Reply #18: Here's my two cents worth, Red. [View All]

[Kutjara]

Let me start with a story about myself.

Until I was 30, I believed that the couple who raised me were my parents. When my "father" died, I was sorting through his personal papers and discovered that I'd been adopted. That was shocking enough, but the kicker was that my real mother was a person I'd known all my life as my cousin. It seemed she'd had me "out of wedlock" when she was 19, her boyfriend had split the scene, and I'd been dumped in a convent orphanage, no doubt with the intention that I never be seen again.

After a couple of years, other members of the family discovered my mother/cousin's little secret, extracted me, malnourished and suffering from rickets, from the tender care of the Sisters of Eternal Indifference, and handed me over to a great aunt and uncle of surpassing psychopathy. They raised me as their own, the way wolves raise chickens, while the whole family kept the elaborate fiction going for three decades. The only indication I ever got that things were not as they seemed was the continual looks of contempt I received from everyone in my family, which I just ascribed in my childish way to the fact that I was an evil person who deserved everything I got, even if I couldn't understand why.

When I discovered the duplicity and bigotry that lay behind every aspect of my existence, I was apoplectic with rage. If my "parents" hadn't already been dead, I would have killed them myself. Fortunately my birth "mother" was a continent away, with her new husband and my four half-brothers and sisters (whom I've never met), so she was sufficiently out of my reach to avoid the same fate.

After the anger subsided, a strange thing happened. My memories began to reedit themselves. Every recollection suddenly had an extra dimension to it, so that previously inexplicable things suddenly made sense. Long-held feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness disappeared as I slowly realized that nothing I'd been subjected to was "personal." My family abused, lied to and ultimately abandoned me not because of who I was, but because of what I represented. There had never been anything wrong with me, but rather with them. Strange as it may seem, I found this incredibly liberating. It made it so much easier to say "fuck the lot of you" and get on with the business of living my life, unencumbered by all the baggage I'd taken on over the years.

I'm not saying that your wife's experience will be the same as mine. The nature of the discrimination we were subjected to is very different: she is half African, I was an unwanted bastard. Yet, if she comes to the realization that none of what she endured was "personal," she might find that her new knowledge sets her free of some stuff she's been carrying around for a long time.

My best wishes go out to you both. And let your wife know that someone here understands some of what she's feeling.