Something else I’ve learned about dementia, which has taken over the mind of my 86-year-old mother. It’s relentless. There is no backward movement. Only the push forward. I think of the brain, now, as a live organ that can erode. On some level, I knew this. Although I’m not sure I understood what it meant.

Where am I? she wonders. What is this place?

You’re home, I say.  This is your house.

This isn’t 28th Street. (the house she grew up in, back in Virginia.) I don’t recognize these walls. (Looking across the room. In a whisper.) Who are those people?

Your daughters, Mom. The oldest and youngest.

This is a terrible situation. (clawing at the arms of her chair.) I want to get out of it. But I can’t.

Nothing will make this better.

The person you love is not coming back.

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On Sunday, our “adoption book group” met to discuss Kathryn Ma’s The Year She Left Us. Several of us in the group are parents to tweens, teens, and young adults, so the novel’s themes–short version: a young woman adopted from China struggles with loss and identity–really spoke to us. A good book does that. So here I am, recommending it again.

The Year She Left Us, by Kathryn Ma. Check it out.

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Here’s what’s interesting about dementia, which my 86-year-old mom has had for some time, and is now in the advanced stages. You can ask her what she ate for breakfast 30 seconds before, and she doesn’t remember. But tell her that friends from the old neighborhoods, former Rockettes, and uncles, aunties, and cousins, are sending emails and posting on Facebook, calling and sending notes–and name those people–and she smiles and says “Oh yes!” She knows exactly who you’re talking about.

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Today in the car I heard a Chopin piano piece that I’ve heard hundreds of times in ballet classes over the years, including with my mother in her studio. (A former Rockette, she owned a dance studio in our small New Jersey town, and taught tap, jazz, and ballet.) The Chopin piece is always played at the end of the class, when the girls leap across the floor in what is called “big jumps.” My mom is now in home hospice care, confined to her bed, and using a wheelchair. She can’t find the words to make a sentence.

But this morning when I called her, I hummed the tune of the Chopin, and just for a moment she remembered the feeling of flying across the floor, suspended in air, the freedom of that, the joy.

“Beautiful,” she said.

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In case you haven’t seen this February 8, 2015, NY Times piece by Stephanie Sinclair, Child, Bride, Mother, please take a look. The photo essay is part of a series about child brides around the world; in this case the focus is on Guatemala. It’s a story many of us know first-hand, or through friends. From the article:

“In Guatemala, the legal age of marriage is 14 with parental consent, but in Petén, in the northern part of the country, the law seems to be more of a suggestion. Underage brides are everywhere.”

Organizations do promote contraception in some larger villages and towns, but culturally, it is not always accepted or understood. In 2006, the Guttmacher Institute did a study of reproductive health in Guatemala, titled Induced Abortion and Unintended Pregnancy in Guatemala. The study states that 32% of pregnancies in Guatemala are unintended. Abortion is illegal in Guatemala, but the study found an estimated 65,000 abortions are performed annually, for an average of one abortion for every six live births. Complications from unsafe abortions are a leading cause of maternal death in Guatemala.

Thousands of poor young women in Guatemala have little control over their own lives. Basics we take for granted here–education, nutrition, healthcare, reproductive autonomy–are out of reach for them. And as this photo essay illustrates, even today, the cycle continues.

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The NY Times ran a follow-up to the article about adoption from Korea, by a Times staffer who is adopted from Korea and returned to live there for a few years. Adoptees Sought Their Roots, and Readers Reacted was written by Marie Tae McDermott. Here’s an excerpt:

When a Times Magazine cover story appeared on the home page recently, it wasn’t the headline, “Why a Generation of Adoptees Is Returning to South Korea,” that startled me — it was the face of the adoptee Amy Ginther, who it turns out is someone I know. I saw Amy perform her one-woman show in Seoul, South Korea, and attended a communication workshop she led in New York.

Full disclosure: I am a Korean adoptee. I too returned to live in my birth country, where I became acquainted with the work of the adoptees profiled in the article. But unlike them, I did not stay.

The article struck a chord with New York Times readers, many of whom, like me, arrived with their own set of personal experiences as adoptees, parents of adoptees, birth mothers and impassioned observers. It became one of the most emailed articles, and by the time we stopped accepting comments, more than 1,200 had been submitted.

Maggie Jones, who wrote the article, has written extensively about adoption from the parents’ perspective. She is an adoptive parent herself. Now she sought to explore the issue from the perspective of the adult adoptee.

“It can be both delicate and, at times, polarizing among adoption experts, adoptive parents, adoptees, birth families,” Ms. Jones wrote in an email. “It gets at key public policy issues and also goes to the heart of what it means to be a family.”

Many adoptee readers did indeed take issue with aspects of the article.

Here’s my take on the two articles. There is no “one story.” There are as many stories as there are individuals involved. Definite “themes” repeat, and we them see in our own lives, in our own circles. For some. Not for all. Not all the time. In my own home, with two different children, each individual, I see divergent attitudes. Sometimes Olivia and Mateo are very interested in their birth stories and country, and sometimes not.

Moreover, the situation for many of our kids adopted from Guatemala is different from adults who were adopted as babies and children from Korea. The adults adopted from Korea were the first large “cohort” of children adopted internationally. The belief then was that adoption should be secret, birth family not talked about, and history ignored. Adoptive parents were told their children came as “blank slates,” and would adapt seamlessly to their new situation.

I once heard a talk by a 75+ year-old woman who was adopted as an infant somewhere on the East coast. The most telling sentence she uttered was this: “In those days, we didn’t say the word ‘asthma’ out loud. Do you think we ever talked about adoption?” Thankfully, since then, thinking about adoption has evolved. We talk, we talk, and we talk some more. We join online groups, read books, go to workshops and seminars and Heritage Camp, make birth-country trips. We encourage the conversation with our kids. And we need to.

Remember: As parents to children born in Guatemala, we are lucky to have access to identifying information about birth families. This crucial element allows our kids to answer questions about their identity. To give you an example: Last night, Mateo took out the photo album we made from his first visit with his birth mother, when Mateo was seven. We spent an hour studying every single image. Mateo pointed out how much he looks like his birth mom–down to the shape of their chins, the thickness of their eyebrows. I try to imagine if all that was a mystery for Mateo. If he had to imagine her face, her personality. The sound of her voice.

Twelve years into adoptive parenting, I hope I understand the very real sense of loss any person who is adopted feels. How can they not? Whatever the circumstances, regardless of where they end up, how can they not, on some level, in some place deep inside, not feel abandoned? As the adoptive mother to two children–happy, well-adjusted, terrific–I see the pain this sense of abandonment can bring. I witness it. I feel it.

I can’t “fix” that loss, but I can understand and acknowledge it. That’s a place to start. ~

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