Adopted (#SOL15, Day 3)

Ordinary Angels (M.A. Reilly, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, 2008)

I.

A word uttered still fails to encompass the whole of meaning.  I think of this as I read the word adopted in the opening to Darcy Moore's post, DNA and My Ancestral Tree.  He writes:

I was adopted as a baby. My adoptive parents made no secret of that fact but never had any information they could share about my ancestry. I often wondered what my ancestors had experienced and where they originated. It made me sad that I would likely never know. It was not something I talked about and if the topic came up I was very philosophical about it all. 

Darcy chronicles what he learned about his deep ancestry by participating in the Genographic Project.  I was fascinated as I read.  Imagining the whole time that I too might participate in the project.  Spend $150 and this slight fee might enable me to name a past I cannot name today.


II.

Meaning is never stationary, never stable.
Language allows us to know partially.

               Adopted.

Sometimes it is too hard
                                           to breathe.


III.

Decades ago I traveled with Rob to Ireland and while there we spent one morning at the Joyce House--a place in the Republic where birth records are kept.  I went there armed, knowing my name at birth: Olivia Muldoon, and the year, date, and place of my birth (Stamullen, Ireland).

I knew as much as I could, and yet I found no record.

When I was leaving, a man working there stopped me and said that about 50% of the records were never collected as registering a birth was voluntary at that time in Ireland.  He said this with such kindness.


IV.

Later that day, after we left Dublin and travelled to Grange I wrote the following poem.

Lineage

At the Joyce House on Lombard Street
in Dublin—we climbed the staircase
to the second floor. The narrow aisles
of the registry were crowded with others
searching too. I looked through
the oversized ledgers, moving a finger
steadily down the long list of names—stopping
with a jerk at each sound that hinted
of my birth—only to breathe out
exhausted, and then continue on, till we each
had looked through the same six years of paper
and names and I knew no record would be found.


We left that Dublin office, traveled
north of Sligo to the seacoast town
of Grange. There I slept the length
of afternoon while you explored
some jagged coves. Later, you took
me in hand over tall grass dunes
to a cliff, overlooking the strong
Atlantic. We sat there, dangling
our feet well above the foam
and smashing waves,
as my finger traced
and retraced the rock
hardness of a fossil.

V.

It wouldn't be until years later that I understood that being adopted is not the same as being abandoned.  

Each requires its own sense of time.