As we move from
November National Adoption Month, into
the final month of December it might be a good time to consider that this has
been the global year of orphaned and homeless children. UNICEF has just
declared 2014 to be one of the most devastating for children on record. Up to 15 million have been displaced, driven
from their homelands or having lost their families in the Syrian War, the Gaza/Israeli
and Ukraine conflicts. This also includes the Central American refugee children
at our borders, the now ostracized Ebola orphans of West Africa, as well as
many others across the planet.
All of these
children will be forever marked by their abandonment and displacement.
I am, myself a
once-abandoned child. Now in my sixties, finishing
my masters in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University, I have come
to realize how essential giving and receiving a personal story of origin is to
finding a sense of both self and home.
As a child I never allowed myself to imagine
where I came from or who my birth parents might be. Only after my “life”
mother’s death did I feel free to explore my own story of origin.
I recently learned that at birth I was immediately
placed in a children’s home for six months. The adoption agency report I received
contained details that had been unknown to me, allowing me to piece together that
precious period of infancy and to begin to imagine my story of origin.
On the first page the report notes that during
the initial interview with my birth mother “she used gestures while talking and
appeared to be a ‘typical French girl.’ She was high strung, nervous and very
proud, it was difficult for her to accept assistance.” I now can picture her to
have been both conflicted and courageous.
After my birth, during those first formative
months of life, it was recorded that “you kissed your caretaker on the cheek, you laughed to
yourself and hummed a sleepy song when you were in bed at night.” In my
aloneness I sought solace, trying to establish safety, trust and connectivity,
essential experiences that influence an individual for life. With these details
I could begin to imagine what I experienced.
Arthur W. Frank
wrote in The Wounded Storyteller that
“to experience we have to imagine; imagination is conscious struggling to gain
sovereignty over experience.” Imagining
one’s story of origin and the benefit that comes from being able to share this
story led me to explore how abandonment has been imagined, or
represented throughout literature, which is replete with stories of orphans and
the displaced.
Seeming to reflect
my own experience, Charlotte Brontë writes about the effects of abandonment
on orphan Jane, in Jane Eyre: “To this crib I always took my doll; human
beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of
affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded
graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow.”
An historic example of the results of
refugee displacement is captured in the story of the Hmong, a tribe of China,
oppressed and driven from their homelands time and again for centuries. In The
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, she explains their
amazing gift for maintaining their own culture while living within cultures
that both reject them and yet expect their assimilation.
Throughout Hmong folktales there
is the recurring character of the Orphan, a young man whose parents have died,
leaving him alone to live by his wits. Symbolic of the Hmong’s ancient
struggle, the Orphan lives on the margins of society, reviled by others, yet
ultimately succeeding in the community.
The importance of belonging and connecting
with others is central to the discipline of Narrative Medicine. Giving one’s
self to another by encouraging them to tell their story and being there to
listen is referred to as the giving and receiving of story, as we must
acknowledge the value we too receive as listeners. Gabriel Marcel stated this
beautifully in Mystery of Being:
“When somebody’s presence does really make
itself felt, it can refresh my inner being; it reveals me to myself, it makes
me more fully myself than I should be if I were not exposed to its impact.”
Returning to our origins, to our homes, is a
central part of life for many, but what about those for whom home and origin
are only a memory, now only an imagined or re-imagined place? Perhaps one of the
most important things we can offer anyone abandoned or displaced is to truly
listen to their story and to provide them the connection with others that
establishes a sense of self and home.
