Mother's Day Essay Contest Winner 2008

 

Comanche Child

by Elaine Greensmith Jordan

 

“Mom! The adoption searcher just called. They’ve found my birth family!” My daughter’s voice over the telephone from central Oregon sounded thick with urgent joy. “I couldn’t even talk to the lady,” she went on.

“I started crying. I can’t believe it!”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, meaning it.

We’d been searching for Caroline’s birth family for ten years and had never broken through the barriers of secrecy. I’d spent over four thousand dollars paying the expenses of detectives, Internet geniuses, and outright scammers. Then one day Caroline’s aching stomach made her angry about not knowing her health history. Did her birth family have colon problems, or cancer? She and her two daughters had a right to know. She went to a website, gave her credit card number, and paid for another searcher she’d learned of on the television show, “Montel,” I think it’s called.

“They live in Oklahoma on the Comanche Reservation,” Caroline went on, and I could hear her fighting tears.

“I guess I’m a real Indian. My other mother works in a smoke shop. Isn’t that funny?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just wonderful. Smoke shop?”

“I think the searcher must’ve called everyone on the reservation. I’m so scared. Wish you were here.” She started to cry.

“I know, honey,” I said. I could picture my daughter on her back patio, a green lawn and vegetable garden extending out from the small cement pad. She’d be holding her cell phone, a cigarette in the other hand, tears streaming. “I’ve never been to Oklahoma,” I added. “I picture tornados. Comanche are plains’ Indians,

I think, and they’re expert riders. You’ve always loved horses.”

“All I can think of is ‘Dancing with Wolves,’” she said, her voice in a higher register. “Mom, she’s almost got my name—Carley. I wonder if I could join the tribe. I mainly want to know where I came from. I think they’ve a college there—maybe my kids could go. I’m so excited,” she said, panting. “Sometimes I forget to breathe.”

“It would be fun to give your kids Indian names.”

“Yeah,” she said, coughing. “I think I’d call my Sara, ‘Runs with No Shoes.’”
I turned to look outdoors at the wind-tossed flowers on our deck. Though I live in northern Arizona, those few pansies and petunias evoke the colors of San Diego I’d always miss. Perhaps my daughter’s spirit craved an Oklahoma landscape in the same way I yearned for California and the flowers of San Diego.
You might wonder why I’d tried so hard to help out on this search for a birth mother. Caroline had been a cranky sullen youngster who fought with her brother and the neighbor children. Then my wild child became an angry teen. I was a divorced single mom, and my daughter was my nemesis. Frankly, she’d brought so much chaos into my life that I was eager back then to help her find someone else, a ghost mother, to answer her needs. At the lowest points, I wished she were not in my life.

“Mom,” Caroline said the next day, after she’d talked at length over the telephone with her birth mother, “this is pretty funny. Carley’s done time; she’s got tattoos like mine, and she’s a biker.”

“Does that upset you?” I asked, knowing I looked like a bespectacled librarian.

“Not really.” She paused. “Carley seems nice, and she wants to see me. Besides, I was pretty wild myself.” Caroline had, indeed, ‘done time.’ She’d been a year in juvenile lock-up and had endured months of drug rehab when she was a teenager. “It’s so great not to be lost any more. Did you know I’m related to Jim Thorpe? I looked him up on the Internet. Cool.”

“I’ve been waiting so long for you to claim your Indian heritage,” I said. “I’m excited too.”

“I know,” she said. “You kept putting Indian stuff around and trying to get me interested. Now I’m really interested. Carley says I have two brothers. Oh Mom, two brothers! Maybe they look like me.” Caroline paused as if absorbing a universe of images.

Thoughts of Native American faces brought back my memories of walking the late-night streets looking for Caroline. On my walks I nurtured my fantasy about Caroline’s Native American birth mother. This ghost mother of my imagination would have the wisdom of an Indian matriarch—the kind who gazes in solemn profile at the mountains—and would offer my daughter unconditional love. I longed for another mother who would know how to discipline Caroline, how to lift the sadness that seemed to linger around her mouth. I knew the real Carley wasn’t my fantasy Indian woman, but she was a person you could look at and talk to. I sensed that’s what my daughter needed now.

“Son-au-uuat,” Caroline said. “That’s my birth grandmother’s name. I’m going to find out what it means.”
I don’t know if that name translates or if I could pronounce it. It resounds with the unfamiliar, untold stories of cultures lost, of deep urges for identity. I do know that with a living birth mother and family, Caroline can now fill the “hole in her heart,” as some have phrased the feeling of not knowing their origins. She says she felt lost, and I can’t think of anything sadder. I used to have dreams of being lost, unable to find my way home.

I’ve read that our children are not ours to own but are like arrows we send out from us. That image fits my Native American daughter well. A month after that first telephone call, Caroline left her Oregon home, taking her husband and daughters to meet her Comanche tribe and her two half-brothers. She sailed—as if shot from a taut bow—to Oklahoma and came back with a calmer stomach and a landscape as firmly fixed in her heart as California is in mine.

Elaine Jordan is a child of the Fifties. She'd planned to teach and then stay at home and have babies and raise them to be exceptional people. Then life intervened. She divorced, got a degree in religion, adopted two children, and turned into an essayist. One essay, "Great Art and the Gods," was featured in the UUWorld Magazine for Unitarians. She won a prize from American PEN Women for a piece about her life as a mommy and published another mommy-piece in a "Cup of Comfort" anthology. Most of her work is about her eleven years as a Congregational minister, or about her life as a frustrated, ignorant, hysterical mom. It seems suffering has a readership.