by Cherie Logan
I am a woman, a wife, a mother, a genealogist, a writer, a public speaker, a childbirth educator and several other titles, some more important then others. I am a composite of many roles, gifts, talents and ideas. And I was adopted.
I rarely say that I am adopted. For me, adoption came late in life. I was only a few weeks from my fourteenth birthday. I was not a troubled teen although I caused my mother more than enough trouble. I was not alone in life but lived in the midst of a loving mother and sister. I was not abandoned, exactly, but my birth father left after the divorce and I never saw him again. My mother tells me that I walked in when she was packing his clothes and I asked where Daddy was. Gently she told me that he had left. She says that I never called him Daddy again. So, I wasn't abandoned, exactly, my mother and little sister never left me alone. But there was no dad and my heart needed a dad.
Today things are different. I don't know if that is good or not. Just different. Today children from divorced families journey from a few blocks to a few states to have living time with each parent. Today raising children can be quite an exercise in juggling relationships. I'm blissfully ignorant of the process having never divorced. And as a child, so many years ago it was decided that it was best to not tear us up emotionally by having an out-of-state father show up from time to time. So I think of myself as my mother's daughter.
One day my mother began to date this man. He was tall, quiet, and more quiet. But he was funny too. And he sure loved my mother. His concern for us spilled over into our lives and we basked in the blessings. I remember the first time he brought groceries to the house. It was like Christmas! There was a pineapple in the bag and we had never even seen one before. He had served as a Lt. Commander in the navy and was stationed in Hawaii in some leadership position at what I think was a training center there. I don't think that is why he brought us a pineapple but to this day I associate pineapples with that quiet, gentle man and his subtle concern for my little family.
After a year of dating, Mr. Sommers asked my mother to marry him. Not long after that my mother conspired with my young sister to see if we could call him something other then Mr. Sommers....like maybe “Dad.” They married in March and he became step-father to two girls ages ten and twelve. When they married we did begin to use the title of Dad and Mr. Sommers became something more then a dream.
I don't know exactly what motivated Dad to adopt us. I don't want to ever ask why. I want only to know that he loved us. And he did. And I knew it and loved him in return.
I had not seen my birth father since he left when we were so very young. I had not heard from him. I knew nothing much about him except all the wonderful things my mother had told me. They had been friends growing up in their small town and the friendship turned to marriage and the marriage brought children and a move out of the small town and to a distant and busy California. Then it ended and he returned to that small town and we stayed behind. Nothing dramatic, just a causality of the times.
We all wanted the adoption. A lawyer explained that because of the father's absence we didn't need his permission but that it was cleaner if we could get it. My mother wrote him and asked him to let us be adopted by her new husband. It seemed to take forever for that permission to finally reach us. Now, I can imagine and feel the agony he must have felt, staring at that paper and trying to give up that last final attachment. But he did it. And we went to the judge and became Sommers for real.
The adoption was one of the events of my life that changed my life. It healed something inside of me that I have never been able to completely identify. It sounds silly but as that young teen I could see myself someday being a mother but I could not see anybody being a father to my precious children. Then the adoption happened and I knew just what I wanted for my life, for my children's lives. And it included a husband and father for the first time.
A year after our adoption, my dad died. It was sudden and the quietest event of my youth. He left our home in the middle of the night because of a heart attack. After a short stay in the hospital we rejoiced because he was to come home in the morning. Then in the morning my mother got The Call and he was gone. But the adoption remained and that was something remarkable. I was not abandoned, exactly. I was a Sommers...a somebody special to somebody special...and I always would be.
The miracle of belonging didn't stop there. Dad was like a pivotal point in our lives. From there we became close to his best friend who stepped in to help us in huge and tiny ways. Eventually this other quiet and comfortable man married my mother and became my Dad as well. There wasn't an adoption. There didn't need to be. There was just knowing that another dad loved me and I loved him in return. And when he died, I grieved deeply and missed him with all of my heart.
My birth father died a year after my adopted father. Almost exactly a year after the silence of loss had settled on me, my grandfather telephoned. I had answered the phone and the first thing I heard was his grief-filled voice saying, "Oh Cherie, your daddy is dead." I wondered why he would say such a thing and then realized who he was talking about, the childhood friend who had spent so much time in his home, who married his daughter and fathered his grandchildren. My grandfather was feeling what I couldn't at that time but what I would later, the pain of somebody missed. I guess no matter what would have happened I would have experienced the death of a father at an early age.
I didn't think of him for years and then one day I fell in love with my birth father again. Love and anger. I watched my husband cuddle with our new daughter and I wondered, “How could he ever leave me if he loved me even a little like Neil loves his daughter.” And then later, I remembered how long that letter of permission took to get back to us. And I knew he must have loved me, even if he never saw me. Sometimes I daydream that he did see me. Peeking from behind a car window when I would visit my grandparents as a child. But it is too unreal to be believable. And yet, pretending something good does no harm.
As an adult I want to meet my younger, unknown brothers and sisters. I want to meet them but to do so I would have to overcome some insecurity fears. I guess I’ll grow up someday. In the meanwhile, I get lost in all of the genealogy. I connect through finding ancestors, my mother's, my birth father's, my adopted father's and my honorary father's.
So I rarely say that I am adopted. Rather that I was adopted, that I am my mother's daughter and have three fathers, and someday I believe I’ll meet them all once again.
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The articles were written in the hope that they will help mothers realize just how normal chaotic life with children really is and how priceless the journey. Search My Site! The Noble Child Email List  . |