The Soul of Family Preservation: A Blue Norther
By Randolph W. Severson, Ph.D.
The Soul of Family Preservation: A Blue Norther
By Randolph W. Severson, Ph.D.
See a man, in middle age, pacing the long corridor of a small rural hospital. Again, he heads down to the kitchen, draws another cup of coffee, and heads back down to the divan right outside the maternity ward, where he sits down in front of a table, where already, on the table in front of the couch, lined up, in a perfectly symmetrical row, are four empty coffee cups, emptied into veins now pumping and visible with caffeine. He takes a sip, then cringes, as he hears another scream from the birthing room, on the other side of a wall just a few feet away. Hes been in there, already, several times, to comfort his daughter, unmarried, who is giving birth to his first grandchild. Its ten oclock in the morning. Hes been up since four o'clock. Last night, when he went to bed, he didnt know his daughter was pregnant. Well, thats not precisely true. Both he and his wife suspected it and had confronted the young woman, who is twenty, and with a long-time stable boyfriend, a year younger than herself. But she denied it, insistently, indignantly, contemptuously regal with denial. But no more than four or five months certainly. Only now had she started to slightly show.
There would be time.
So the night before, when he stumbled out of sleep and bed to find his daughter, full of tears and thrashing with back pain, he was genuinely shocked and not until the hospital confirmed that indeed she was already considerably dilated and would soon give birth did he give up the hope-fear that this was another crisis with a familiar illness.
The hope died hard. For an hour or so, his heart voiceless with fear and roasting with fury, he refused to go to the hospital. Maybe it would just all subside into a bad dream, or that dreamlike, slow motion, almost underwater state in which most of us undergo the major events of our lives. But a voice shocks him out of his denial. Go up there and tell her you love her and that youre there. Walking to the hospital, his heart climbs back from its sunken retreat in the soul, to stride the captains deck of what he realizes is a family script, an unfinished story. A destiny a-shiver with deja vu, an opportunity to do it right this time.
So, at the hospital, he downs another cup, adds to the row of empties marshalled on the table. Back and forth he goes to the birthing room, dismissed one time by the physician, who inquires, Are you the father? No, the grandfather, he fires back. He is there for the birth, that slippery gush of glory, the anxious examination of this child whose mother has received no pre-natal care, but whose tiny form and reactions are normal, the murmurs and sighs of relief, the fragile minutes afterward as the nurse sponges the baby beneath a heat lamp, when he watches, furtively, with sidelong looks between each of which he manages a prayer, his breath squeezed apprehensively through his chest, to see the childs mothers first reactions to this child,does she glance over? does she want to hold her? will a small relax those features still poised for another stab of pain? Is it over? she repeats.
Is it over this child, this child for so long denied, and at least until this morning, unwanted.
Days pass. One, then two. A first night home. Adoption is considered. In the extended family, some support adoption. Some do not. Even a visit by both birthparents to an adoption agency. From the beginning, hes against. This child will stay in the family. In doubt and fear, he falters, wants someone else to decide, gives lip service to silly cliches about it having to be their decision, that is, the mothers and fathers, but he lobbies against it, gets up at night to take care of the child, which he didnt do much, to his everlasting discredit, even with his own children, refers to himself as grandpa, reassures his daughter against and against that she need not give this baby away. Finally, she breaks down, says she wants to keep her. The rest of the family comes round holding love back from an infant is like holding flowers back from a Texas field in springtime. The child remains with her mother.
Now, more words, bravely eloquent, by Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist, or, rather, on the basis of this column, a poet. They are words that the new grandfather in the case vignette Ive just presented would have spoken had he the necessary gifts.
Dear Eric,
Hello, grandson. Im sorry that greeting you doesnt come naturally to me yet. You see, you are a bit of a shock. Your mother, 18 and unmarried, kept is a secret from us that you were on the way. She said she didnt want to 91hurt or 91disapppoint us. She hid her body in oversize clothes and denied pregnancy indignantly and repeatedly. Her mother suspected that she was pregnant anyway, but I accepted her denials. I wanted to believe her.
Mr. Pitt shares the doubts and self recriminations that haunt nearly every parent with a pregnant teen:
When you are a parent, you fear your own ineptitude. You fear that you will ruin a young life by saying or doing the wrong thing or just not being equal to the task. You fear that your 18-year-old daughter will come home pregnant. And, when it happens, you fear you screwed up.
Even though intellect informs you with irrefutable logic that you have done everything you could as a parent, your heart insists with a fervor that you have failed. It yells that you could have said something, done something and somehow changed something. You never will figure out what the something is, but not knowing it wont silence the clangor of your heart.
And, finally, even as he admits that the candle of life has not completely lit the dark, he acknowledges, with a lyrical understanding the affirmation of life and the renewal of hope that his grandson brings regardless of how he got here:
I dont know you, but I do know this: Holding you, I feel it stirring again...You struggle, you gurgle, you watch the world with eyes that have yet to see meanness and pain...
Who are you, child? a teacher or preacher? Entertainer or explorer? Will you sink the winning shot? Win the Nobel Prize? Or will you, just possibly, change the whole world? These are questions that must wait a lifetime for answers. But their mere asking has the power to lift downcast eyes and spirits...your young aunt and uncles see it. They gaze down at you with such luminous eyes, wondering who you are.
Perhaps they see in you what I do. A possibility renewed, a future unmortgaged, a second chance. And a hope. That someday the wounded places will be healed and the deep silences will overflow with joy.
These words. Stunning are they not? And, Im sure that the birthgrandfather in the vignette would have written them had he had the gift. I know because Im the birth-grandfather. The daughter, my daughter. The child, my new granddaughter, Katherine Leia, now 8 months old.
A Blue Norther. Spirit. Spiritus. breath.. God speaking to Moses in the Whirlwind. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And for those whose fidelities are less conventionally religious, this whirlwind is Shelly's Wile West Wind and Wordsworth's sweet breath of heaven, the Great Romantic Not I but the wind that blows through me. And, of course, whenever reflecting upon this confluence of symbols, Coleridges Ancient Mariner looms near, he, a sailor who, because of his price, his hybris, found himself dead in the water, awaiting for heavens sweet breath to redeem him.
The Ancient Mariner. Do you remember? Now, although I am a grandfather, I remain, I hope, a shade too young to be mistaken for the Ancient Mariner, but I have, within my lifetime, known six generations of my family, kinfolk, as we say in this part of the country, beginning with my great-grandmother and extending now to my granddaughter. I maintain a fragile hope of knowing two more generations, my great and perhaps my great-great-granddaughter. The birth of a new generation does bring thoughts of autumn, the passing of the seasons, the approach of old age.
And it is families not unlike mine, Southern-Midwestern, rural, small town, white, proud, but with finances sporadically or relentlessly tenuous who have become the raw materials for the infant adoption industry. The Schmidts do you remember them? and the Seversons. How sadly ironic that the discipline of social work whose noble origins lie in the commitment to serve those at societys margins, those at the slippery sloping edge and losing their grip to hang on even there, has become, in the case of adoption, an instrument of exploitation in service to those at the top instead of the bottom of the social ladder. Who sits on agency boards? Who funds adoption services? These families who have become the industrys raw materials these families, all they want is a chance to preserve themselves and their traditions, a chance at a decent, honorable livelihood, a chance to know and raise their children. When I think of the cause of family preservation, it is William Jennings Bryans famous Cross of Gold speech that comes to mind. I quote (or misquote) from memory:
We have petitioned
And you have not read our petitions.
We have implored
And you have not heard us
We have begged on bended knees
And you would not even look down to see us.
We no longer petition.
We no longer implore.
We no longer beg.
We will defy.
I do defy.
But defiance alone cannot be sovereign. It scalds the soul. Readies the soul only for a sleepless fret of embittered rumination. Leaves it empty and stagnant as the waters on which the Ancient Mariner finds himself after killing the great White Albatross. But, then, comes the moment of healing and reconciliation...then comes the Wind that carries him home.
All in a hot and copper sky,
The blood sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean...
But soon there breathed a wind on me,
Nor sound nor motion made:
Its path was not upon the sea,
In Ripple or in shade.
It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek
Like a meadow-gale of spring
It mingled strangely with my fears,
Yet it felt like a welcoming.
Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship,
Yet she sailed softly to:
Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze
On me it blew alone.
The birth of my granddaughter has been such a wind for me, a divine Blue Norther, a celestial breeze full of limitless grandeur that has left me, like the Ancient Mariner, a little crazed to tell my story, the story of family preservation. To recover its integrity and decency, social work must rededicate itself to the cause of family preservation, must look beyond itself, must rejoin its philosophy and practice to the larger issues of social welfare and social justice, and finally, it must re-root itself in the frail sincerities of a passionate, creaturely, and very fallible human love. The greatest of these is love.
A Blue Norther. A Big Wind. Perhaps, and nothing more. But perhaps, the Wind that will turn the tides.
Editors Note: Dr. Seversons article is excerpted from his keynote speech to the American Adoption Congress in April and is taken from his new book, The Soul of Family Preservation. A former adoption agency psychologist and administrator, he is now in private practice in Dallas, Tx.
Last updated March 12, 1997