Oh, of course: it’s the tiny words that trip me up –
A bit of freewriting in a semi-public space…
In talking about stories, Dolly Parton said this to a podcaster: [Stories] are my truth.
And he added, I believed her and yet wondered what was being left out.
Eight years ago, a few months after learning the DNA news that made me someone with a Not Parent Expected (NPE), I composed a photo post for Facebook for the simple reasons that I didn’t want to keep that news a secret, and telling many people at once was waaaaay easier – emotionally and logistically – than scores of individual discussions. Also, then as now, nothing in my bodymind experience made Pops anyone other than my *only* male parent, and everything in my nervous system, right up to my brain, affirmed that “family,” for me, was always socially contexted endeavour more than biological imposed organisational framework.
The people in that personal bubble Facebook of mine, got it – or it least, got me. And thank them regularly for that.
Eight years on, I have a pile of essay drafts – most half-drafts that stalled out while I was part of writing groups with other NPE writers. Somewhere in the talking during online meet ups, each piece of writing stopped. My story felt out of place – more accurately, I felt out of place. In time, I recognised my floating away feeling as a form of “displacement” – I wasn’t going to end at a final place in my writing, in my life, where my parents were wrong in their decision at my birth to not tell me unless I asked, or where I would feel anything but glad that I didn’t have a growing up experience that included “biodude.”
These insights come as I sit at my desk just now to set up for a writing retreat week on my newly screened in balcony. Thing one for the retreat week, is responding to a list of 5 questions from an NPE group asking for reflections from people affected by DNA surprises like mine, as well as people, for example, who are impacted by adoption, and donor conception discoveries that can shift understandings of identities and experiences of family in the context of “origin loss.”
And it’s that one tiny phrase – origin loss – that allowed me to realize why and what had so often stopped me in the writing with NPE groups. That particular “loss” presumes we – humans generally – have that one origin story, which as NPEs was – what? torn away, lost at birth; reasserted, reassembled at discovery? As NPEs have we, then lost a single story that we would, could, even should have had if there hadn’t been a secret about one biological parent? That one phrase set up a binary for me: I had an origin story. It was taken from me.
The dangers of a single story. Please, please, please give me the complexity of many stories, of identities that become more multilayered as we experience life, of social power as acts of collaboration and cooperation and mindsets of expanding and extending one’s original thinking rather than as action of social scripting to maintain a particular culture’s or religion’s norms. For me, “origin loss” suggests that the absence of a true? patrilineal? hierarchical? biological? origin story, is a wound – a trauma – that we share.
And today it clicked: Minimally, I was born into multiple family ethnic identities and traditions. I developed sense of self that required code switching for the multiple families and communities where my life landed over time. Before my NPE discovery, I already needed to develop psychological, cognitive, and social selves in the plural – origins, connections, contexts, allegiances, identities – as a means of surviving and thriving. It helped that I was raised with “What are you going to do about that?” as a guiding question, one that taught me to be intrigued by wicked problems – paradoxes, contradictions, ambiguities – and wary of binaries. Wary to think that I’d “lost” something that or someone who had been vital in my life. I often had to address loss – deaths, loss of friendships, ends of relationships, of safety in its many forms – through acts of rediscovery, observing something new in living or thinking, and then expanding or extending my ways of responding to loss.
The Truth of Things 