo in the middle of a Finnish forest, hunting the northern lights on huskies and skidoos. I also think the break will be good for Robin and me: she has a lot going on in her family too, so this could be the perfect moment to press pause.

  The adult me thinks this is a brilliant idea and the mother in me is beside myself with excitement at seeing Edvard and Emma again: both kids leaving the nest to go so far away has pulled hard on the phantom umbilical cord and I can’t wait to see them both.

  But that pesky inner child, however, is also beside herself and doesn’t want to go so far away for so long. It is a weird tug of war that perhaps I should have seen coming, but I didn’t.

  The night before Oskar and I fly out, Robin and I go out for dinner. The restaurant is delightful on a warm summer evening and the food is delicious, but I am already beginning to worry about leaving. It doesn’t help that I am also an anxious flyer and the anticipation of the long flight is adding to my stress. I try not to show any of this to Robin as we make our way through the ridiculous amount of food that we have, in our enthusiasm, over-ordered. We then go back to Robin’s house and watch a DVD, a good distraction. Yet as the movie comes to an end, so too, I realise, has my time with Robin. I am excited about our trip but, right now, I don’t want to leave.

  Robin

  I can’t let my daughter go all that distance away without praying for her. I ask the Lord to watch over her and keep her and her family safe. I pray that their time together will be bonding and that their Christmas will be full of peace and jollity.

  Susannah

  I understand that the prayer is important for Robin and I am comforted by her words and her hug but it isn’t enough: I want something more tangible that I can take with me, have with me while we are apart. Robin takes a green cord from some flowers I have given her and cuts it: we tie one part around my wrist and another on her key-ring. Tethered. That is the theory. The string will hold tight, the knot cannot be loosened. It is a symbol of our unbreakable connection.

  The symbol crashes and burns within the hour.

  I haven’t even left Hadfield when I look at my wrist and the ribbon isn’t there. I U-turn back to Robin’s house. She tries to make a joke of it but I will have none of it, so she runs back inside and finds more cord. This time she ties it tighter with a complicated but ineffectual series of knots. When I get home, Oskar, sensing his wife is, once again, close to losing it, burns the ends to hold it fast. That cord isn’t going anywhere.

  But I am, and it is with a strange mixture of excitement and regret that I board the plane to Europe towards my family and 17 000 miles away from Robin.

  Family reunion

  Susannah

  Oskar and I have an idyllic stopover in Dubai before we land in London. Two days of sun and sleep are just what is needed before we fly on to stay with much-loved old friends and to be reunited with Edvard, who has in turn just been reunited with his girlfriend, Claudia. And then, reunions clearly the order of the day, we all travel to Cambridge and reunite with my brother Duncan and his family, and Dad, who is staying with them.

  Cambridge is a charming university city and Duncan, a fellow at one of the colleges, has arranged a beautiful dinner in a private dining room at St John’s. It is very Cambridge yet also very family, with old jokes being told and a lifetime of shared experiences and anecdotes being drawn on and traded. Everyone knows their role; there is no wondering if you have put your foot in something, made a good or bad impression. Everyone just is as they have always been and it is so easy, relaxed and lovely.

  I watch my dad, my brother and my nephew together – three peas in a genetic pod – and with fresh eyes I see the strength of their similarities, both in appearance and manner, the expressions they use, even the looks they give. And, as I watch my niece, I can see both her mum and my mum in her. The similarities are as undeniable as they are comforting.

  I don’t remember it ever worrying me that I couldn’t see myself in anyone else in my family, but I realise that I like that I can now: that I can hear my laugh in Matilda’s, that I can see my jaw-line in Robin’s. It isn’t essential but, then again, there is something affirming about it.

  For a moment I have a thought that this might be the time to tell my family about my other family. The atmosphere is so warm and loving … and I want to throw a hand grenade at it? So I keep that thought to myself but with a little sadness: once again I am hiding something important from the people I love.

  But this is not the time for sadness: there is too much fun to be had. We return to London: we shop among the Christmas lights of Regent Street, see a brilliant play in the West End and we eat and drink our way through the week with festive cheer and abandon.

  Yet, every now and then, I feel a pang. I miss Robin. I am surrounded by family and old friends and the excitement of being in London at Christmas time, yet part of me wants to be back in Hadfield. What is that about?

  Oskar suggests that I ring Robin, to keep up a bit of contact, and keep me in check. ‘Just don’t talk too long,’ Oskar wisely advises. ‘We are still on Australian SIM cards and it will cost a fortune.’

  I ring Robin late one night, which is early in the morning for her. Things are difficult for her at home, she is tired and I am jetlagged and we have a small argument over nothing. An hour later, things aren’t much better – I can’t believe I am paying this much to become this upset. I hang up, sad, and then get a text from Robin. She is, inexplicably to me, excited:

  Our first argument! Great! Sign of intimacy xx

  Now I am even sadder. Not only am I sad we argued when I really just wanted to be comforted by Robin’s voice, but now she is claiming the argument is a good thing, a happy new stage in our relationship. And Oskar is rightly wondering about our phone bill. None of this helps.

  What does help, however, is flying to Sweden towards one last reunion, with Emma, and a Christmas with Oskar’s family. Sweden and our Swedish family are very important to us and to be all together for Christmas, the first without Oskar and his sister Stina’s mum, is particularly special. And the Swedes really know how to do Christmas: their response to the cold and dark of a Nordic winter is to make the preparations and lead-up to Christmas so beautiful that we all forget we are freezing in the dark.

  And so it is as we enter Stina and Sten’s house, one of my favourite places in the world, now exquisitely decorated with candles, handcrafted paper stars in the hallway and a magnificent Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. The smell of the Christmas fir, the gingerbread cookies and blue cheese and the bottle of chilled wine greet us in the living room. My daughter arrives home from a party and the family is all together again. I watch my two children sit so happily with their cousins, this time five peas in a genetic pod, and there is a lovely sense of calm and belonging. I feel incredibly lucky.

  VIII

  EMOTION SICKNESS

  Buffeted by the waves

  Robin

  I have severe igloo envy. The idea of quiet, remote isolation seems incredibly appealing to me, as back in the heat of the Australian summer, the pressure is on: there is Matilda’s wedding to Jason to organise and other serious family issues erupt just before Christmas.

  On top of all this, probably as a result of lifting my grandson Levi incorrectly, I manage to injure a spinal disc, which then causes pressure on the sciatic nerve in my leg. As anyone who has experienced this will testify, it can be excruciat
ingly painful. I cannot afford to rest properly, however, because there is too much to do, but, when out and about, I am frequently reduced to taking emergency measures, such as walking bent over at a ninety-degree angle or sitting down on a stack of toilet rolls in Coles.

  As an unattractive garnish to this mix of minor adversities, I have an accident that could have proved to be quite disastrous. I am sitting in a cane chair on Marian’s outside deck, from which a flight of four stairs descends to the lawn, when a slight movement causes one leg of the chair to tip over the edge and I find myself, still in my cane chair, tumbling backwards, over and over till I land on the ground. Thank God, I emerge from the experience virtually unscathed. However, as a result of accumulated pressures, I am becoming increasingly physically and emotionally exhausted. I hope Susannah is having more of a refreshing break. I do miss her but maybe it’s for the best that she is not here right now, given the tensions and busyness.

  Separation anxiety in the snow

  Susannah

  With snow falling gently outside, there is, blissfully, no need for excuses to do nothing. The family takes long, rugged-up walks along a frozen beach and sits by the fire watching movies, reading books, talking, being together. And yet, I feel a little apart, adrift. Early on an already dark afternoon, my reading of choice is a raft of e-books about adoption, all with titles that involve colons, never the indicator of a light read. Yet I am hoping to learn, looking for knowledge that will give me some context and perspective on my reunion with Robin, some relief from the rising panic I am feeling.

  All the books talk about how adoptees carry a deep, primal wound of abandonment and that, reunion or no reunion, they need to bring together a divided self that was split between their blood and life families. They describe the experience of the adoptee attempting reunion as a bombardment of overpowering emotions that seems to come from nowhere and tosses them in all directions.

  Six months ago I would have scoffed at all this but now I understand the motion sickness they describe, the lurching, heart in stomach, from one confused feeling to another. It is as if all the books are talking about me and my experience with Robin, looking into my heart and head. I love reading it: it shows that it isn’t just me, that I’m not going mad – or if I am, it’s okay, it’s normal, it’s to be expected. I realise with relief that if I am the nutter I fear I am, I am in the very good company of a large number of adoptees struggling to cope with a reunion.

  And, as I read on, I discover that it is very common for adoptees to spend years denying the importance of their birth families. ‘Hostile non-searchers’, they, we, deny that any wound has been inflicted, that any connection to their birth families exists. Then, whenever, however that wound is exposed, everything is thrown up in the air: the genetic genie is out of the bottle and there’s no turning back to the comfort of numb denial.

  I read case study after case study and similar stories of alienated confusion and tumult are told. In my mind, I build an image of the adoptee straddling two countries, the one of their birth and the one of their life: they have a passport to both but perhaps never feel completely at home in either, walking a tightrope between the two.

  I read on, flicking from book to book, Googling other references, and begin to build a list of my ‘symptoms’:

  Fear of telling my adoptive parents – tick, got that one covered.

  Trouble bringing the ‘what was’, the ‘what ifs’ and ‘what is’ together – tick, massive head spin.

  Trying to please everyone, fear of being abandoned all over again – tick.

  And then – separation anxiety if away from the birth mother once reunited.

  Ah, there it is, the reason I feel like I did when leaving Robin to come overseas, the reason I am still feeling sad when I am surrounded by everyone I love. My inner child has popped up again and now has a severe case of separation anxiety. But what can I do about it?

  ‘Time for wine, Suse?’

  My darling sister-in-law offers me a glass and I put down my iPad.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  I told Stina about Robin and the reunion soon after we arrived in Sweden but I don’t want to discuss this. This information is all new and I need to wrestle it by myself a bit.

  And we have Christmas to plan. There is a long list of decisions to be made about what will be cooked and when and by whom to prepare the julbord, the Swedish Christmas table. The kids are allocated the meatball-making, Sten will prepare his Danish dishes, and Stina and I will do the gravlax. There is a lot to plan and much shopping to be done but it is far from a chore: it’s part of Christmas and it’s fun and it’s very family. Stina and I have both done it with Stina’s mum before and now we are doing it without her but together: the family renews and reknits. Stina and I talk easily and with love: despite no blood bond and only seeing each other every two years, there is a deep, mutual tie. Family comes in all different boxes.

  Later that night, while everyone sleeps, my mind spins again and I return to my books. As I read, it seems the adoptee’s separation anxiety is best healed if the birth mother is prepared to acknowledge it, to see the wounded baby in the adult child and help it to heal.

  Part of me, instinctively, cries out yes please and that’s what I asked for and she gave me at Longleaf. But can I keep asking her and for how long? I don’t want this to go on forever either – I would quite like my grown-up self back in charge. I Google on, looking for answers and I find myself once again watching Professor Brené Brown’s brilliant TED talk on vulnerability. She speaks of the need to be brave enough to show up as we really are, to allow ourselves to be seen, to reveal ourselves to others as vulnerable and, above all else, to believe ourselves to be worthy of love and ask for it.

  Big call for the baby abandoned. But perhaps I can lay a path. I take a screen shot of a page from one of the books about re-parenting the reunited adult child and send it to Robin. And I hope it doesn’t freak her out completely.

  Robin

  I am a little horrified by the whole re-parenting thing. Being a single mother, especially with both myself and my children bearing wounds from the past, wasn’t easy. I carried burdens that I should have cast on the Lord as He tells us to do, and in hanging on to them, I think I often messed up His operations and depleted my resources. As a hangover from this, when I read in the adoption literature Susannah sends that the adoptee can need considerable re-parenting, I must admit I quail at the thought. Who has a baby at seventy-two? One phrase used by a psychologist was ‘sucking on the withered breast’, which epitomises the taxing and at times despairing feeling of not being able to give what is demanded. ‘Give more! Feel more! Do more!’ Blood out of a stone.

  Sometimes, in rebellion against the tossing of the waves, my inner child rises up: Poor me. It’s too hard! It’s not fair!

  But then I remind myself that I can go to Jesus, who is my harbour of rest and, no matter how rough the seas, He is the anchor that holds me fast, that tethers and calms my soul. He is the navigator I am relying on in this voyage with Susannah and because I believe He is in our little boat with us, I believe we will make it safely home.

  So, I rally and send Susannah this email:

  Hello darling.

  I have only now discovered this email as I haven’t ‘gone on the computer’ for some time. It is very interesting and validates any ‘nuttiness’ you may have manifested, as it seems clear that being adopted ranks very high on the trauma scale. I don’t think this is at all widely appreciated – and certainly not by me.

  One tends to think of other things – like witnessing horrors as a child or being abused as a child or even later being abandoned as a child, for example, would be worse than ‘being given away to a better family’ at birth.

  The whole identity issue – and the fact that this begins before emerging at birth even – is little understood and therefore little taken in to account – but is, in fact, obviously crucial! Again, good old
Shakespeare comes to mind: ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’. So, darling Susannah, I am more conscious now of the magnitude of the ‘sin’ (my term for the wrongness of our ways) in giving you away – in ignorance, maybe, but ignorance doesn’t mitigate consequences). In your early letter, all those years ago, you said – also out of ignorance – you had nothing to forgive me for. Thank you for recently – with more understanding – telling me that you did forgive me; that was a beautiful thing.

  Looking forward to having you back here.

  All my love, Robin xx

  Susannah

  Robin’s email makes me happy: she seems to understand that I am more comfortable with her invoking Shakespeare than the Bible. The differences between Robin and me are becoming clearer at the same time as the strength of the connection is being confirmed. It’s more than a little confusing.

  So, I ponder my newly diagnosed separation anxiety and decide I need to do something about it. Perhaps I need distractions from Robin, things to help me wean myself from her? And then it comes to me, the perfect solution – I’ll make contact with Tim.

  Up until now I have been a conscientious objector to meeting Tim, largely because I don’t know what to do with him – and don’t know what he would do with me. Robin has assured me that he wants to meet me but part of me thought, why would he really? He hasn’t ever before.

  But 17 000 miles away it suddenly seems a brilliant idea. So, I ask Robin for his number. She sounds surprised.

  Robin

  Despite the fact that I have been so keen for Tim and Susannah to connect, I am surprised that she should choose this time to make contact. Somehow it seems a little impetuous, a little crazy. I feel she should stop spinning, stop throwing more and more balls into the air – slow down her already frenetic juggling of people, thoughts, emotions. Why doesn’t she take this holiday opportunity to rest and regroup? I am exhausted just thinking about her energy! But then maybe that’s the tortoise in me coming out: older, slower, increasingly averse to doing more than one thing at a time.