Hair! The Musical

I recently had the privilege of witnessing the phenomenon of Hair! The Musical, playing in London, and I remembered when I first became aware of it, around 1969. I was twelve years old. It was a bold production, surrounded by controversy, with nude bodies on stage at the end, a story of drugs and hippies and the horror of sending young boys to war. I stood around the bonfire in the back yard of our house with my brother and many of his friends, the summer it came to Indianapolis, and listened to Junior, one of the wild ones, regale us with his tales of the performance. I had been deemed too young to attend, and, as with many experiences of the sixties, I was forced to learn of it second hand, from the mouths of those older and wiser than me.

The current cast members of Hair were not even born when the first production hit the stage, yet they were able in some small measure to capture the scent and the feel of those heady times—the sense of freedom and the naive hope that filled the air, the firm belief that we could actually change the way the world worked, that we could operate with a new paradigm, and from that paradigm build a new society based on love and togetherness and mutual respect for the earth and each other. It was a short lived dream, dampened by hard drugs and Charlie Manson and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, finished off by the violence at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont Springs. But, for awhile, it was a glorious ride.

I was only twelve years old at the end of the decade, too young, most would think, to have taken in the flavor of those days. But I was lucky. I was the youngest of four, with older siblings, and my home was, shall we say, a rather open environment, a place that inhabited all the sordid and profane and beautiful elements that belonged to the era. We provided shelter for many houseguests, during those years, some dodging the draft, some hiding from police, some who came to either indulge in or kick their drug addictions. Smoke filled the upstairs bedroom, (the smell of ‘burning rope,’ my mother used to say), drifting down the steps and through the windows into the yard, where bonfires were held, guitar notes picked, folk songs sung in unison. I sat on feather mattresses with people ten years older than me who engaged in deep discussions about communes and rock music and the draft and the war. I grew my hair long and parted it in the middle, like them, made sand candles, learned to macramé. Our coffee table held underground newspapers sold in the street markets of Talbot Village in Indianapolis. I listened to my sister argue with my dad about the Chicago 7 and the Democratic Convention of 1968. Our bedroom, painted white with black curtains, in honor of the “White Room with Black Curtains” song by Cream, held posters blazoned in psychedelic colors and declaring “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I spent hours with my face in front of the hi-fi, my ears against the speakers, the albums of Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, Janis and Jimi and the Doors, piled all around me.

As a chubby girl from a family with no money, surrounded by kids dressed in crisp trendy clothes whose parents had boats docked on freshwater lakes in the south, I struggled with a sense of isolation and alienation most of my young life. I received Ds in citizenship at Crestview Elementary for my outbursts of temper and endless streams of tears, and I developed a reputation on the school bus for my ability to beat up all the boys. Let’s just say I had issues.

But then I discovered “the sixties,” and I drank it in, all of it, like milk laid out for a starving cat. Suddenly I had found a place I belonged. If I couldn’t afford the latest white fringed go-go boots the girls bought from Ayres Department store downtown, I could tie dye old tee shirts and string love beads to wear around my neck. If I couldn’t shake pom poms and put on a cheerleader outfit, I could wrap a leather band around my forehead and sew patches on my bell bottom jeans.

And “the sixties” gave me another gift: a sense of purpose. No longer did I think only of myself and my own perceived problems and sorrows. I could focus instead on the suffering of others, and try to do something to put an end to it. I could take all the outrage that had been smoldering in my internal cauldron and unleash it on the world. I read all I could about the movements of the day, inhaling the literature of the Black Panthers, the Yippies, (Steal this Book!), the anti war movement, the American Indians. From them I learned that there were other ways to live and be in the world, that there were things more important than shopping and grades and homecoming dances (to which I would never be invited anyway) and proms. From them I found a world outside the tiny, myopic vision of suburban Indianapolis. From them I gained a sense of the new world and my place in it.

That sense of purpose is with me still, though perhaps the anger and passion have waned a bit, having been tempered with loss and sorrow and joy and reflection and age. Today I live in the most ethnically diverse area of London, where I sit on the top deck of my double decker bus and listen to the languages of the world—Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Mandarin, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish—being spoken. I tread through government bureaucracy to help young Afghan boys who come from a country at war, who seek shelter and asylum and receive it, here, who are stuffed together behind boxes in trucks lined on ferries and, if they are fortunate enough to escape the watchful eye of the UK Border Patrol, manage to land in a place where they might have a chance to survive and thrive.

The sign outside the production of Hair! The Musical calls it “A Beacon of Hope in a Fallen World.” In spite of all the silliness and impetuousness and ultimate destructiveness of “the sixties,” they still carry the flavor of hope for me. I am so happy that I had a chance to be a part of those wild and heady years. I could not have survived my youth without the gift of their vision.

Stuffed

                                                Stuffed

Saint Kevin's Monastery in the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland

On Wednesday nights, I’ve begun to tune in to a riveting reality show called “Hoarders.” It is set here in England, and profiles the lives of people who hang onto piles of unusable and unnecessary collections, until their piles have spilled into the outside world, devastating their neighbours and their families, and most tragically, themselves. Space is a precious commodity here in the UK, our homes much smaller than those in the states, so their collections fill up the skinny hallways and tiny sitting rooms much faster,  thus exacerbating the severity of their plight.

These people may function fairly well in careers and in friendships outside of their homes, although not all of them do. Some of them have become imprisoned by the stacks of papers and plastic cartons and boxes that permeate their world, and they hide among their piles in shame, embarrassed to allow anyone else into their sphere. Others are able to find clean shirts and trousers, somehow, amongst their piles, and trot off to their workplaces and afternoon pub gatherings with friends, never revealing the enormity of the problem that lurks within their homes, behind closed curtains and locked doors.

I am fascinated by them for a variety of reasons. My sister was a hoarder, and my mother, and my father, to some extent, as well. Perhaps this compulsion to collect became a part of our genetic history, I have thought, passed down by ancestors who lost so much in their treks from their home countries to the United States, and across the states in wagons, where all that they owned was reduced to a couple of trunks and a few old dusty pictures. Perhaps it is just a facet of human nature gone awry, accentuated by our western focus on material wealth. I don’t know—but it seems to flow through our family’s blood, an inexorable trait, like our stocky builds, our angular faces, our sturdy thighs.

This peculiarity of the human condition fascinates me, too, because I have struggled against it myself. I moved many times, as a young person, from a tent in a field, to a pickup truck, to hole in the ground (or kiva) in Santa Fe, to a dorm room in the Marin Headlands, to a room that once held pigs in a village in Mexico. Each move, back then, forced me to come to terms with the amount of stuff I held onto, and through it all, I managed to keep my hoarding to an acceptable level—a few boxes of books and pictures, a can full of protest buttons, a container filled with posters and tee shirts.

Then I became a mother, a wife, a householder. And for the last 25 years of my life my definition of necessary stuff expanded, until it encompassed all things related to my son, my husband’s interests, my spiritual beliefs, and my career, eventually filling a three bedroom home. Books, clothes, Christmas decorations, pictures of my son in all his stages, school mementoes, all his awards, articles I found interesting, literary journals, magazines, boxes of my own writings, in various drafts, with and without critiques, pens, markers, scrapbooking materials, books on social work, religious texts, books about how to write, how to organize your writing, how to publish your writing, how to get over a writing drought—the stuff surrounding me, creeping into every available space. I kept it neat and tidy, stacked and hidden, but still. It was too much stuff.

From time to time, I would venture into the home where my mother and sister resided, attempting to help them come to terms with the mounds of things they held onto, and several times, when my sister was away, I would plough through it myself, filling dumpsters and second hand stores with the things they had collected, clearing the hallways of debris so that my mother could get through them without falling, cleaning off their beds so they could actually sleep in them. But usually, within months of my efforts, their place would be packed, again, and I would be filled with feelings of helplessness and resentment. Finally, I decided, for the sake of our relationship, to leave them to sort it out on their own, and I would meet them at the door, when I came to visit, taking them to dinner or to church, rather than trying to spend time in their home.

It hindered their quality of life. They’d lose things and misplace important papers and spend hours searching for documents that were hidden under piles of trash. They couldn’t organize their daily activities, they’d forget to write down dates for appointments, and, if they did write them down, they couldn’t remember where they had left their calendars. They couldn’t have friends come to visit. Once, my mother fell over a vacuum sweeper and broke her shoulder. Another time, she fell out of the small area she had carved out as a sleeping space at the edge of her bed, and broke her nose.

My social work training and my writer’s nature led me to search for and to analyze the deep seated issues that drove their need to hold onto things that did not matter, and their almost psychotic refusal to part with the most inconsequential collections. (I once came across a bag filled with dryer lint, that my sister had been saving, she said, to use as a stuffing for a pillow one day.) For both of them, the collecting was a response to their many losses, I think, an effort to claim back a part of themselves, to hang onto history, to return to a time that was somehow more meaningful, when they felt more complete. Or, perhaps it was an effort to stave off the emptiness they felt inside, as if their things could protect them, somehow, from feeling alone.

Then Debra got sick, and it began to dawn on her that her time on this earth was short. Shortly after she was diagnosed, she let me go through the boxes in her bedroom, and she became willing to part with the Oprah magazines that she had saved for five years, her collection of greeting cards, enough to open a Hallmark store, her Child Life book series, that filled an entire bookcase, along with myriads of other collections. It was as if a light switched on in her head, and she saw, suddenly, how little these things meant to her.

A month later, I returned to visit, quickly realizing that they could no longer manage on their own, and I brought them to live with me. The night we left, my mother scurried around, trying to figure out what to bring with her, but, by then, my sister didn’t care about any of it. She wanted to feel better, she wanted to sleep comfortably, and she wanted to be able to eat. She left all of her stuff behind, not giving it a second glance.

My sister died at hospice house, in a room that held a few of her favourite belongings, some Christmas decorations, my mother, and me. And, in the end, it was all that she needed.

It was very hard for my mother to let go of her things, and I tried to surround her with the possessions that mattered most to her. We brought her china cabinets into my living room, and filled them with her depression glass and her Indianapolis Race Car glasses. We put up all of her old pictures and hung her plates on the wall. Still she felt uncomfortable and displaced, in my home, as if, without her things to define her, she no longer belonged in the world. And before long, she became ill herself, dying less than a year after my sister. Perhaps parting with her possessions was just too much for her, along with losing her daughter. Perhaps the loss was too great for her to survive it.

When they passed, I became obsessed finding a way to change my life. I wanted to experience the world free of the clutter that had turned my mother and my sister into prisoners. And six months after my mom died, I arrived in England, my new home, with two suitcases. I gave away my record albums, shelves full of books, clothes and dishes and pots and pans. I left my furniture for my son, and gave Mom’s china cabinets to two of my nieces. I still have stuff stored back in the states, but I hope to pare it down each time I return, to get down to the bare essentials, to free myself of the material possessions that clog my life and weigh me down. I’ve lived a whole year with just a few things, and for the most part, I haven’t missed the stuff I’ve left behind.

Recently, I travelled to the site of a monastery outside Dublin that was formed in the 6th century by Saint Kevin. It was a cluster of stone buildings and churches set in a beautiful valley at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. The story goes that he allowed anyone to come to his monastery, to take refuge there, but they had to leave all their possessions at the archway, and they could enter only with the clothes on their backs. Mother Teresa required the nuns in her order to limit their possessions to only what could fill one paper bag. It is who we are, that matters, she told them, and how we treat each other, not what we own.

I don’t know that I could emulate the example of Saint Kevin or Mother Teresa. But I know that my life feels simpler, now, that I own less, and that I am able to tread much more lightly through my days, no longer shackled by the treachery of stuff.

Living with the Dead

On my way home from the shops this afternoon, I wander into the local cemetery, or crematorium, as they call them here. I used to walk through this cemetery, often, after home visits in the neighbourhood, and I have missed it. When I lived in the village in Mexico, the graveyard was the only place I could go to be alone, and I took refuge there, daily, sitting among the plastic flowers and tissue-wreathed crosses with my journal and a pen. Here, in England, the world outside my little flat is noisy and crowded, my solitude penetrated by the sputtering of car engines, the pounding of footsteps against my ceiling, country and western music blaring from the fellow who lives in the flat next door. Sometimes I long for the wide open spaces of the states—big roads, big yards—lots of room to roam without intruding upon another person’s domain. So I have come to sit for a moment, at Croydon Crematorium, where I share space only with the dead.

I feel peaceful here, seated on a wooden bench, my hands gloved against the cold. Old gravestones, toppled and worn, are interspersed with marbled monuments, their etchings elegant and deep. This cemetery allows people to plant colourful plants and leave flowers at their loved one’s graves—not like my dad’s cemetery, with its symmetrical stones lying flat against the earth, designed for the convenience of riding lawn mowers, who shear the grass in summertime. These graves seem more natural in their uniqueness, like the people who inhabit them once were. Some of them are covered by a layer of coloured rocks, framed by silver incense urns, and I picture weeping relatives at these tombs, their grieving somehow soothed by the pungent aroma of smoke as it rises to the sky. Others show fresh tulips, resting in plastic vases, next to their monuments. Still others display green plants, slightly wilted by the cold, rooted in black dirt plots, bordered in stone.

There are graves of children who died too young, and graves of ninety year olds who died soon after their partners passed. Across the paved path, in perfect rows, stand the gravestones of young soldiers who died in WWII. The English do not seem comfortable with the word death. Their stones bear anachronisms like ‘fell asleep’ and ‘taken from us.’ Their etchings are wordier than ours, poetic, almost, with long descriptions of how much their people were loved, and proclamations that God must have needed them in heaven, more than they were needed, here. It is strange how we use kind words to soften the ugliness of death. It is like a mask we don to spare those around us from witnessing the full measure of our loss. Perhaps such gentle words serve as a balm for our wounds, as well.

I’ve found my own ways to soothe my grief. I’ve sought the aid of mediums, here, where they are abundant, and work without the stigma attached to them in the United States. I have attended a spiritualist church, here, too, in hopes the ‘presenter’ would find, among the souls whose loved ones are in the audience, a message from Mom or Debra to me.

I wanted to have a chat with them, to find out why they had to leave so soon, and to let them know how much they were missed. But the sessions did not accomplish what I had wished. They could not fill the hole in my heart, or make me feel like part of a family again. I still dream of them, at night. So maybe it is only through my dreams that we can meet.

In every country I have visited, I have found myself drawn to their cemeteries, where I read the names and dates of those who lived and died and are memorialized, there. In Wales, the dead lay below moss-covered tombstones in old church yards, close to where their loved ones worship and pray.

Sweden’s grave sites are clean and orderly and sleek, like the country’s quiet streets. I visited the grave site of Jim Morrison, of The Doors, in Paris, the resting place of Chopin and Oscar Wilde and many other famous folks. For years, the relatives of families buried in that cemetery tried to have Jim Morrison’s body removed. They grew weary of the scruffy young folks flocking to his site, where they smoked dope and broke whiskey bottles and had sex atop his tomb. His grave is surrounded, now, by a chain link fence, and patrolled by a private guard, yet people continue to leave their offerings of liquor and pills next to his stone—a twisted tribute to the tools of his untimely death.

My mother never asked for much, but she did make explicit her desire to have her remains interred with my dad. I asked her, through the years, if she was certain she wanted to spend eternity with the man who made her life so tumultuous and crazed. But she loved him, with all his wild faults, and it was her wish that she rest at his side. I wasn’t able to spare her from suffering in her last few months of life, but I am happy I could place her where she wanted to be, in death.

Like many cities in Europe, Paris lacks the space to bury their dead, and the plots are rented as family plots, with one body piled on top of another inside them. People in England, too, tend to cremate their loved ones, adding only a name, instead of a body, to an already established monument. For some reason these monuments are important to us. It is as if the names of those we loved, immortalized in stone, grant some kind of final meaning to their time on earth, an assurance that their impact on us will be remembered for generations to come.

My sister, Debra, never wanted to be buried. A diabetic since the age of 14, with few of the customary complications, she often referred to her body as a miracle of science, and she hoped to have it donated for research. But an earlier infectious illness made her ineligible for donation, and shortly before she died, I had to tell her she would be cremated instead. She took the news as she had taken most disappointments in her life—in silence, and without protest.

On a cool winter evening in Florida, my sister slipped away, and Mom and I watched them lift her body from the hospice bed. Within a week they called me to pick her up—her presence reduced to three boxes of ashes—one for Ben, her son, one for Dennis, her twin, and the other one for my mother and me. A year later, I added my mother’s ashes to my shelf.

Debra wanted to visit a foreign country, and it was one of her last wishes before she died, but her time was too short, and she was too weak. So I brought her ashes here, to England, where they sit upon my tiny mantelpiece. I still cannot look at pictures of the women I have lost, but the urn is a comfort to me, somehow, and I am glad that I have her with me, here.

It is almost dark, when the crematorium closes its gates, and I must enter into the stream of noise and life, again. There is quiet among the dead, but a bit of sadness too, a sense of missed opportunities, perhaps, a swell of lingering regrets. I walk the path past toppled stones and marbled monuments, and board the bus that will carry me home, to the world of the living, in my little flat, footsteps on my ceiling and country music blaring, its lilting rhythms a blessing to me.

Autumn comes to my little street

The Queen's English

I am a lover of words, and language, and I believe that the language of a people says a great deal about who they are and what is important to them. Since I have been in the UK, I have come to appreciate many of their sayings, and to recognize them as a reflection of their culture. And others are just funny and entertaining!
Here are just a few:

Are you all right?: When I first came here, I thought my body language or facial expressions must be signalling that there was something wrong with me, because people were constantly asking me if I was all right. But I have come to know that the English use this as a more honest greeting than our American “how are you?” They don’t really want to hear a long tale about what is going on with you, they just want to make sure you are all right.

Well done: I overhear English parents say this to their children. It is used as we use “good boy,” or “good girl.” I like it because it praises the act of the child instead of tying the act to their essential goodness. It feels less conditional, and more real.

Unwell: The English use this to describe people who are sick or even mentally ill. It just seems less harsh than ‘sick,’ or ‘ill,’ and implies a temporary condition that is fluid, and subject to change.

No worries: This is often heard as a phrase instead of ‘no problem,’ or ‘not an issue.’ It feels like a kind of commentary on how they handle things in general—that there are no worries worth causing a problem in relationships, or worth troubling ourselves.

Leave it to me: This phrase is used when someone agrees to take responsibility for getting something done. Although it is used sometimes by people in the service industry and I don’t often trust that the person is really going to follow through! Sometimes it just feels like a way to get me to stop perseverating about the problem on the phone!

At the end of the day: I love this phrase because it reflects the idea that, in the scheme of things, whatever it is that seems so big and important really doesn’t matter, much. I hear this used a great deal in my work environment. It helps us to keep things in perspective.

Cheers!: This greeting is usually used at the end of a conversation, in place of or before saying goodbye.

Isn’t it, or i'n it: This phrase is used at the end of a sentence or thought, as we would use ‘you know,’ or ‘know what I mean?’

I am sure there are others, which I will share in the future as I encounter them. For now, here are some other entertaining turns of words and phrases that I have had to learn in order to adapt to the life here!

Pants: trousers
Sweaters: jumpers
Stove: hob, or cooker
Restroom: toilet, or loo
Umbrella: brolley
Thrift store: charity shop

Trunk: boot—I went to a ‘boot fair’ recently, expecting rows of boots for sale, and found only people’s junk that they had brought to sell in their ‘boots’—what we would call a flea market or garage sale!

Fries: chips
Chips: crisps
Cookies: biscuits

Life continues to entertain and amuse me here, as I settle into my new world across the pond!

The land of the Brattons, Wales

Settling In, Coming Home

I have not written in almost two months. I have been spending time adapting to my work and my new flat and trying to absorb all that it means to work and to live in this country so different from my own. I have also had so many thoughts swirling in my head about my work, and the different approach here, and those thoughts have mixed with the memories of my mother and my sister and my childhood. As I have thought about these issues, they have become more and more complex, and I have resisted writing about them because I don't want to trivialize them or simplify them with words that are trite and easy.

With all of our talk about and money spent on family preservation, in the U.S., it is not a concept that we practice well. We remove children of parents who test positive at birth, whether that positive test is for cannibis or cocaine. We bring families into court and force them into treatment when we are barely certain of the extent of their addiction. We separate newborns from their mothers and they are fortunate to get visits one hour a week. We don't provide poor families with housing and then we take their children away when they are homeless. We expect parents who are struggling to find work or keep their minimum wage jobs to attend court hearings in the middle of the day and to come to visits at the convenience of the workers and to attend parenting classes that cost money that they don't have. When the parents begin to falter, or miss a visit, or show up late because they have no transportation, we write their failings into court reports. And if, God forbid, they become overwhelmed and let their despair and feelings of hopelessness cause them to drink or use drugs again, we judge them to be unfit to parent their children, and we move for termination of parental rights.

Here,if it is decided that a mother cannot safely parent her infant on her own, we place the mother and baby into a sheltered environment where her parenting can be assessed, and where mentoring is provided. If she does not want to go into a placement with her infant, we arrange daily contact for at least an hour a day. There is a respect, here, for the importance of family.

There are those who will say that we go too far, here, in the other direction. Indeed,there have been several scandals in the UK that have included horrific stories of abuse and torture and death. But do we not have those scandalous stories in the U.S.,too? In spite of all of our courts and authoritarian approaches and our placements and our speedy moves toward adoption, do children not die at the hands of their abusers there, as well?

I cannot say which approach is right, or which works better. Both have their faults. I can only speak from my own experience.

When I first became involved with abused children, I was a young woman working in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco, with an inner city drop in day care center, and I came to know many children who lived in the hotels in the neighborhood, whose parents were addicts, and for whom life seemed pretty bleak. I was appalled by the conditions I saw there, and I thought that the answer was to get them away from these parents, to place them into nice homes where perhaps they would have a future.

It was the 80s, when I was working there, and there was a psychological theory afloat that posited the idea of "toxic parents," "toxic families," and "toxic shame." It was a time when victims were urged to cease all contact with their families in which abuse or neglect had occurred, to make new families with friends and like minded folks, to turn their backs on their pasts, to liberate themselves from the anchors that their families had become, and I became a part of that movement.

I was beginning to understand how some things that had happened in my childhood had wounded, indeed, scarred, me. I was never exposed to intentional cruelty or brutality by my parents. Instead,I was the youngest child of a father who had an alcohol problem, who wasn't a great provider, and a mother who was depressed and overwhelmed with the care of four children, and I knew deprivation and hunger and feelings of abandonment as a result. Other things happened. Life in the Bratton household on 75th street was fairly chaotic when I was growing up! And I was exposed to things I should not have known at such a young age. It affected my image of myself and my relationships with others. I cried alot (still do!), I suffered from depression and addictions of my own, I had a hard time trusting folks, and as a young adult, I moved from state to state, trying to outrun my past.

For much of early adulthood, I carried an anger about the things that had happened to me. I used to wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family that had stability and structure and routine. I tried but never succeeded in cutting off contact with family members. I swore I would never be like them. I moved as far away from them as I could get.

But something happened. Circumstances caused me to move home. And as a result of that, I grew. I saw my childhood in a new light. A wise man I know once said that the older (and more sober) he got, the better his childhood had become. He began to understand not only the pain but the blessings he had received, as a part of his family, and he began to view his past with a new pair of glasses.

And so it was with me. I learned to appreciate the humor and the joy my father exuded, even when he didn't have two pennies to rub together. I have a vivid memory of my father shaving at the bathroom sink, singing and smiling at himself in the mirror. "Oh, you handsome fellow," he'd say. "Oh, you lucky dog." I must have been about six. I remember looking around at our rusty bathtub, the cracked toilet seat, the coal dust covered walls, and thinking, "is this lucky?" But my dad loved living. He was a happy drinker. He loved people, and they loved him, and he never met a stranger, because he turned them into friends.

With the current climate in the US, my behavior in elementary school (I had temper tantrums daily) would have brought me to the attention of child welfare folks. They would have investigated the conditions of my home, and I could easily have been removed from my family. And I don't know if they would have been able to get me back. It's not that they wouldn't have wanted to. But my Dad didn't like government intervention, and he would have rebelled. My mom would have felt powerless to comply with all the stipulations the state would have required. And they may have given up.

And so I could easily have grown up in a different family, as someone other than a Bratton. I may have been spared some of the pain of my wild and traumatic childhood. But I would not have known my dad.

For much of my life, I had a difficult relationship with my mother. I blamed her for leaving me when I was twelve, when she went on the road with my dad, who was a travelling salesman, and I held her responsible for not protecting me. But, the birth of my own child helped me to see her in a new light. Where I had viewed her before as weak, and submissive, I came to recognize her quiet strength. I came to respect her intelligence, her spiritual understanding, her tolerance, and her particular way of showing love. She helped me parent my son. She taught him his ABCS and took him to get his shots. Had I been separated from my family, I wouldn't have come to know her this way.

When Debra died, my mom and I had had a tense moment, after we watched her take her last breath. She followed me into the lounge of the hospice, while we waited for them to come and take Debra's body away, and she apologized to me for not being there when I needed her. My own son was struggling with drugs at the time, and I told her that I saw how hard it must have been to try and handle four kids, two (my brother and I) who were acting out. I told her I understood how helpless she must have felt, and tired, and I told her it was okay. Had I been separated from my family, I would never have had that chance. I would never have healed that place in myself that blamed her, and she would never have heard me say it didn't matter anymore.

Had I been separated from my family, had I been raised as someone other than a Bratton, I would have missed the opportunity to help my sister die with dignity, to watch her heal her own old wounds, to see her thank my brother Dennis for all he had done to help her, to watch my brother Allan, with whom she had had a conflicted relationship, carry her from the bed to the toilet and back, to be a witness to the tender exchanges that brought us a moment of grace in the midst of the suffering and sadness.

Had I grown up in another family, I would not have been able to lay by my mother's side at hospice house, cradling her in my arms, as she drifted out of consciousness. I would have missed the opportunity to rub lotion on her legs and arms, to care for her most intimate needs, to bathe her and help her to the toilet and to tell her that I didn't mind, that I was glad to do it, to let her lean on me.

I have seen many foster and adoptive children, in my years of practice, carry a deep and unmet yearning to know who and where they came from. Some of them have grown up in the most loving and kind adoptive homes. They have been given all the material goods, the educational opportunities, and the nurturance of parents who doted on their every need. Still they have felt fractured, somehow, like they didn't quite belong, like a part of them was missing. And many have gone to find that piece of themselves. It doesn't discount the brave and devoted parenting of their adoptive families. It just means that they need to know their connection to the blood ties that bind us as humans to each other. It is not the only thing that matters. But it matters, nonetheless.

Last weekend I travelled to Wales, and I carried with me my father's tales of the four Bratton brothers, who were kicked out of that country for stealing horses, and who set sail out of Donegal, Ireland, in the 17th century, for America. I walked the patchwork hills and viewed the little stone churches and met the Welshmen in their caps, fishing at the river, and I was so thankful to have had those stories, to feel a part of something bigger, to feel connected to the land of my ancestors, to feel like a piece of me had found my way home.