All posts in Relationships

Living with Bias

by Suz on 2012/02/06 in About Me, Ignorance, Language, Relationships, Reunion, Things I wish I could Tell Her with 7 Comments

I don’t even know what the first part of the conversation was about. I was not part of it. I was merely in the same room as the conversing parties, a member of my family and my friend’s husband. I am confident I could retrieve the conversation from my memory if I had to. I am also confident that it has been lost due to the fact that the parts of the conversation I do remember were so disturbing to me the earlier parts have been wiped out.

After a few minutes of conversation, family member says to friend’s husband “I cannot stand to see people of the same sex kissing or touching. That makes me sick. Don’t make me watch that. It’s just wrong.”

I am startled and turn my head quickly towards family member. A mixture of anger and embarrassment (at my family member’s beliefs and the way they were just expressed) causes my breathing to become rapid. Others in the room also overhear the exchange and for a moment, all eyes are on my friend’s husband waiting for his response. Friend is clearly uncomfortable with where this conversation has gone to and seems to be struggling to respond.

A child comes bouncing into the room and the distraction is enough to derail the conversation. I sit at the table fuming. This family member knows my daughter identifies herself as a gay/queer femme woman. I am offended for my child and for all LGBTQ people. I am annoyed my sons were in ear shot and that they are exposed to such homophobic views from their own gene pool. My mind reflects on the last time I had a conversation on this topic with a member of my family…

Familial Bias Scene 1
Family members and I were sitting at kitchen table discussing something having to do with the LGBTQ community. During the conversation I offer up that my daughter identifies herself as gay (I use the word my family uses, not the word my daughter does). I also remind them that my husband’s uncle was gay and that husbands’ father and said uncle owned several gay bars in our state. One of the family members stops the conversation abruptly and says:

“WAIT! What? What did you just say? [daughters amended name] is gay?”

“Yup.” I respond casually as I pour my diet coke into a glass.

“Well, is she REAAAALLLLLY or is she just, you know, experimenting?” family member asks.

I become annoyed and struggle to respond. Why does it have to be in question? Why isn’t it taken at face value? I am angry at myself for opening that door. I know my families conservative, homophobic, jingoistic, racist, religious belief system all too well. The relationship I have with said gay daughter is actually a product of that belief system. I struggle to compose myself. I realize the question is causing more conflict than is likely warranted.

“Does it matter? I mean if she is experimenting or if she has her feet firmly planted in lesbian soil, does it matter?” I respond with the slightest hint of disgust at the question.

“Well, uh, um…I guess not” family member says in response. It is clear they backed down not because they suddenly feel it does not matter but rather they sense my irritation and are fearful of further reactions from me.

It is clear to me that it does matter – to them. It also clear they want to gossip on about it but they realize I am not going there. Even if they, and friends of mine, find the need to do so.

Like the last time I met with a high school friend…

Friend Bias Scene 2
“Did you tell him she was gay?” friend asked.

Uncertain if I heard her correctly, I asked her to repeat herself.

“What? What did you say?” I asked.

“Rob. When you met with Rob, did you tell him that your daughter ended up gay?” she repeated.

Startled and annoyed by the use of the phrase “ended up” I find my thoughts swirling with equally balanced desires to be snarky and serious. The use of words “ended up” seems to imply that her adoption caused it, that adoption did not make her better, but in the friends POV, it made her, well, gay. I am not sure if I should be offended or if I should be offended for her adoptive parents. I am definitely offended for my daughter.

“Uh, no. Why would I do that?” I asked. I decided I was going to poke back at her, stick my words deeply into her ignorance.

“Well, you know…” She pauses, awaiting my response.

“No, really, I don’t. Tell me why you think I should tell someone that the daughter I surrendered to adoption ended up gay? By the way, she prefers the word queer.” I respond.

I realize there is some anger to my voice. I work to control it. I don’t want her to become defensive in response to my tone. I briefly recall the moment I did share that fact with a family member wherein I was asked if my daughter was “experimenting”. I push away the anger from that conversation. I really want to explore this one.

“Queer, gay, lesbian, what is the difference? You know what I meant.” she offers.

“Yes, I knew what you meant but I wanted to be clear that she prefers queer. If you ever meet her or another queer person, it might be considerate to use the vocabulary they do. You are Italian and never liked my dad calling you a Guinea Wop even when he claimed he was joking, right? ” I replied as I turned to grab my coffee.

“Whatever. I am still shocked she is gay. What did your entire family say when you told them?” she asks as she leans closer to me, her voice level lowering. It is as if she afraid someone around us will overhear a deviant conversation. Again, flash of memory from the conversation with my family member (who interestingly, does use the word queer but it is not meant quite the same way my daughter means it).

“I didn’t. I don’t see the point. It’s a non issue for me. I am struggling to understand why you think I should have told Rob let alone my entire family.” I asked a second time. I realize I am intentionally poking at her. I want her to admit what she is, show her true colors.

“Oh, come on. YOUR family? YOUR parents? Let’s put aside their religious beliefs, their conservative nature and perhaps point out that they have zero gay friends or family members. Do they even KNOW gay people exist? I mean, I realize your dad had his token black friend that he felt made him not racist but homosexual? Oh, wait! Didn’t you hang out with a gay dude in high school? Wasn’t there some hubbub over that?” she responds laughing at the last sentence and her memory of me and my darling friend, Jim.

She is annoying me. She has now offended me, my daughter, my family (even if rightfully so) and one of the dearest friends I have ever had. May he rest in peace. I remember why I did not like her much in high school. I give second thoughts to having this conversation. I am not confident it is my job to educate the asshats of the world.

“Queer” I respond, again with a touch of annoyance to my voice. She is confused as my response did not match her last statement.

“It is irrelevant.” I continue. “I don’t believe it says anything overtly interesting about her or is any indication of her as a person or is anyone’s business. I am not implying that I know her as a person, but as a general rule, I prefer not to judge people for their lifestyle choices. You like to date black men. Do I introduce you as such? Do I say Hey, Mom, this is my friend hetero friend Sarah, she likes to date black men? And you know what they say once you go black… Do I say that?” I inquire.

“Ha ha ha. No, but the fact that I date black men is very different from being gay.” She insists.

“Really, how so?” I ask.

Sarah doesn’t respond to my question. I am confident my mentioning of her desire for black men has brought back all HER family bias towards her choice in men. She shrugs her shoulders, makes a rude comment about me and my “freaky views” and does a supreme job of deflecting the line of questioning.

I decide I am definitely not having coffee with her again.

My Position Present Day
I am going to put this on my blog and I am going to say this hopefully in a manner that my blog readers (and perhaps some day, my daughter) will understand. I am also hoping I am not offensive (as if my friends and family above haven’t already been offensive enough).

A majority of American society views reproductive, monogamous sex between men and woman as “good” and places any sexual acts and individuals who don’t fit into this normative view (queer, bi, trans, etc.) as “bad”. Same sex couples and their needs are invisible. Individuals falling into the “bad” category are subject to bias, discrimination, and much worse.

As a result of this there is a part of me, immature as it may be, that does wish my daughter did not identify as queer. However, her identifying as such does not cause me to love her any less. Nor do I feel that her being queer means there is anything wrong with her or that it is something to be embarrassed by or ashamed of. My desire for her to lead a hetero-normative life is rooted in my desire, as her mother, for her to have an easy life. When you are different, life is not easy. When society views you as “bad”, life is not easy. I know. From the day she was born that is all I wanted for her life to be easy and rewarding and for her to be happy. I want to protect her from all the bad, ignorant, asshat people in the world (and at one point I was one of those bad people – at least society said I was). The fact that I did not raise her, do not have a relationship with her, does not negate my desire for her life to be “easy” or my desire to protect her.

My daughter is not invisible — even if her original name was changed and is not present in my life physically. She is not bad or unseemly or a threat to society as a result of her gender identification and choice in partners. Again, I realize it is impossible to protect her, but that impossibility does not diminish the desire. It is instinctual for me, as her mother, to want to protect her. Being a marginalized member of society myself (as a birthmother) I don’t want her to experience pain.

There is nothing wrong with my queer daughter. There is a great deal wrong with the society we both live in. The same society that told me she was better off without me tells her and her loved ones that society is better off without them.

I will never accept that.

I, for one, was never better off without her.

Facing and Embracing the Dark

by Suz on 2012/01/20 in About Me, Divorce, Relationships, Reunion, Trauma Recovery with 9 Comments

Are you familiar with the aspects of your personality referred to as your Persona and your Shadow? Rather simplistically, let me state that people who study these things (you know, psychotherapy types like Freud and Jung) suggest that your whole self is comprised of two parts – the Good part (the Persona) and the Bad part (the Shadow). Good is not necessarily good as you might interpret the word at first. Rather it is only good because society has told you it is good. Conversely, the bad part of you, the Shadow, is also only bad because society makes it so. Bad may not be bad at all except that society has taught you that part of your self is inappropriate or unsuitable for public display.

I could illustrate this by referencing relinquishing mothers and what we feel or do, but to give this explanation a wider appeal, I am going to refer to primary school lessons (since presumably all of my readers when to elementary school). When you were young, you learned from your teachers, in a structured environment, when and how to ask questions. You asked questions only when you were prompted by the teacher saying something like “Does anyone have any questions?” If you had one, you expressed that first by raising your hand, the teacher noting your hand and granting you permission to speak. If you did these things as instructed, you were a good student, ideally asking good questions with the right amount of hand elevating.

What if you were an overly excitable student and you asked questions loudly and rapidly in such a manner that it made the teacher wince? What if you forgot repeatedly that you were supposed to raise your hand before you spoke? What if you raised your hand and shook it around too vigorously, like your mother might shake a bug off an article of clothing from the clothes line? If you were a student that did not exercise the proper question asking technique, you may have been chastised by the teacher. She may have told your question asking was wrong or maybe even “bad”. If you are told this type of thing frequently enough, you might stop asking questions. You might stuff that inquisitive part of your personality in the bad part of yourself – your shadow. Asking questions is not inherently “bad” but you have been taught your way of asking them is bad. You stop asking questions.

It is through lessons like this that society at large pushes us in the “right” direction. We are told what we should and shouldn’t do. As soon as we learn certain things are “bad” and certain things are “good”, we subconsciously remove elements of our personalities from public display. We take certain parts of our personality and put them into the Shadow. All the things which society says are “acceptable” become the Persona. The Shadow harbors the unacceptable pieces and parts.

The result of this social constructing? Most of us are civilized. We follow the rules, wait our turn, say please and thank you, don’t cut in lines, speak only when spoken to and never act on impulse. We are always subconsciously pondering the right thing, the polite thing, correct thing to do or say. The subconscious is critical to this pondering. To stay sane, and more importantly, accepted by Society, we (our Persona’s) must act as if the Shadow doesn’t exist.

See what can happen here? If we are very good people, at least “good” in the way society defines good, much of our energy can be trapped in our Shadow. We live half of our personality, half of our impulses, and desires. We are in an emotional prison – at least until the time of a crisis or an emotional breakdown, at which time the Shadow may attempt a prison break (as it did for me when I found my daughter). Shadow will ‘break out of Jail’ and let itself be known.

One way our Shadow (particularly an overly heavy one) may make a run for it (at least according to Jung) is for us to project those ‘bad’ traits onto other people. If am such an amazingly good boy, then the only source of bad, rude, mean behavior in the world, must be in other people, most often someone from another country, social or economic class. Speaking in reverse, it is also possible to project our Persona onto someone and take on their Shadow.

Let me illustrate this in a more personal way and allow me to do that without getting too personal (LOL). I entered my first marriage with incredibly large load of emotional baggage related to my teenage pregnancy, maternity home confinement and eventual surrender of my only daughter to a baby broker for a closed stranger adoption. Drawing from my familial and religious teachings (my primary socialization) I was pretty much convinced I was lower than pond scum, white trash, evil incarnate. This belief was reinforced daily by friends (who refused to talk about my daughter for it made them “uncomfortable”), family (who literally told me never to discuss “that” complete with a mother who told me I would be lucky to find a man who would marry me and a sister who told me I did not deserve children after what I had “done” to my first) and society (who took my name off of my daughters’ birth certificate presumably in an effort to protect her from all my slutty evilness). In my twenties, I believed that the only way to make myself socially acceptable was to marry a certain kind of guy, drive a certain kind of car and live in a certain kind of house (society was screaming out loud at about this time). After all, women who lead those kinds of lives got to KEEP their children AND they also got to BUY the babies born to women like me. Therein we start to see (or at least I do) some disturbing aspects of my persona and shadow.

Conversely, the man I picked, my first husband, was pretty pleased with himself. He had a very strong ego, great smile, engaging, charming, and successful. I wont go so far as to say he was attracted to my brokenness’ but I will state I do believe my low opinion of myself contributed to his attraction to me. We worked in tandem. He was the light. I was the dark. He was the persona (the socially acceptable part of our coupledom) and I was the Shadow (the dark icky stuff you keep in the back of your closet). He, in a word, okay, maybe a phrase, thought he was the cat’s pajamas, my savior, better than me, above me, more educated than me – and I believed it. He had (and his mother told me this) “married down”. It might be suggested he had no shadow. He basked in all his own glory, white light and goodness while I sat there in all my badness.

It worked for us — for a while. For about five years, he was the light. I was the dark. He never needed to admit to or look at his own dark because I was carrying it all for him. I also took his projections willingly as I knew how to carry them so well. I had plenty of room in my suitcase of shadowy horrors. Of course he had a shadow, but for him to admit it was difficult (even more so when I stood there taking heaping helpings of it from him). It was far easier for me to do it for him. I had been doing it for everyone for years. He had a shadow of course. We all do. I might even venture to say he had a larger shadow than I did. For the taller you are, the brighter and better you think you are, the longer or “heavier” your shadow is.

This relationship started to crack when I found my daughter. When I started to look at myself, really look at me and what I was doing both negatively and positively, to myself, there was naturally a corresponding effect on my relationship with my husband (with everyone, really). I stepped out of his heavy shadow and started giving him back some of his own baggage. I stepped out of my familial shadow (somewhat, there is still work to do) and I definitely stepped out of the shadow of that monstrosity known as the Roman Catholic Church. I “met” my own shadow and I looked at what I was hiding there. I discovered some really wonderful aspects of my personality that were not the least bit “bad” and I pulled them out into the light – my light. Loving my daughter’s father for more than half my life was not bad. Having sex with him was not bad. Choosing to give birth to her rather than abort her was not bad. Society saying such did not make it so. I was not bad.

I see the Shadow at work in many places in adoptoland. Denise’ recent blog post actually prompted this one. I have some thoughts on adoption reunion and our shadow selves. This post is already a wee bit long so I will expand on those thoughts in a new post.

I will let you sit with your own Shadow for a spell. If this topic interests you, I offer links to two of my favorite books on the topic.