THE GYPSY KING’S LOST DAUGHTER

On Infant Relinquishment

A LITTLE WEIRD

Oh, you do come across as a little weird. Someone with that many tattoos can’t be trusted. Can’t be introduced as someone serious or quite sane. A bit peculiar. A bit of a fruit loop, you must understand. Too old for those piercings. Too…

I am not like you.

The adopted people he [Dr Paul Sunderland] sees often appear very well put together.

They rarely talk about being adopted – it’s just by the way. When he does a bank of psychometric tests, he finds these people score very extremely high on the measure of depression, but you can’t actually see it. Sunderland[1] began to question what this was about and found there is an awful lot these people have in common…

When I was young I wanted to be like other children. To get princess compliments. No, not from my ‘family’. That was never an option. From those other children. It didn’t happen, of course. It couldn’t happen. They instinctively knew I was not one of them. By the smell of me, perhaps. That I was wrong, in some way they wouldn’t have been able to articulate, even if asked. So I just achieved more than was fitting for a girl. For a while. Endorphins are interesting like that.

Over the years it became easier to be different. There was a precedent. The era was ripe. They were promiscuous, skinny-jeans-wearing, black-lipstick days of anarchy and political disobedience, of nights sneaking out of windows to have sex in darkened laneways up against a wall. Times of poetry and ritual, war and rage and loud music… and of rejection for being different. Because I was not like them, and even though the era gave the hope of freedom to other girls, I was trapped. I would never be them.

I was born a mammal. Squeezed from an unwilling vagina, cut and washed and wrapped in something to prevent my fists from pounding air. Popped into a small hospital box and put up for sale. Nothing smelled like me. No flesh, no nipple, no sigh, no grunt at the force of my suck, no eyes locked to eyes. Did you know that of abandoned children? That immediate and irreversible fear of death is our first breath? Our first milk fed to us through rubber? The hands that powder us and pin us to a diaper, a stranger’s hands? Brisk and efficient. Paid for by a hospital?

…

An abandoned child’s neurons are, at birth, irrevocably confused because there is supposed to be oxytocin. And a name. A future. A designation.

We I am not like you because I was not in the company of the person belonging to that vagina.

For the adoptee there is real fear in relationships. There is a great desire or hunger to attach, causing you to sometimes behave against your best interests, but with the conflicting feelings that this is not safe. The feelings are held in the limbic system which will always override the frontal cortex…

And no one speaks of it again. Or if they do, in later years, it is impossible to fix those broken neural pathways. Besides, it is with the voice of shame. Or with a thinking mind of I know-ness. When that is impossible because the person doing that thinking is not the relinquished person. Will never know them, because in their brain is another brain. A limbic thing of several billion electrical

impulses. Ancient and primordial. Reptilian, in fact.

That brain is not wired like yours.

When an unborn mammal is floating in the sea of an amniotic fluid for that full and airless inner lifetime, from conception to eruption, we heard the thunder of a thousand heartbeats, from organ to pulse to excitement to rage. I turned in languid sensual seal-movements, to the rumble and gurgle of bodily secretions passing along and through that glorious universe of unrealized digestive tract. The rush and whir of lung-life. The contraction of some mythic, external winter-on-skin, the grunt and rush of a masturbated orgasm. The magnesium hit of ocean-in-summer. Roller coasters of standing and lying and bending and shitting and rolling over in the night. I was prepared. An eternity of DNA and cells and neurons all promising suckle. And safety.

That never comes. So this is death. At the first breath, and the breath after and the breath after that. Left on the grass of a savannah with eagles and buzzards circling. Caul not licked off. Legs unable to stand, let alone find an udder or a pap. Lying there. Ready to be eaten. Carrion for any scenting hunter.

To never look into eyes and see yourself. Yourself in the turn of a smile. The behavior that says like mother like daughter. To never, until ejecting young from a woman-body, smell someone whose scent is like you. You think we are like you? You really think that?

…

THIS brain is not wired like yours. You might think so, but you are wrong.

The normal biology of pregnancy has the baby set up for bonding with its mother, and the mother who relinquishes her baby goes against her biology. The child experiences life-threatening abandonment. The ‘chosen child’ is the story of a child entering a family that does not genetically fit them, with an impossible job description to be someone they can never be.

We are achievers, or we are dead. By our own hands. Quite often both. One step ahead of the bullet, the blade, the syringe or the top of a tall building, the bottle. The sentence that says, in truth, you have no right to be alive. You are a sin. You are a bastard. You have brought shame upon someone you never met. Their parents. The church. You are the get of a slut. Fallen from grace. Of no name until bought. Claimed. Your new, ‘real’ identity recorded within the appropriate department of an establishment for such people as what came from so much badness. Who could not be a citizen without the legitimate banding of some man who had the money to afford their price. Who could keep his wife’s infertility a secret. If indeed that was the case. Yes, we were recorded in some register, somewhere, as an actual entity, a human being, now acceptable within the culture of both the sellers and the buyers. Paid for by a legal document. Signed into a life with strangers by a court of law.

A child now owned, and everyone pretending I belong. People playing with belief. Playing love. Causing harm. In uncountable paper cuts or other ways, unmentionable ways, humiliating and confusing to a child. Them saying, but you like it, don’t you?

But we are not like them and they do not know that, except by the look of us, so utterly unfamiliar to any of them. They thought we would comply with the pretense of family. They thought we would be a proper kid. How? We don’t know how. This is not in the handbook of the neuroscience that I we are wired for, in that ceaselessly noisy prepartum ocean. The umbilicus feeds this person something else. An ancestry that dates deep to within the sea of stars from which we all come, and something else. Before that. The atomic roar and electron kaleidoscopic particle accelerator that exploded one cell into two, with the ramming of that unrelenting sperm into that other woman’s vast and eager egg. Therein is written another story. An old, old one. That handbook said you belong! You will belong! But it unwittingly lied. That doesn’t happen. It never happens.

I am now an elder, and my relationship with rejection and shame, my intimacy with achievement and excellence, depression and isolation, is as private and unknown as the secret, hidden insubstantial fluff of a newborn empress penguin, called an emperor, raised and brought up amongst sea lions, too wet and too huge to do more than to show her that she cannot be satisfied by them, but neither is she able to know she is not one of them.

This relationship is that of the twenty one stairs in our house that I threw myself down, in an attempt to die at seven, to Valium and the acceptance of violating sex, to the wonder of understanding raven conversations, prophesy and wildness, and the dreams of the smells of a forest of fir and aspen, in a landscape I have never trod. It is an unquiet fear of nothing, that is sometimes, also, the dark, deep bottomless ocean that yes, fuck it, is occasionally a terrifying suffocation because I can never really swim to the surface.

…

AM ERASED person is not like you. You might think so, but you are wrong. I am not wired like you.

I’m adopted, I say, to someone who’s not knowing, even as I speak, that the words will only sound like the same language. Note I did not say stolen.

I wish I’d been, they sigh, giving me an opening to ask why that I refuse. As every time before.

Really? I reply, hiding this unquenchable rage with the look of guilelessness that has kept me from an asylum most of my life. The look on my face is benign. Benign with practice. On the inside I am unavailable to anything except as a deep-dark-water-drowning-person who is wishing, right now, to be aboard a saddled and gaily-tasseled camel wandering a desert in another part of the galaxy. Rather than have begun this conversation.

You think that would have made your life better? I smile.

Poker was a game, mastered in the company of a bloke-full of butchers, preferred to the threat of idleness (or even books). I only win if I play with matches, however, because addiction is such an easy hole to fall into. I’d have bet my life and lost.

Sure do, they shrug, you can’t choose your family, you know. That look on their faces. Of resignation. And the need for my compassion.

No, I don’t know, I say, and so they change the subject back to them.

Do I curse the something that has kept me alive this long? That pulls at me with ribbons of inspiration? That has me thinking perhaps I’m schizophrenic but in such an unpsychiatric way that I scoff at the very notion? A something that/who cares, but cruelly? That rides me, then deserts me? That is classified as clinical depression but that doesn’t kill inspiration, only the desire to follow it.

…

The Gypsy King’s lost daughter.

The human brain starts working before it is fully built. Experience is the architect of the brain. Experience is the cue for connections and hook-ups of the billions of neurons formed before birth. In other words, neurons that fire together, wire together. If life begins with a trauma of separation and abandonment, that feels life-threatening, that is how the neurons will fire and wire. The human brain is a reflective organ, reflecting on past experiences, so it would be normal for abandonment issues to always be there in relationships.

Oh, he knew about me. But there was nothing he could do, the gypsy king, this father of mine. My real mother sang him. Who would not be seduced by her? That Titania. That copper-haired, wild young faerie queen with eyes like the green-gold fruit on a hazel tree. Skin dappled with freckles from making love in the meadows and glens, under an early autumn sun. She’s known for it, you know. Stealing a handsome man’s seed for the sheer wickedness of exchanging a child of her own with a human one. Sneaking into a mortal’s hospital like a silken film of shadow, and making the swap. All to keep herself viable in the lands of the short-lived. To keep the fear and awe of her whispered about, still and then later, when I am grown. And who knew what happened to that cast-off, unwanted bastard that she took instead? Of course she informed my father of what she had done. That big, handsome, barrel-chested Rom barro. By way of one last, fleeting visit. That he had a daughter as fair as she, but that he could not know her, would not find her. She was given away to strangers. To cause havoc. As changelings are meant to do. To make him sad, as women do, to men and children not their own, in stories.

Then she was gone forever. Melted away, uncaring of his desperate why. Melted as frost does with the start of a new day.

I sat in a café in Byron Bay, sipping on long black, and reading to idle the time away, just waiting for him to arrive. Thinking perhaps he’d send my three brothers. Them knowing. For them to tell me that he has searched for me his whole life. To explain why I could never belong. They would take me to him. He would whisper of his love for the mother I would never know: that wild copper-haired sídhe from beyond the Western Isle. He would welcome me home and teach me to communicate in the language of ancestors.

But they never came. He never came.

Then there is Dickens and his orphans. Those poor children of unnamed mothers. The whelps of noblemen taking what they wanted from beautiful servant girls, who had actually been the chieftains of these lochs, glens and burns before the slaughter of their ancestors. Before the Clearances and the Pale. Yes, Copperfield could be my name.

…

Not all brains are wired alike.

The break in the mother infant bonding has an enormous impact on brain chemicals and neurotransmitters. Cortisol and adrenaline are raised in trauma, and there are reduced levels of serotonin. These things happen from very early on, and may be repeated with multiple relinquishments, which result in new and unrecognised environments. ‘Where am I’ is the constant question.

When I was a child I asked my faux mother—my owner—in secret whispers of confidentiality, Am I a foundling? Was I abandoned and you took me in? It’s alright to tell me the truth, you know, I promise to never tell.

Don’t be stupid, she replied, returning to the dishes, her back to my face.

And with that, eventually, they are all dead, so orphan can I now claim to be?

But then…

The discovery of a woman’s name on a piece of paper, eventually giving me the birthright to Celtic tribal lands as old as the enemy of the mad Emperor Claudius, and that of a woman who tamed hawks for a French royal court, and that of a Viking warlord of whom a television series is written, does not take away from the fact that my brain is not wired like yours.

I have been lied to for so long that even the truth is suspect. Even the truth can be the history of the child taken beneath the hollow hills to the garden of earthly delights, leaving me, a faerie

queen’s rightful heir, to grow old amongst humans.

There is so much evidence for a trauma of relinquishment. They exhibit enormous amounts of hyper vigilance, anxiety and catastrophic thinking – because the wound was a life-threatening one. They develop shame and anxiety, afraid to show who they really are. And they develop self-reliance – ‘if you want to get something done, do it yourself’.

No. I am not like you. Is that why you look askance? Is that why you spurn my work and my inked hands? Is that why you only seek me out, shaking as you always do, in my ancient places of secrecy, to get your fortune told? Refusing to acknowledge me by your side in the daylight? Is that why you are so shocked that I am clever? Because if I look like this I’m supposed to believe some misappropriated dream-catcher shit? You court me, but you keep me from your door.

You know, but oh… you think you are not a bigot because… because…?
You know something I never will. No matter how you explain with what savage force your brother raped you. No matter how utterly hypocritical and alien you feel at the family christmas dinner, or your nephew’s bar mitzvah. Yes, I hear what you say. That you would disown them, divorce them, never speak to them again if you could. How you ridicule and deride them. But you do. You know.

When you were born you were looked upon. By eyes that looked like you. Your brain, small limbic, primitive thing that it is, remembers that moment.

Mine does not.

…

I am not wired like you. Do you dare to scoff at my claim?

The developmental PTSD is stored in the limbic system, where the fight, flight or freeze response is initiated. And the limbic system deals with trauma and kicks in straight away before there is a chance to experience the feeling of rejection. These people often feel schizophrenic – living with a duality, and have an ambivalence in decision making because making decisions feels life-threatening.

Never give advice to a person with developmental trauma.[2]

And finally, now, I sit before a spit tube. A new one. The earlier company I spat at did not evaluate the Y chromosome in my DNA and, despite the gypsy king, there was no man’s name registered as responsible for inseminating the woman, or the faerie queen, within whom I, or my human counterpart, gestated for 40 weeks. And her? The human woman, that post adoption resources advised, gave birth to me…? I met her. I sat with her for one day. That could have been, considering how that unfolded, a mistake. But we’d both agreed, and I was so fucking hopeful.

I look nothing like her. The boy she confessed to having fucked, she claimed was from France. Who knows? As it stands there is only her word, and the post-adoption case worker couldn’t hunt that name down no matter how many bad nights the problem gave her.

So I sit with this second spit tube, ready to find out.

Because we, children of no one, if not dead by sixteen… we are mad by your standards. We are explained away by the pretend families. Some I know are nuts, preferring total denial, claiming that if it’s legal—if our ownership is legal—then we belong.

The White Australia Policy was legal. So was the slave trade. So was burning women to death for suspected witchcraft. So, still, is stoning for blasphemy. For loving someone of the same gender. Just because it’s on paper doesn’t make it right. Doesn’t ever make it sane.

The new baby, way before the birth day, during it and right after, is an extremely sensitive being, in fact, more sensitive than he or she will ever be during the adult life. And not only able to have all those sensations and feelings, but also to not-cognitively remember them! Our early impressions stay with us for the rest of our lives, for better or for worse. Twenty five years of thorough research and studies in the field of prenatal psychology show undoubtedly a direct correlation between the way we were born and the subconscious behavioral and emotional patterns in our adult lives. This is due to the mechanism called “limbic imprint”.

We are very familiar with establishing the basic settings in our TVs, cameras, computers… Imagine that your TV is set on “maximum blue”, then, no matter what movie is being shown on the screen, everything will be very blue; or if brightness is set on ‘dim’ – same thing, no matter how bright is the image in the video, your screen will show a very dark picture.

That exact mechanism is at work with us, mammals. It is the same limbic imprint that is being deliberately used for thousands of years to train animals to serve people: elephants, camels, horses, circus bears. For example, a baby elephant is routinely tied in the yard on a chain to a small stick in the ground.

The baby elephant rages all his might for a few days and then stops. When he grows up and has enough strength to pull this stick right out, – it doesn’t happen. He never even tries…[3]

On 21 March 2013, Julia Gillard, then Prime Minister of Australia, apologized, on behalf of the Australian Government, to people affected by “forced adoption”. Or that was what was on the agenda. I listened. I waited. She did not say sorry to me. She did not apologize to the stolen children, sold as objects in a trade as old as slavery, and she did not demand we be acknowledged victims of a corrupt morality. No one has.

My own offspring cannot comprehend this wiring problem. They have my eyes and they had my breast for their suck. They have my nose and each other. But they have no uncles, No aunts or cousins or grandparents’ stories. No truth or mystery beyond or around me. I am it. When I was able to write to them of their genealogy I did so with great pride. That I had finally found us.

It wasn’t important to them.

Am I the gypsy king’s daughter? Or the wild, copper-haired faerie queen’s changeling child? Young Mr. Copperfield’s long-lost sister, and yet another orphan? Or am I the child of ancient heroes about whom most people do not care? Or is this all just make-believe and none of it matters because we’re all just meat on the journey to be stardust?

I will not say, here, or aloud, why I wear my defenses like armor, my ink with such heraldry and grandeur… why I do not get old like a nanna, content with the kiddies of my kiddies.

How is that even plausible for someone resigned to death at the moment of birth? That unrealized… normalcy. Unclaimed and unacknowledged? A trauma impossible to heal? Events creating a person unable and unwilling to forgo the hunt for honest answers to anything? To everything?

The fire is way too fierce, the dark still way, way too dark…

And I am not wired to. I am not like you. You might think so, but you are wrong.

…

POST SCRIPT

Since writing the above I have been through the NSW Supreme Court and, despite the governor general’s department attempting to deny my paternity, their historian Michal Cornelius Flynn, has rendered them moot. He is now on my birth certificate. I was released. I am now a free person.

My posthumous father was French nobility, not the gypsy king.

My mother’s mother, however, with further research and much confusion from relatives making contact through ancestry.com, is revealed as Romanichal—English gypsy. Therefore, my mother’s pregnancy was moxado (taboo), her coupling with a gadje likely an outrage. And she became lost, after. I met her for one day. Me? Serendipitous that most of my life is as drabarni.

The funny/tragic/enraging/proud/defiant thing, however, is: I am my parents’ daughter. Or am I?

…

SOURCES

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e0-SsmOUJI

[2] PAUL SUNDERLAND notes from LIFEWORKS LECTURE

ADOPTION AND ADDICTION-REMEMBERED NOT RECALLED

[3] http://www.birthintobeing.com/the_limbic_imprint