“A Matter of Voice” by Christine Koubek Flynn
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. —Anne Sexton
The first time I heard a voice speak words unspoken in my soul, I was 45 years old and at an American Adoption Congress conference with a new friend who had also been given the name ‘Christine,’ as a baby on her adoption day.
We sat side-by-side listening as another adoptee, a surfer-pretty woman in her forties (who discovered her original name was “Summer”), describe her life as mime and mimic, always studying the landscape and figuring out how to fit in. “Sure, I can make myself seem like their biological child, or like my in-law’s family, or like I belong in this group or that. I know how to do that.” She let out a long exhale. “What I didn’t know how to do, never thought I could or should do, was ask myself, What fits me?”
I squeezed my friend’s arm. As the woman continued, actor Michael Caine’s voice in The Cider House Rules rang in my head. He played Dr. Larch, a World War II-era obstetrician and abortionist who ran an orphanage in John Irving’s book-turned-movie. In the opening scene, baby Homer’s first adoptive parents return him saying there’s something wrong with him, that he doesn’t make a sound. Dr. Larch says, “He didn’t cry. Orphan babies learn there’s no point in it.” Caring as the doctor and the nurses were, they couldn’t respond to all of them.
“You were a perfect baby,” my mother said the middle-school-summer-day that I learned I was adopted. “You hardly ever cried.”
What if I had?
I spent my first three months in an infant home. Three months is enough time for a baby, for a newborn nervous system, to learn that when it cries, when it needs someone—no one comes.
That Cider House scene had felt like an anvil on my heart since I saw it debut in 1999. I was the mother of a young son then. In his first year, when I was 30, I quit a full-time job I’d loved but required quite a bit of travel, to find a part-time one so I could have more time with him. And I signed up for a college music class in voice. Just for something outside the house, I told myself. There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir since elementary school chorus.
“You know what your problem is?” My voice teacher said after my third attempt to sing “Moon River.” She took her fingers off the piano.
There was something about music that I’d been drawn to like an elixir.
My classmates studied the tall pines through the window. I waited for Ms. Turner to tell me the answer, tell me in her matter-of-fact teaching voice, a voice that transformed to a gorgeous soprano when she broke into song. I stood taller, let my shoulders sink, and drew a long, slow breath into my stomach—the place of strength and sustainability she coached us to sing from.
She stepped away from the piano. “You’ve got a three-octave range for God’s sake.”
“Is that bad?” By that point in the semester, I’d learned I could sing alto and mezzo soprano, that a voice is a mix of many elements—some God-given, some nurtured—and that my younger classmates were far better versed in music.
“No, that’s good, quite good. Your problem is you never let your darn voice out.”
“I thought ‘Moon River’ was supposed to be sung quietly.” In all honesty, that’s why I picked it. Audrey Hepburn had sung it so in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and once told an interviewer that it was one of her most challenging roles because she was an introvert playing the extroverted “Holly Golightly.” I related to that.
The song was also far more appropriate for a voice recital than the 90s rock anthems I belted out in my car on the way to class, including INXS’s “The Stairs”—
The nature of your tragedy is chained around your neck.
Do you lead? Or are you lead? Are you sure that you don’t care?
Those lyrics felt a challenge, a challenge I didn’t want to face.
Ms. Turner planted herself in front of me and smiled. “There’s a difference between quiet and weak, and quiet and strong.” She poked her abdomen with two fingers. “You are not managing your breath well. And you’re holding back. You’ve got to sell it! Put more emotion in it— more something of yourself.”
Something of myself is the problem, I thought. While Hepburn sold a persona unlike herself in a movie, I’d been selling one since I was a child.
One summer day in 1980, when I was almost 13, I played the board game Sorry with a girl down the street. I won a few games. She hated losing.
“I don’t even care. You know why?” She stood and kicked the board. “You’re adopted.”
The moment those words escaped her, I knew in my body it was true—and I understood she wielded that word ‘adopted’ like a sword meant to cut.
I ran home to our babysitter. She dialed my mother at work with her long, burgundy fingernails while I cried at the kitchen table. I knew my parents had struggled through miscarriages and the death of a baby, but they never told me I was adopted. I was overwhelmed to think my mother might not fully belong to me. She rushed home, sent the babysitter to the backyard with my siblings and hugged me as we climbed the stairs to her room.
While she rummaged through her closet, I sat on her waterbed’s edge across from a photo of my little sister, brother and me dressed in matching green-and-beige plaid. As a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family of blue-eyed blonds, I looked darker than ever.
I’d spent many elementary school nights making projects about our French Canadian and Dutch ancestors, writing about kin who sang Sinterklaas songs and ate pepernoot, a biscuit made with cinnamon and spices. I drew pictures of girls in clogs. Those projects were meant for my classmates and me to connect with one another through our ancestors’ music and food and stories. I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
I didn’t know I was writing fiction as my sister and brother wrote fact.
My mother emerged, her hair a little askew, with a letter from Catholic Family Services and sat beside me. I was breathless as I read that my unnamed birth parents were Irish, Welsh and German; and that my birth mother was 5’5, intelligent and sensitive, and had taken piano lessons since she was a child. She’d hoped to major in music. She was 17 when I was born. My birth father was 17, too, “athletic and enjoyed the drums.”
The father I’d known had left our family shortly after my brother was born. My mom apologized for not telling me about my adoption and said they hadn’t wanted me to feel any less their daughter. She pulled me close and pointed to a photo of her round-eyed, round-cheeked grandparents. “See how they grew to look like one another—It’s like that for us.”
I wasn’t mad at her for keeping my origins secret, only viscerally aware of my parental math. I had four parents. Only one remained. I couldn’t risk losing her, too.
“Do Suzie and David know?” I asked, trying to digest a new reality that felt unreal.
My mother said they didn’t and that she loved me and nothing had to change. And I could choose whether or not to tell them. I didn’t want them to think I was any less their sister, so I marched out of that room and kept my origins to myself.
A few years before voice class, I discovered I was one of more than two-million babies adopted in America in the decades before Roe v. Wade—a time when surrendered babies like me came with a brand new birth certificate that implied our adoptive parents were our birth ones. It’s as if you gave birth to her yourself, they were told.
Our original birth certificates were sealed in 48 states and just like that—like a shake of an Etch-a-Sketch—your original name, identity, ancestry and medical history disappeared and you were grafted onto another.
Nearly half those states still hold sealed records today. That secrecy was intended to protect us from shame, from feeling worth ‘less,’ but it did just the opposite.
Trading in my nature for all things nurture, for a family, felt like a good trade after I learned I was adopted. For years I watched grown adoptees on 1980s’ talk shows squirm in their seats when they were asked if it might be “a little ungrateful,” or even “disloyal,” to want to know about the people they came from. “After everything your parents have done for you,” was a frequent refrain, along with—“You’re lucky. They saved you. They gave you a life.”
While my parents had not given me my existence, ethnicities, or whatever may have come pre-loaded in my DNA, they had given me a home and love, especially my mom. The Hallmark stores had rows of cards to thank them for that, but I never saw cards for birth parents, which I took to mean I wasn’t supposed to know them and felt ashamed of my desire to include my roots in my identity. What was never said, but I absorbed by osmosis: if you can just be who you’re told you are and ignore any inner voice to the contrary, then you can belong and be loved.
I spoke none of this to Ms. Turner. I only swept my arm toward her piano. “I’ll try again,” I said, hoping more dramatics might suffice.
She led me along the fundamentals instead—singing up the scale ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah – ah. . . . and down, Wa-ffles are won-der-ful they wi-den your waist.
“That’s it,” she said. “Just. Keep. Trying.”
Ms. Turner’s words of wisdom came rushing back twelve years later when I began a Master’s program in creative writing. My chest tightened as I listened to feedback on my first semester’s work:
“The voice is passive.”
“Give this character more agency, more ability to take action.”
“Your narrator needs to be really interesting as a person, more idiosyncratic, quirky, individual—give her a voice that conveys her personality.”
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page. The voice I hoped to ‘let out’ was my birthmother’s, and in turn, my own. A lack of agency was central to her story—a story inspired by her time away at a home for unwed mothers.
I was wrestling with voice again, only this time on the page.
The first time I heard of such a place was the day a letter arrived folded around photographs of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with freckled forearms like my own. I was a college junior and had recently transferred to a school near my mom. A chill raced up my arms as the photos spilled out—a little girl with painted fingernails, that girl now grown, standing beside an older lady who looked just like her, both smartly dressed in crisp black-and-white suits.
“Dear Christine,” she wrote. “. . . I remember holding you on my lap; your eyes seemed to look right into my soul. I knew I couldn’t keep you and my heart was broken and still is. Words cannot express how I have felt not knowing anything about you. I visited you at the infant home but I couldn’t hold you or kiss you because you were behind a glass window. You are a five to ten minute drive from my house. I named you Ann Marie. We are good people, nothing to be afraid of.”
My stomach was in knots when I shared the letter with my mother. She’d suffered so much in her life, and I never felt she loved me less than my siblings. Her eyebrows knit together as she read, ranting that she couldn’t believe this woman hadn’t contacted her first, and what if I hadn’t known I was adopted, and was she even thinking about what’s best for me. My mother handed back the letter and returned to the stove with a huff that I assumed meant she’d had enough.
“It’s a shock to me, too,” I said.
My mother didn’t bring up the letter in the days that followed. I tried to focus on my psychology final, which, ironically, included the study of what it meant to have a healthy sense of self—to feel known and know one’s self—know myself in ways those not adopted could take for granted.
A week later, I stared across a restaurant table at a stranger named Ann. “Oh, honey,” she said in a warm alto voice as she covered my hand with hers. I’m unsure what she saw in my face. I felt struck dumb. She seemed to recognize me in a way I didn’t recognize myself.
“I’ve thought about how strange this might be for you—to see someone who looks like you for the first time. You have the same roundness in your face as my sister, Lisa.” She took a deep breath and shared that she’d recently had a tubular pregnancy and lost the baby, but was still hopeful she and her husband could have children. “Tell me about you and your family.”
The waitress delivered two chicken parmesans as Ann and I attempted to fill each other in on twenty years of personal history. I told her how hard my mom worked to support us after our dad left and admitted I didn’t know I was adopted until middle school. “My brother learned a few years after I did,” I said, likely smiling as I pictured him. “He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I don’t care. She’s still my sister.’”
Ann took a long breath as if she was digesting it all.
I cleared my throat and asked, “How did I come to—be?” She described her relationship with my father in short phrases: “teenage puppy love,” “we met at a dance, we both loved Bob Dylan and poetry,” “we were so young, and times were very different.”
She moved on to music saying she was a piano teacher and that she had passed the time at the unwed mothers’ home practicing Chopin and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” for the senior recital she’d have after she returned. “You were getting big,” she laughed. “I had to figure out how to tuck you near the keys so I could play—do you play?” She looked hopeful.
“Not really. My grandmother taught me a bit on the organ when I was a kid and singing in my school’s chorus. We’ve always been close.”
“I always pictured you playing.” She looked down.
I felt a wave of loss. Her loss. My mother’s loss. And mine, too.
Thankfully, the waitress stopped to ask if we wanted dessert. As we shared a slice of chocolate cake, Ann shared that the home had forbidden salt and sweets with the exception of Halloween night. She over-indulged and mistook her stomach cramps for indigestion.
I was born the next day.
“You were a bundle of pink chub,” she smiled.
It was the first time I heard a true story about the night I was born.
The more she shared—about her family, about what life was like in the 60s—there was no sex ed, no legal birth control, and no credit cards for women without a father’s or husband’s permission—the more I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life. She said she found me with the help of people she met at an Adoptees Liberty Movement Association meeting, an activist group that was in its infancy stages in the late eighties.
“Your father Gregg is a high school English teacher,” she said as we finished. “He lives nearby, if you’d like to meet him.”
I realized I was missing the first chapter, the context, of my life.
A couple weeks later, I met Gregg. In the months and years that followed, he never talked about my adoption. He sent poetry he wrote that eluded to it and mixtapes of his favorite music—Bruce Springsteen, The Waterboys, U2 and threw in a Whitney Houston song here and there because he knew I liked her. On a road trip to a U2 concert shortly after we met, I learned that he, too, was an introvert who loved to run, travel and write.
Throughout my twenties, I met Ann and Gregg separately in coffee shops and restaurants. It was easy to talk to them from a part of me that felt like me. While my mother knew I’d met them, she didn’t ask much about it afterwards, or suggest how I might share the news, or them, with our family, so I kept my get-togethers on the down low. I didn’t want to hurt my mom, and I didn’t want to lose her. Acknowledging the connection I felt to my birth parents felt like an enormous risk to my relationship with the family that raised me.
If “Voice” is the full embrace, expression—and ownership—of all that one is, I was on a long and winding road to finding one..
Which parts of my past could I own? Which parts of myself were acceptable to share with whom? That conundrum often left me speechless. And sometimes startled awake in the middle of the night feeling like I’d fallen down a deep well where no one could hear me, questions running through my mind on a loop. How do I say this just right? What if I hurt someone’s feelings? What if I’d said to my mother or family, “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it didn’t—it doesn’t—take away the immense grief of losing my first family.” Would they love me less? Would they leave me in big ways or small?
Over the years, I’ve pictured finding a voice akin to opening a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. With each one opened through singing and writing, therapy and reading, I got closer. Closer to understanding that curiosity about my origins wasn’t a maladjustment, but a primal desire to answer a question that’s central to our human experience: Who am I?
A couple years before graduate school, I had the beginning of an answer. From my mother, I learned how to be resilient and strong, and to make time to start a day peacefully with good coffee. From Ann, I’d inherited a love of music and art and a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. And from Gregg, a steadfast tendency to use writing as a means to clear a path in which to live.
It was in those same years that Ann lost her life to breast cancer, at age 59. Losing her was the loneliest of griefs. I’d lost a mother I loved. I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me, and who loved me for them, too.
“Out of nowhere, a wave comes and I’m overcome,” I said months later to a holistic physical therapist who had become a friend. “It’s in the past. I know I need to move on.”
I’d lost the person who wanted to know about all my families, and all the parts of me.
Wen-Li worked the side of my body that moved freely first, then moved to the locked-up scapula behind my left lung, her way of bypassing my brain to show my body what was still working well and possible. Finally, the knot released and I took a full breath.
“Sometimes it is good to spend time in the past when it shines a light in a dark place.” Her hand rested atop my head.
In the decade before Ann’s death, she returned to college to study painting. The painting that graced her first gallery show’s postcard—an ethereal figure with a cascade of white-blue hair offering a trinity of tulips to a child—now hangs above my desk. In her artist’s statement she wrote:
“Being a musician all my life, I always had a silly notion that people are one thing. I never thought I could be an artist. Over the years, I vacationed out on the Cape. I loved the beach but I couldn’t wait to wander into all my favorite galleries in Wellfleet and Provincetown . . . but most importantly I have many works by my friend John Grillo . . . He once said, ‘My work is about color and love, and a little bit about art.’
I have found a voice as a painter, a painterly voice . . .When I am painting, I am in a different space, tapping into some other dimension of self, both intuitive and healing.
In describing these paintings, I think of music. The lyrics are the curved lines. The rhythm is in the texture. The harmony is within the color.”
The money Ann left me paid for my MFA, and a dog my family and I named Rookie. I, too, longed to tap into something intuitive and healing.
I attended that American Adoption Conference shortly after I graduated. It was there that I learned the costs of secret and shame on many parents, and children now grown. Those discoveries came with me to a writing residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, in the Blue Ridge Mountains a few months later.
It took a full day to get used to the quiet, such quiet I heard the chestnut-brown horses chewing grass, and gravel crunch beneath my feet on the path to the barns-turned-studios. As I tacked family photos and a postcard of one of Ann’s paintings to the bulletin board above my desk, I felt guilty for being away from my roles back home; guilty because while my novel-in-progress had earned me the residency, it had no reliable monetary value and, worse, it was composed of words meant to go unspoken. And maybe a little guilt, too, because I was excited for a week in that sunlit studio with a pen, paper and pared-down life.
One night, a painter named Janet Gorzegno tapped her glass after dessert and invited us to her studio. Each of her gouache-on-paper paintings was of a different man in profile. They looked like time travelers from past centuries.
I fell in love with the painting she’d titled Between Land and Sea. He had a scruff of a beard, slight curl in his hair and soulful eyes cast skyward. One of the poets asked, “What inspired them?”
Janet tapped the side of her head. “Painting them is like meditation for me.”
I took a postcard from the table’s stack. Her upcoming exhibition was titled The Old Souls.‘Old soul’ was a term Ann had used often to describe people she loved. “What made you pick him for the postcard?” I pointed to her painting of a man with a stubbly beard and a Nike goddess-wing tattooed behind his left ear.
Janet pointed to another who was clean-shaven, with full lips and a strong jaw. “I thought it would be him,” she said. “But he’s too shy. He didn’t want it.” She touched the postcard. “He kept saying he would be the one, so I let him.”
“Wow,” was all I managed to say.
Voices. She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too—trusted her inner compass and intuition to lead her in ways I wish I knew.
She not only heard their voices, she trusted them, too.
I sprinted back to my studio and thumbed through a binder of Ann’s letters. A few years before she died, she sent me three-pages titled “Remembrances” that included the day she and her family met with their priest to discuss the best plan for ‘the baby.’ She asked if the infant home could care for me until she finished high school. “A baby needs to be baptized by a married couple,” the priest had said. “If not, its soul will go to purgatory when it dies.”
What does a teenage girl do with the weight of those words?
After Ann died, I found a vine-patterned journal in her bookshelves. In the 22 years we knew each other, she shared poems she wrote while pregnant, a driving tour of the places she haunted as a teen, her music, her friends and dogs, a few piano lessons for me, and painting dates with my sons.
It wasn’t until her last years that she filled in the more horrifying details of unwed motherhood, though she’d never spoken these words that I found scrawled across a page:
Pregnant at 16.
Life of guilt and shame.
Now I have cancer.
Twelve words. What do I do with the story she told herself about herself, her haiku of how her body kept the score? And how do I honor—not shun—the reality of a bond that arcs backward through our roots and forward through my sons?
When I arrived at VCCA, I thought being around other writers would guide me, but it was the painters who left me up late imagining what it would be like for a high school girl to endure what Ann had endured, and get caught in the quicksand of loss that followed. I couldn’t write fast enough to capture what felt like her voice—her desires, her anger, the way she spoke about sexuality through the art she collected, and the peace she found through painting.
The next night, another painter, Jane Lincoln, clinked her glass in invitation. I was in.
The images that filled Jane’s studio were deceptive—composed of nothing more than colored stripes. “Each painting’s red is the same height and width,” she said as we entered.
Wandering the room, the red looked bold with yellow. With mossy green it seemed less vibrant. And paired with fuchsia, I swore there was more red in that painting than there was.
I stared at her wall of colors until my eyes blurred, broken-hearted by all the times I’d let my fear of loss drive the things I said and did.
Those moments felt like a bardo.
What if a voice is something you can never find, or get?
What if it’s something you must put your ear down close to your soul and listen for from the elements it springs from—a mix of nature and nurture, and the rest open to whatever you can open-heartedly create—and then live from.
Later that night, I walked the faintly-lit path from the studios to the residence building and saw a group sitting around the community room, a few bottles of wine on the table. I entered the foyer as I did every night, with a choice: left to the bedrooms, right to the community room.
Night after night I chose left, mostly for sleep so I could get an early start. But that night I heard music. A familiar voice in my head said: They’ve been here longer. They know each other well, and they’re singing. It’ll be awkward. Then, For the love of God, you like singing—and wine.
It’s been ten years since that night. I can see more clearly now the ways I lived my way into answering the challenge embedded in that long ago INXS song, and how this thing called ‘voice’ is a matter of choice, of choosing, as the lyrics go on to say, how to climb as we fall and “catch ourselves with quiet grace.”
In those years, I’ve helped other adoptees share their stories and spoken at adoption conferences on the physical (I’m screened regularly for breast cancer) and mental health benefits of knowing the truth about your full identity (even if you can’t, or choose not, to know the people involved). The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss, and I share how powerfully healing it has been to share those losses with other adoptees, and over time, my family.
In the words of renowned researcher Brené Brown, in her book Atlas of the Heart, “our ability to connect with others is directly proportional to our ability to connect with ourselves.”
It haunts me to know that adopted adolescents have a four-times-higher incident of suicide attempts than the general population, to hear Supreme Court justices advocating the use of anonymous baby drop boxes, and to witness the ways recent legislation turns us back to practices so focused on birth that we miss the bigger question—what does it mean to nurture a life?
The hard truth is that adoption is rooted in loss.
I don’t have all the answers, but I share some insights I’ve learned whenever an adoptive parent approaches me after a conference panel for advice. I share what a child psychologist said when I interviewed her for a writing assignment. My sons were very young at the time and it became my parenting north star: “If a child has one person in his or her life—ideally a parent, but it could be an aunt, uncle, grandparent—someone who tries to see that child for all of who they are and thinks they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, that child will be okay.”
I returned to voice lessons recently. As I sang ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah up and down the scale again for the first time in years, I reflexively dropped a note when the sound got loud.
My new teacher, Catherine, made a motion with one of her arms. “Do this while you sing.”
I’d witnessed that motion a thousand times, only in basketball as a free throw. “You’ve got to follow through,” my sons’ coaches often said, their arm rising, hand pressing forward through their fingertips.
I made the motion, over and over, as I practiced with other sounds and words, and heard my voice rise from my core, on up through my throat, and arc out of my mouth toward the trees outside her window—it was sound in all its sonic fullness.
“Did you hear the difference?” Catherine laughed.
“I did!”
A few minutes later, as I continued, she said, “Could you feel what went wrong there?”
“I let it drop again, and a couple other times I think I tried too hard. But when it worked well it felt less like trying and more like allowing the sound to come out.”
“Yes! You made a transition rather than trying to jam the note someplace that it doesn’t want to go—which is a sign of both support and freedom.”
She asked if I had a song in mind to practice. I sent the video link to “A Beautiful Noise,” a ballad sung and played by Brandi Carlisle and Alicia Keys. Its’ evocative lyrics speak to the choice we have to use a voice to heal.
I play it in my car sometimes, and sing myself home.