Writers Bloc Thirteen: Writers Bloc, #13

By Henderson Writers Group, K. Ray Katz, Jean Widner and 15 more

The Henderson Writers Group challenges its members each year to submit works for blind judgement. Those with top scores are presented here.

 

Enjoy this multitude of works written by K. Ray Katz, Jean Widner, Jo A. Wilkins, Fred Rayworth, Michelle Smith, Frank Westcott, Ned Barnett, Donna DeVargas, Thomas J. Benner, Keech Ballard, Valerie J. Runyan, Joseph DeBenedetti, David Long, J. M. Dohanich, Wolf O'Rourc, Anderson Black, Audrey Balzart, Cora Fey Nielson, Raden Marafioti, Olivia Wheeler

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henderson Writers Group
• Release date: Nov 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223009672

Henderson Writers Group

Beverly J. Davis, Brandi Hoffman, Pat Kranish, David R. Long, Keiko Moriyama, Rick Newberry, Chike Nzerue, Wolf O'Rourc, Lori Piotrowski, Donna Pletzer-DeVargas, Joe Van Rhyn, Valerie J. Runyan, Laura Engel Sahr, Judy Salz, Willow Seymour, Arleen Sirois, Nancy Sanders Tardy, Bryant C. Thomas, William Darrah Whitaker, and Duke Woodrick.

Book preview

Good Times and Bad

K. Ray Katz

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No one arrived in the town by accident. It was literally at the end of the road deep in the backwoods and it was where old Joe lived and died. He was a man of the mountain and planned ahead. His casket was ready, his grave was ready. The ceremony was all planned. There was only one thing Joe couldn’t control—the weather.

The day dawned bright, the air crisp and cold, and the fresh snow over two feet deep. Timberon, with its three-hundred residents sits on a mountain at seven-thousand-foot elevation inside a national forest in southern New Mexico. Joe planned to have his barbed wire decorated coffin pulled through town to the community church on a horse drawn wagon. The wagon, horses, and preacher were stuck in Alamogordo, and our entire town was without electricity—a common occurrence in this mountain retreat, home to more deer, turkeys, and bears, than humans.

With the dirt roads being well-frozen, the snow presented little problem for residents equipped with four-wheel drive. Everyone who could, assembled in the dark church with a portable boom box providing the music. A neighbor led the brief service. In the ice-cold wood-frame building, a small cloud issued from each mouth as a few hymns were sung. Attendees then carried Joe’s casket through the snow to a small graveyard out back. His interment was quick but dignified, followed by everyone being invited to the local community center/library/restaurant building to help a local couple celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Most of the couple’s guests were stuck at the base of the mountain, unable to negotiate the fifty-six-mile drive of yet to be plowed roads. Being good neighbors, the funeral attendees filled the empty tables, drank a toast to the couple and made sure none of the food went to waste.

In between its annual forest fires, that was life in quiet Timberon. A place where everyone guarded their privacy but were always available to help a neighbor, in good times and bad.

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Author Bio:

Mr. Katz has written professional articles, short stories and novels for over thirty years. He is currently working on his eleventh novel. The three stories included here were actual events he experienced. His novels go from Mafia activity in Moscow to humor and adventure during W.W. II in the Pacific.

Memories of the Theatre

K. Ray Katz

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Theatre people are good hearted and friendly, most of the time...at least most of the ones I met were. I lived in New York from 1958 through 1961. I was going to school for electronics, but I enjoyed (live stage performance) theatre. One day I walked into the Kaufmann Concert Hall, also known as the 92nd Street Y. I found the stage manager, Gary, and asked if I could help out. The answer, No. Everyone was a paid employee. However, his wife needed help with a new off-Broadway show she was managing.

I worked every evening for about two weeks for Timmie Harris, Gary’s wife. From that encounter I was offered the position as Sound Technician for a different off-Broadway show called USA. I worked eight shows a week for nine months in New York, Chicago, and Palm Beach. When the show closed, I became Assistant Stage Manager, and then Stage Manager of Kaufmann, all while going to school for electronics. I had the pleasure of meeting all types of performers: dramatic-Eli Wallach, William Windom, Sada Thompson. Musicians-Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Issac Stern, Jose’ Montoya. Writers-Robert Frost, Norman Mailer. Singers -Joan Baez, Odetta.

I loved classical music. The theatre booked many of the top performers of the day who I illegally recorded. About twenty years ago, I donated all of those recordings to the University of Texas. Later, once rights were negotiated with the performers’ estates, some of the performances were released commercially on CD’s and they sent me copies.

Even after I went in the army, I worked one more week at the theatre. Robert Frost was giving a reading. I took care of him the previous year and he requested that I be there again. I got leave, went to New York, stayed with Gary and Timmie and had a great evening with Mister Frost joking backstage about his publisher who was on stage introducing him.

Memories like these are something you can’t buy–you have to live them.

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Author Bio:

Mr. Katz has written professional articles, short stories and novels for over thirty years. He is currently working on his eleventh novel. The three stories included here were actual events he experienced. His novels go from Mafia activity in Moscow to humor and adventure during W.W. II in the Pacific.

The Adoption Paradox

Jean Widner

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Prologue – My Adoptee Story

The mother who birthed me, and the mother who raised me both have the same middle name, spelled the same, and that became my first name. Neither of them knows this.

In combing through my past, I discovered this serendipitous twist of fate. How I am called and echoed through this planet has made me wonder if it was as the universe intended. The mother who gave me life, who gave me up for adoption, has a middle name mirroring that of the woman I called Mom. Was I meant to be taken from the arms of the woman who made me and placed into the arms of the woman with whom she shared that one small thing in common?

My adoptive mother did her best and is the only one I’ve known. She loved me, broke me, rejected me, confused and confounded me. She was broken herself. Later she would save herself and then me.

For my part, I would wound her, shun her, push and shove my way of being at her, and fling my disdain for her in ways that would finally move her to lift herself out of the darkness. 

I was born in April 1965 in Spokane, Washington, at a Salvation Army Hospital for unwed mothers. My birth mother was eighteen then, and her hometown was halfway across the country in North Dakota. Girls in her predicament often went away to have their babies in secret and give them up to God and the powers that swirled around them. Today, I harbor only gratitude to her, and the parents who raised me, even with our difficulties. My parents could not conceive on their own, and I was their only child.

They were never secret about my adoption and raised me with a loving indoctrination that I was special and wanted and that being adopted was good. I don’t remember being ‘told’ I was adopted; I only remember ‘knowing’ I was.

On the surface, we were a typical happy family. Underneath, there were problems.

Growing up, I thought every home had a medicine cabinet like mine. A hundred or more prescription pill bottles sat in shoe boxes in three different areas where mom kept her pills. I had no idea what they were or what they were for and, luckily, stayed out of them. My mother, an expert addict, had seven different doctors prescribing medications for her ‘mood swings’, depression, and migraines. On top of that, she also drank.

This book is about adoption and not addiction, yet it’s impossible for me to tell my story without touching on that hard truth – my mother was an addict, and my father was her co-dependent, trying to cope and manage, but without openly acknowledging my mother’s problem. I can’t separate my childhood from the effects of growing up in a household filled with the typical patterns of alcoholism. There are ‘rules of engagement’ that every other child who grew up with addiction is aware of - the details change, but the impacts remain the same.

Regardless, we were often the picture of that ‘happy family’ with joyful times in our home. I was in girl scouts, and my mother was the co-leader of our troop. I took dance and gymnastics classes, liked school, and grew up active and mostly happy, especially in the company of my father. I dealt with the hidden heaviness by checking out and emotionally left our home by my teen years.

Even through these challenges and emotions, I still somehow emerged from my childhood with a strong sense of self. My problems from growing up in a home with addiction are typical – I don’t know how to be vulnerable, ask for help, face conflicts, and have hard conversations – I’d rather run and hide. And, of course, I’m really good at telling you I’m great when inside I’m not.

Children are far more intuitive to the energies of those around them than adults realize. As a child, you are tethered to the souls of your parents. You take in the hurt of others and feel the plague of their pains, fears, and the dance between two people in a marriage. As that emotional spillage starts to stain one’s childhood, adopted or not, questions of your worthiness unwind those connections - like a rope that frays to the point of breaking, leaving you unmoored and adrift.

My mom didn’t seem happy being my mother. Something disturbed her as if adopting me was too much. As a child, you sense a parent’s unhappiness and internalize that you are the source of that pain. As an adopted child, this manifests a feeling of not fully belonging, or that you are not welcome in this family.

As an adoptee talking to others, I have found that there is a lingering sense of abandonment or rejection. Sometimes that is physically real for adoptees, and you’ll see many such stories in the pages ahead. My heart aches as I hear their words about the sense of loss of what might have been. After all, what if my mother hadn’t had her addiction? Or, how different would my life be had my birth mother decided to keep me?

Somehow, I always felt a strong sense of where to place my pains. They lie with the parents who raised me and never with my mother who gave me up. I love her for what she did and honor her. Even though my family wasn’t perfect, everyone did their best, as did my birth mother - and thus find myself grateful for all of it.

Adult adoptees are often asked if they have searched for or found their birth parents. I never seriously considered looking for them until a few years ago.

Having searched and found new information about my birth parents, as well as having an emotional awakening to these complexities, is what motivates this book. Adoptees have a voice, a deep rumble below the outer surface of our lives that deserves to be heard.

Modern adoptions are often more complex – open adoptions, international adoptions, those with foster kids, special needs, and children with behavioral problems are more common than ever. Parents who take on the role of raising these children have more challenges and, sadly, few resources to assist them.

Birth mothers and fathers who, willingly or not, opt to relinquish their natural-born children are some of the most misunderstood people in the triad. They are often judged, shamed, or shunned, and the consequences of their choices stay with them for the rest of their lives, never healed or forgotten.

The question, I think, comes down to this - how do we ensure that all sides not just survive, but thrive? As children, we are all innocents - unable to hold any power over our circumstances. There is no doubt in my deepest-held instincts that all adoptees, to one extent or another, carry permanent wounds caused by the separation from the mothers who bear us. They, in turn, reflect that same pain seared into their souls. These instincts lie in the oldest parts of our brains, inserting themselves into our present being, regardless of how happy we are with our adoptive families. The parents who raise us, I believe, intuit this as well and harbor some sense of insecurity even through their unconditional love for their adopted children.

I say we must thrive. Find our power, each of us in this triad, and also give space, grace, and understanding to each other. It is the only path to wholeness and healing I can find.

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Chapter 1 – The Paradox of Adoption

A paradox means that you have seemingly opposite and dual realities. Adoptees are rescued, repaired, loved, rejected, celebrated, abandoned, made to feel special, made to feel less than. We are both grateful and angry. We are different from everyone else, and yet we are the same. Regardless of the backstory or the upbringing, we usually know a reality that contradicts itself.

To understand the paradox, it is best to understand some history. Over the centuries, adoptee children have been stolen, sold, loved, wanted, abused, made into indentured servants, used as farm hands, and graced with wealth, education, and opportunities their native birth families could never have afforded them.

In the modern era, most love their families very much and feel wanted, safe, cared for, and a part of the family that raises them. But what no one who is not adopted can understand is this - no matter who raises you, you will never see your features in the people around you. And depending upon the circumstances of your situation, you will not know or have access to medical information and many other vital and identifying facts about yourself. Your heritage is theirs, not yours.

Adoption has consequences. It has joy. It can complete a family, create one from scratch or fulfill through some mystical unknown the way things are supposed to be, without the conscious knowledge of how. Adoption can rescue, heal, and harm.

I am a fan of the practice – but it must be done ethically. Historically adoption had nothing to do with the welfare of a child. It was created to protect wealth and manage the labor of children. Throughout history, adoption has been done well and, at times, horribly.

My intentions with this book are to tell the tales of those who have lived any three sides of the triad: adoptees, parents, and birth parents. This is not sugar-coated rainbows and unicorns. It is an honest, hard look at the joys and tragedies that unfold for everyone involved. This is my baseline for the paradox of adoption.

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Adoptees

I feel so incredibly lucky. My parents gave me so many opportunities that I would have never had from my biological mother. I used to think she didn't want me, and that hurt. But later, I learned that she hadn't had a very stable or happy childhood, so for that reason, when she knew she was pregnant, and my father wasn't going to be in the picture, she did what she thought was best.

~Kate

I don't want to say my parents are reluctant to discuss adoption, but they feel that once the adoption took place, that pretty much ended that whole chapter. Once I became adopted by them, everything was fine. There's no need to go digging into the past. There's no need to find out health-related things. You know you're going to die anyway, so who cares. I remember this vividly when I told my parents that I was reunited and found by my biological sister. My dad said, Well, it sounds like you had a better life with us. And I think, Okay, but we don't know that things wouldn't have been different had I stayed with them. Maybe my mom wouldn't have gone down a certain path. It didn't hurt, but you don't know that that was better for anybody. I remember him saying, It sounds like your mom was messed up. Yeah, I would be messed up too if I had to give my baby up, and my mom was considered a minor at the time; she was only 18. And I guess 21 was the age of consent in Michigan then. So, my grandmother was the one who placed me for adoption.

~Tina

I never really felt out of place or anything like that. Nothing like that. My mom told me I was adopted. I knew my whole life; you can just see. I never really questioned it. I was like; they love me. I love them. When you're loved, it really doesn't matter by who.

~Jacob

As an adoptee talking to others, it’s a common theme that there is a lingering sense of abandonment or rejection. That their birth mothers did not want them. That they are discarded, set aside, and unworthy of love. Later you’ll not only read many personal stories from adoptees, but the book will examine the psychological impacts that adoption and its processes have on the emotional and mental health of children.

I have my own wounds. Being raised in a home with addiction colors my perspectives in ways that are so intertwined that they cannot be undone. As an adult now, I do not and cannot blame the mother who raised me for her flaws. Likewise, I never blame my birth mother for my circumstances.

Many do blame their birth mothers and are unable to move beyond what they have internalized as a physical rejection of them as human beings.

A question that needs to be asked is, 'what is the difference between us?'. Why do some feel that profound abandonment while others do not? What forces create that? Biology, environment, or something else?

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Adoptive