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.