Unfinished Bohemian Rhapsody

In the late eighties I was as traditional as they came on paper: Caucasian, from a middle class intact home in the NY suburbs, possessed of musical talent and plenty of interests, a good student, later maybe even a great student who attended a competitive college, eventually an Ivy League. On paper I was destined to follow the carboned chronology of college, job, engagement, marriage, children. On paper I would later find a life in the suburbs replete with 2.5 kids, a picket fence, and a dog. Trouble was, I didn't want to live on paper. Paper, thy name was villain.

I was never the girl who dreamed of her wedding or rehearsed elaborate wedding ceremonies. I do confess to a small dalliance during which I wrote "Mrs...." (fill in the blank) over and over and over on lined notebook paper but quickly realized that if, a big if, I would keep my name (unless the other was more musical than mine). I was also not the girl who dreamed of her future children, preferably one of each sex (because that's how binary thinking rolled then). I hated babysitting, instead taking over my brother's paper route and giving flute lessons. To this day I have a visceral repulsion to crying children and babies. Ew. So in my teens and early twenties, I flirted with the logistics of pregnancy as an intellectual exercise, not something whose byproduct I wanted any part of.

Born before the advent of sonogram selfies but just before Roe v. Wade, I had not been inducted into the guild of motherhood via stories of my own nine months in the womb with the accompanying photo documentation. Those of us spawned in the age of closed adoption received no such history. I was far more intrigued by my own origin story (am I now the superhoero in this story?) than in providing one for someone else. Unlike many of my friends, I was not haunted by the ear worm tick tock of a biological clock or Ally McBeal dancing babies. And by my early thirties when an ovarian cyst burst, followed by surgery, I knew stage 4 endometriosis had likely made pregnancy moot.

While for other women my diagnosis may have been a great tragedy, for me it was a blip on the radar. At least a decade before I had sought the nontraditional in history, literature, psychology, devouring stories of the Bloomsbury group, fascinated not just by their intellectual pursuits but by their free flowing, incandescent love affairs and pursuits of pleasure. I romanticized the hell out of the Romantic poets, conveniently disposing of their great tragedies. I researched gender bending and sexual trailblazers with gusto. I pondered, swallowed wholesale, and then posted Katharine Hepburn's ideal, "I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then," on my dorm room door and was determined to seek such real estate. I discovered it had been circling me for some time.

While I look for an accuracy memory denies me, one less rosy, too (we'll get there), what I see now is that the golden haired boy with divorced parents, who lived on a boat during high school, who didn't attend college, drank, smoked both regular and pot, and was an artist, seduced me right out of the box. He drew me literally and metaphorically, his mythic existence feeding on a hedonism I had never before witnessed up close let alone partaken of. He set his own rules and defined his own terms. There were no dreams of weddings in his future, instead those of wooden boats he would create and restore. There were dogs, not children, and certainly no picket fences. He chose freedom over self-sacrifice and I wholeheartedly believed he would not box me in. I doubt his courtship of me required much effort at all.

I ached to be someone I did not feel courageous enough to present in real life. I did not desire to be and did not fit in as wife, mother, or the elementary school teacher I had become. There were small resistances and rebellions on the scale of asymetrical haircuts and double ear piercings, unmarried overnights in the same bed (for traditional parents of the 50s this was bitter medicine to swallow), and some really questionable nineties fashion statements. Mine was a destiny not so beige yet still lacking color. I passed a few years seemingly satisfied but always, always, feeling on the inside like an outsider.

In my heart I was an impostor, an interloper in the places I frequented. Adoptees often feel like we never quite fit in, forever lurking on the periphery, excluded and othered. There was no mirror in which to gaze with instant recognition one's own features. Similarly, no genetic trail of inheritance, no explanation for the traits and quirks the typically born commonly attribute to family. While I didn't live, breathe, eat, drink adoption, it always startled when as an adult I was instantly reduced to a child's answer for a medical professional's question, forced to reply inadequately, "I don't know." It's difficult enough for those who are fully aware of their parentage to navigate self-hood, but what about when you don't know whose eye color or nose you have inherited? Or when questions of ethnicity and ethnic traditions in your family arise and you hesitate because your answer might not be honest or accurate and you want to be both? I was Schmidt, Schmidt was German, but was I really German Schmidt? I felt Jewish, but who could say?

Worse still was when the nature versus nurture debate casually bubbled up in class or conversation. For someone like me, a moment like that is no thought experiment. According to NY State law I was not entitled to my actual birth certificate, names of birth parents or even my own birth name. Existentially speaking was I even Kristie?  Or was I some facsimile of her? Or not even her at all? Like many before me nicked by the same double edged sword, I couldn't decide if I really wanted (needed?) to know, couldn't betray my parents by admitting I wanted to know, couldn't commit to trying to know which would require a few thousand dollars to hire an investigator with no guaranteed results (nevermind happy ending results), so I made do with pushing my questions down or guessing at their answers.

I fantasized about my birth mother, leaving my birth father out it, hoping she was wild, free, living the out of the box the life I wanted to live. Resorting to sick incest jokes, golden boy and I laughed at the number of people who remarked upon our bizarrely uncanny brotherly/sisterly resemblance, winking at the could be whenever we heard the oft repeated phrase, "Has anyone ever told you that you look alike?"  We joked about surprise red haired babies and other potentially inexplicable results of my mysterious gene pool even though I knew then there would likely be no babies. Into this swirl of repeated identity questions I dipped my toe, over and over. While uncertainty ruled supreme, I externally maintained a bounded facade. Internally, I longed to break free.

Golden boy provided a safe confessional and a safe harbor in Not Normal town. When we broke up, that safety net fell away. With him, I was more honest, more me. Without him, big little lies emerged and I put them to work masquerading as someone for whom everything was fine. I would not allow vulnerability, there would be no true confessions, and unwilling to make the crossover to bohemia, I found myself chained once again to the box. And then, no joke, Oprah changed my life.

Saudade

I knew Saudade (pronounce the first d but the end sounds like the end of sausage) long before I set foot on Portuguese soil, before I had read Saramago, before pasteis de nata settled in my belly and left a mustache of powdered sugar behind just above my upper lip. She was not my oldest friend, the soul on earth I had known longer than anyone except my mother, brother and three cousins. That distinction belonged to David from kindergarten and Saudade and I were fresher than that. She had left Northampton with me and stayed by my side in Cambridge. Once I moved back to Long Island I didn't see her for a number of years but by the time I stepped foot in 32 School Street, she had traveled to London, Paris, and Bali and back with me. We finished each other's sentences by the time hospice wheeled my father's body out the front door of 1552 North Street.

Saudade is the Portuguese concept of melancholic longing for those you have loved who are absent and for the places you have loved that are distant, the homesickness for a home to which you cannot remember, the lovesickness for a lover you cannot ever have again or may never have in the future. She was a total bitch in my thirties when an eleven year old relationship disintegrated before my eyes and my life, unbeknownst to many, became a living soap opera, one permanently changing its trajectory.

The breakup was ugly and messy. At a support dinner with friends about one week into it, we had managed to name at least 14 people other than me with whom my boyfriend had had sex, including two men. After the fourteenth unveiling I called an end to it. I couldn't take anymore. He had broken my heart, broken my ability to trust any other human being and what came to be the worst after effect, broken my ability to trust myself. I had missed it all. I had chosen him, I had loved him and in the adult years during which we were together, I hadn't ever seen who he really was. Had I ever really looked?

I had known him since I was 12 years old and had been in love with him since I was 14 despite his ninth grade marriage proposal, the insanity of which I laughed out loud at. Cut to standing in a parking lot as a thirty two year old woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown screaming, "Who are you?" while simultaneously screaming in my own head "Who am I?" I had unwittingly endangered my own health and life, had to have an AIDS test, courts eventually joined our breakup briefly and an actual representative from Judge Judy phoned to invite me (us? Didn't you read Judge Judy--there was no more us) onto their show in California. I told no one (would you?). Indicative of the confused state I was in, somehow Judge Judy, not the AIDS test, was rock bottom for me. Right after that I turned into a social, and certainly a sexual, hermit. To cement my new status, I gained 60 pounds of further insulation from the outside world.

Over the last eighteen years there have been a few first dates, even fewer second ones. One kind, sweet man who clearly adored me and would have been very good to me stood at my front door bewildered as I told him I was not for him. "I'm broken. I'm damaged. I can't," I said. Years of therapy have not fixed that damage. Even before the soap opera began I had been singular and reclusive by nature. As a thinker I require significant alone time in which to speculate, learn, dream. As someone thirsty for knowledge, I need time to read and absorb. As a writer, reflection, often in the form of nighttime insomnia, is and always has been part of me. In some ways spending the last eighteen years alone hasn't been that difficult. Yes, there are times I crave companionship, times I crave intimacy. I remain largely without human touch, even a hug, for weeks if not months on end, hence the brood of cats. I don't know if I have regrown the ability to be vulnerable to someone else. I don't know if I am even willing to try. But still I yearn. Saudade is with me. I see in the distance the home for which I am homesick.

Portugal calls to me nostalgically. I feel a richness waiting for me there which has nothing to do with retirement finances and everything to do with my soul. When we grapple for existential meaning over the intersection of free will and randomness, I allow that perhaps these isolated years have been preparation for this moment. During them I have distanced myself from American obsessions with things and stuff like cars (nothing like a tree killing your car to disabuse you of that one). I have summarily rejected the marriage and children paradigm. For various reasons, I find myself now distanced from the emotional tethers that typically hold one to particular places but more so, people. After my brother voted for Trump, the emotional distance between us grew cataclysmic and as my mother approaches her 80th birthday in good health I see mortality clutching at her side. Although I consider myself deeply sentimental, it is clear that even my closest friends, of which there are few, are held not by proximity but via internet connection and the occasional in person visit. More than a year ago I changed my Twitter profile to read, "witness to a dying democracy." I am now also distanced from nearly everything I held dear in America. Alienated, I feel like I have already been living in exile. And I have. Over the last twenty years, I have become substantially exiled from myself.

It's time to go home.