Little Green

I was scrolling through Facebook a bit ago, and came across a picture of a young Joni Mitchell.  

Vanity Fair JUNE 1997 Photo: HERB RITTS

First, you must know that reunion and subsequent meetings with my biological mother have been quite unsatisfying to say the least.  

Her first “sin” was that she didn’t look like me.  The second was waiting nine months (ironically) until she agreed to meet me in person.  The third was not being soft and fun…….the list goes on and on.  You get it. 

But the worst sin of all has been the changing stories of WHY.   Why did you give me away?

I have gone from the 8 year old who longed for a beautiful brown haired soft woman, who loved giggles and closeness; to the 13 year old who was her fiercest protector when my adoptive mother would say nasty things about her;  to a 30 year old realizing she is not who I wanted her to be;  to a 50 year old with outright RAGE at who she is.  

At 56, I have been wondering when the phase of RAGE will end.  Will it die when she does or worse when I do?  When will I stop calling her a cunt when describing her, as if that is some kind of victory? 

During one of our “reunions” I remember a moment, when she was driving and I looked down at her hand on the steering wheel and I saw my hand.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.  I loved that hand.  I didn’t really care about the woman who was attached to it, as too many disappointments had come.  But that hand……..how does one fall in love just a hand?  Maybe the way I have fallen in love with so many men, just parts of them, just a phrase they say, that hits the right way that day, and off we go to say I do.

But in that moment, while I was so fixated on that hand, myself, my need to slice her off, I remember her going on and on about a song that she used to play over and over by Joni Mitchell (she even made me listen to it), and she said she named me Little Green because at that time, she learned Joni Mitchell had given a little girl up for adoption.   I would NOT cry, I was furious with her for justifying herself yet again through a rock legend; and then I started to hate Joni Mitchell too.  

Today, when I saw a photo of Joni Mitchell, young, free, just wanting a life, just wanting to be a woman (in this very patriarchal world both then & now) something very strange happened……with soft eyes, I saw my mother in Joni.  Rage subsided, tears came, and we were all equal, with messy lives.

In this moment, I realized…….. 

I was out in the world with the name Little Green.