Bastard Moments I Have Known
In her book, Journey of the Adopted Self, Betty Jean Lifton coins the term “bastard moments.” I think of a bastard moment as a kind of Calgon Moment scripted by Hitchcock. You are in your warm, steamy, cozy bathroom, a tub full of warm water and scented suds awaits you. You dip in a toe, a foot, step in, pull in your other foot. Only then do you realize that what you thought was a bub ble is actually a large, hairy spider swimming toward your leg, its closest shoreline. You jump out, slip on the tiles, and bang your head. You want to scrub yourself furiously, but the tub is already occupied by a horror.
I was almost 28 when I learned that I was adopted. Until then, I certainly thought I was the legitimate product of my parents’ marriage (such as that marriage was–which was not much). Still, I had had bastard moments already, though I didn’t know the term then.
My parents, always emotionally estranged, split up for good when I was 12, though they didn’t divorce until I was in my 20s. From then on, I saw my father occasionally. He would take me to dinner or out to a movie, or shopping. But I knew nothing of his personal life, that he had another family, and I never visited him in his home. There were good reasons for this; he and I both would have pai d a huge price if my mother had known about that family. She was a vindictive woman.
But at 22, I was ready to know his family, I no longer worried about what my mother would think, and I would visit his home occasionally. I learned that I had a half-sister only 18 months younger than me. I had no trouble accepting this. My father and his wife were happy with one another, and who was I to judge when that happiness began? I was glad that he had a happy home life, something my mother could never have given him, or, for that matter, anyone around her.
My first bastard moment came when my stepmother, a truly nice woman, hesitantly told me that they had decided, for the time being, to introduce me as my half sister’s friend, rather than as my father’s daughter from his first marriage. Though my father and stepmother had never married (and haven’t still, as far as I know), they had been living as a family for so long, and hiding the fact of his p revious marriage for so long that none of their friends knew Dad had been married before, or that he had had other children.
Odd though it may seem, I was barely conscious at the time of any hurt. I thought it was ironic that his legitimate daughter was being treated as a secret, while his illegitimate daughter, my half-sister, was considered legitimate by everyone who knew him. I was anxious to please, and anxious to fit in with his immediate and extended family (none of whom I had met before, at least not after th e age of three). What hurt I felt I buried in irony. Remember that I did not know that I was adopted then, and wouldn’t for another six years.
And then came a true bastard moment, perhaps three years after these visits started. I was about 25. Dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table when a young third cousin of his dropped in unexpectedly. She was about my age, and looked so much like people in Dad’s family. The three of us sat, I was introduced by name, but not by relationship to this cousin of mine. It was obvious from their ta lk that these visits were not unusual, that they kept up with one another’s lives.
And then she turned to me and asked what nationality I was.
She didn’t know. Three years I had been back in Dad’s life, and although he knew that this cousin was in law school, and she knew about his health and retirement and all these other details, she did not know about me.
I was stunned, and all the hurt that I had not felt three years before at being introduced as an acquaintance came over me.
There was an awkward pause. My father and I stared at each other. Not a word was said, but the exchange between us was almost audible, at least to me. “I’m sorry.” “How could you?” “Please.” “How could you?”
“I only ask,” she went on, “because I have a friend who looks like you, and she’s Serbian.”
“I’m the same as you,” I replied, knowing how absurd it sounded. We look nothing alike. I turned to my father. “Want more coffee, Dad?”
The visit ended, nothing was said by anyone, then or later, and I never have seen that cousin again.
My mother died when I was 27. I was out of the country. She hadn’t been ill, and there was no reason to expect her to die while I was away for those four months. She died on Thanksgiving day, but I knew nothing about it until December 1, when I received a fax at the Central Telegraph office, sent by the State Department. It was my older sister, also adopted, who had decided the fax should be s ent. Dad figured there was nothing I could do about it, so he would have waited till I returned to tell me.
Two months later, I was back in the States, sitting in a restaurant with my father and stepmother. Dad said, “There’s something I have to tell you, something you should have been told when you were little…” He talked for another 15 minutes or so, never coming to the point. Later, I learned that my stepmother had kicked him under the table, worried that I would burst into tears or have a brea kdown in public. I have no idea what he said after those first sentences, because they were all I needed to understand. He finished up with, “I’ll tell you the rest when we get home.” Actually, he told me the rest at breakfast three days later. In the meantime, though, I thought he must mean that I was adopted, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if it were wishful thinking, a childish fantasy that had been given a boost by circumstances.
I remember the first night after his aborted speech at the restaurant, how I was lying in bed with my heart pounding, thinking that I had finally got what I wanted–maybe! Maybe I wasn’t really related to that crazy woman who raised me and her crazy family. Maybe all of this nonsense, this secrecy, this goddamn dysfunction was not my burden, because I was not related to these people at all. Ma ybe that’s why I don’t look like them. Act like them. Share their tastes. That’s why I have these interests that they don’t, and unheard of preferences, dislikes, and talents.
Dad finished the story three days later, at breakfast, and that was not, most emphatically not, a bastard moment. It was liberation.
“I want to finish that story,” he said.
“You don’t need to. I’ve already guessed.”
“It never made no difference to me.”
“I know.”
It was my mother’s death that prompted the telling. Not because she had never wanted me to know (she hadn’t), but because the lawyer handling the estate made it clear that I would find out, one way or another, so I had better find out in a decent way, rather than from some ratty legal document.
Later, we went to the family room and the file was pulled out and I read that for the first seven months of my life, I was Baby Girl Blackburn, and that I had had a different mother, and that my mother had a name. I sat on the couch and read. My heart pounded again, and the world fell away. I was dizzy with the knowledge. It changed everything. It explained so much.
My last bastard moment–for now, anyway–was a memory. The mother I grew up with had, not to put too fine a point on it, a mouth like a sailor. And when my sister and I would fight, or I would annoy her in some way, she would call me names. All sorts of names. But the one that sticks in my mind now, above all the others, is “You little bastard!” Even then, I thought it odd to call a girl that. I thought it was only for boys. I was wrong.
The irony of it. My birth was apparently so shameful that I had to be given away. The adoption that should have legitimized me was shameful, hidden by my parents and by the state. And as I grew up, I was bastardized again by my father and his family, to cover up their own unnecessary shame and perceived illegitimacy. A bastard I was born , and a bastard I remain. Lies and shame made it so.
B. G. Blackburn
