Belonging, Becoming, and Taking All of it One Step at a Time

One year and one day ago, Jake and I were out in the middle of gorgeous falling snow celebrating our 15th anniversary. The next morning we awoke with two excited girls who wanted to play in it. Magnolia and I went across the street to a steeper driveway and used a large piece of cardboard as a sled. It was so fun. Our own little winter wonderland. 

(January 4, 2019)

Later that evening I was abruptly faced with a new reality. My paternal biological family line, that I thought I pretty much had figured out, came to be something completely different. One can understand information as it is presented, yet it doesn't really make full sense until after the information has been processed. The shock is over, thankfully; I cried for weeks. And weeks. And maybe months. But who's counting? Yes, the shock is over, but the processing is not. I'm still working at wrapping my mind around all of the nuances of the change. 

I gained relationships for which I am grateful. But some relationships I had worked hard to build still feel very different. I'm holding out some sense of hope that perhaps this altered relationship will still include future growth. I once heard that a broken heart is how the light gets in. I believe that in so many ways, and I really want it to be applicable here. But I'm not there yet. 

I'm focusing on what I do have. What I do know. I know this. A man I'd never met rearranged travel plans and flew from Arizona to Oklahoma City to meet me less than one month after he found out I existed. We took a DNA test in my living room to prove whether or not we were related. We definitely are. He had lived with the same kind of unknowing I had. And we were both met with similar rejection. And this man I went from not knowing, to being aware of, to being his niece did the best thing he could have...

HE SHOWED UP.

At my door, in my home, after traveling over a thousand miles because finding answers and making connections meant just as much to him as they did to me. He came to me. I am not used to that; I have always been the seeker. It felt really good.

(January 26, 2019. After the DNA test and Jake returned from a recital, my new uncle and aunt took us out for dinner in OKC.)

Not long before winter break, my students did a poetry unit. I put together a poetry packet for them, and a stanza from one of the poems took my breath away. It couldn't have been more perfect. From "Happiness" by Jane Kenyon:

happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair.

Admittedly, I was a nervous wreck the night before my new uncle came to meet me at the end of January last year. There was a lot of crying (probably more like wailing) and a lot of tequila (the margaritas I kept making myself were just so good). I had no idea what to expect. I can't remember a time when I so desperately wanted to curl up in a warm, cozy spot and have someone hold onto me a little too tight. I had never been the one waiting before. But he came. And I survived. We both did. Life is different and better with this new familial connection. 

The hardest part of all of this is how differently I feel about my biological father. In all of the everything that went down in 2019, his reactions, responses, and withholdings are the things that broke my heart. I don't know how to give him the grace I used to be able to before January 4, 2019. Our relationship has meant a lot to me. Finding him and getting to know him when I was 14 meant a lot. He felt familiar. He felt like a kindred spirit. I want to believe that's what it all really was. But part of me knows that some of that was a little girl who had always wanted to know where she had come from viewing things through rose-colored glasses. Those lenses have been taken off, and I am left with what is. And two sides of the same question: What do I want our relationship to be; what do I need our relationship to be? And also, I guess, What am I comfortable with our relationship being?

(May 22, 2003. My biological father and his wife with me at high school graduation. Because I unknowingly went to high school with my 1st cousin, he and his father, my new uncle, were out there in the sea of people on the Apache Junction High School football field. My graduation was the third time in my life I had seen my father. And little did any of us know that he had an older brother he might have seen for a brief second that night.)

All of this is part of an idea that my friend Lisa introduced to me a few years ago: Ambiguous Loss. Often we associate loss with a finite event. Someone dies, we begin a period of grief, work our way through it, etc. There are two types of ambiguous loss, physical and psychological, but there's no finite event for closure - a divorce, finding out you have a sister and then realizing that the reality of that great desire was not at all what you imagined, a loved one who begins withholding from you, a family member with dementia, a kidnapping, etc. All of these are forms of losses that aren't always clear. Feeling the loss of something/someone when in some ways you can literally reach out and touch them. It's hard to make sense of what the loss actually is. I spent a lot of this year trying to make sense of something that will just never make much sense. I'm getting more and more comfortable with that. Sometimes it still really hurts. But it hurts less often. 

Last night Jake and I were out celebrating our 16th anniversary with our friends Regan and Casey. I was telling them part of all of this, and I said something like, "For someone who has spent her life searching for her family, I always sort of hoped I'd find a crazy liberal aunt in Berkeley or something so I could say, 'Oh, this is where I get it from.'" And then they said the very best thing in response:

You can be the crazy liberal aunt... in Oklahoma.

It still makes me smile! I had never thought of this. But I LOVE it. It's going on my list of top five compliments I've ever received, even if I consider myself more moderate. I am the thing I have always wanted to find. A total work in progress, that's for sure. But on the journey of becoming. 

Brené Brown said, "True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being part of something and standing alone in the wilderness." 

And Maya Angelou said this in an interview with Bill Moyers: 

Moyers: Do you belong anywhere? Angelou: I haven't yet. Moyers: Do you belong to anyone? Angelou: More and more. I mean, I belong to myself. I'm very proud of that. 

Coming every day more and more into my own. Belonging more and more to myself. Making my way through the hard things, one step at a time, has been my very best teacher. And I'm very proud of that.


(Here is the rest of Jane Kenyon's "Happiness")

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

3 comments