God's Perfect Timing
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GOD’S PERFECT TIMING Steven Rizzo, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2009 APPROVED: Ann McCutchan, Committee Chair Barbara Rodman, Committee Member David Holdeman, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English Michael Monticino, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Rizzo, Steven. God’s Perfect Timing. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August 2009, 200 pp., works cited, 17 titles. When I was thirty-three years old, I discovered I was an adoptee. In this memoir of secrecy and love, betrayal and redemption, I reflect on my early experiences as a doted-on only child firmly rooted in the abundant love of my adoptive family, my later struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, my marriage to a fellow-adoptee, my discovery of my own adoption and the subsequent reunion with my birth family, my navigation through the thrills and tensions of newly complicated family dynamics, and my witness to God’s perfect timing through it all. Copyright 2009 by Steven Rizzo ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I acknowledge my Creator and Sustainer, the Champion of would-be orphans. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His son… that we might receive the adoption as sons. Galatians 4:4-5 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii PART I: THE IMPERFECT, DELAYED CONSTRUCTION OF GOD’S PERFECT TIMING ...1 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................23 PART II: GOD’S PERFECT TIMING...........................................................................................25 Chapter 1: The Secret Exposed..........................................................................................26 Chapter 2: The Rizzo Side .................................................................................................43 Chapter 3: The Holidy Side ...............................................................................................60 Chapter 4: Early Glimpses.................................................................................................74 Chapter 5: Camelot ............................................................................................................88 Chapter 6: The Dream Denied .........................................................................................103 Chapter 7: OCD ...............................................................................................................129 Chapter 8: Amy................................................................................................................142 Chapter 9: The Reunion...................................................................................................155 Chapter 10: The Crush and the Crash..............................................................................176 Chapter 11: How I Came to Be........................................................................................182 Chapter 12: Close Calls ...................................................................................................193 Chapter 13: One More Cast .............................................................................................195 iv PART I THE IMPERFECT, DELAYED CONSTRUCTION OF GOD’S PERFECT TIMING 1 In April 2003, as I was completing my first year of doctoral work in the University of North Texas English department, I discovered I was adopted, or rather, my adoption discovered me. At this point I had not decided what topic to pursue for my dissertation; in fact, I had not even determined whether I would write a literary thesis or a creative one. My academic background was more in literature than in creative writing, but I had spent the ten years before UNT writing songs, the last five in Nashville, and now I thought I might try my hand at writing a novel or a collection of short stories. Then, as the fall semester commenced, I tracked down my birth parents and found that they have three other children, my full-blooded siblings. After our joyous reunion with my birth family, my wife Amy, who is also adopted, had an a-ha moment. “This is what you ought to write your dissertation on!” she said. “You think? It is a dramatic story.” Writing a whole book with me as the main character, though, sounded pretentious at best and narcissistic at worst. Later I would read Frederick Reiken‟s contention that “[t]he quicker a writer becomes aware of this propensity for self-absorption and self referencing, the quicker it will become an asset, rather than an Achilles‟ heel” (63). At the time, however, when I contemplated writing an entire book about me, I felt like an ass and a heel. Amy suggested I could write each chapter from a different participant‟s perspective: one from each adoptive parent, one from each birth parent, one from each sibling, and so on. It was worth considering. It could be a powerful testimony to God‟s redemptive love. Eventually I found further encouragement in the realization that Augustine‟s Confessions is less about him than about God‟s grace in his life. Though no Augustine, I could aspire to the same purpose in my memoir, transcending mere navel-gazing to point the reader toward something higher. 2 That semester in Dr. Barbara Rodman‟s creative writing prose class I made my first serious attempt at writing in a creative genre other than song or poetry, not counting the stories I used to write in elementary school. When on the first day of class Dr. Rodman paired up the students and had us interview each other about our earliest writing experiences, I recalled the tale I wrote in second grade about a group of people who enter Hell through an underground cave. “Ah, a young Dante, huh?” my interviewer said. “Not quite,” I laughed. One of my office mates from the year before was a novelist, and I loved to pick her brain about her craft. She said she constructed her novels from pieces of her life, and her characters from people she knew. I found this fascinating and wondered if I could do the same. I tried in Dr. Rodman‟s class, writing two short stories featuring loosely autobiographical main characters, one obsessed with urinating, the other defecating. Did I subconsciously believe fiction/life- writing amounted to eliminating bodily wastes? The next fall, 2004, I took Dr. Rodman‟s creative nonfiction course where, in addition to learning that autobiographical writing need not be excretory or masturbatory, I wrote a piece that would become the kernel of my dissertation, as well as a few other pieces that would find their way into my dissertation in one form or another. My first stab at writing about the adoption received mixed reviews. My classmates thought it was “sweet,” but several thought it was too sweet. They could not believe that someone in my situation harbored no ill will toward either set of parents. They wanted to see more “ambivalence.” When I shared this with my birth mother via email, she replied, “Your classmates‟ skepticism that anyone could be so accepting and gracious is understandable; you are exceptionally kind, sensitive and talented.” Of course she is biased, but what was I supposed to do, fabricate negative emotions I did not feel to make my story 3 “grittier”? James Frey fared poorly with that strategy when the truth came out about A Million Little Pieces. Dr. Rodman simultaneously stood up for me and challenged me, suggesting that a story can be authentic without being dark as long as it contains honest self-examination. Perhaps I had not yet examined myself closely or honestly enough. Ironically, whereas the aforementioned classmates believed my story was sugar-coated, another worried that my thanking my birth mother “for not aborting me” was “too blunt.” My birth mother‟s bias was personal; I suspect this student‟s was political. It seems we appreciate directness only when we agree with the direction. At any rate, I dug a little deeper and produced “God‟s Perfect Timing,” in which I gave more voice to my adoptive parents‟ conflicted reaction to the reunion, as well as more disclosure of my frustration with their confliction. My classmates liked this treatment better as it contained more of that necessary ingredient for a compelling plot: conflict. At the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest in Grapevine, TX, June 2006, one of the peer reviewers of “God‟s Perfect Timing” appreciated that it “sounds upbeat, rather than bitter.” Another “enjoyed reading. Felt like I got to know a warm family.” Like my classmates before, though, several of the reviewers wanted more angst. “You‟re hiding some of yourself,” one reviewer wrote. “More of your pain. Your longing—You‟ve sanitized some of this story.” Another reviewer agreed, “This story needs some shadows to highlight all the sunshine.” As I have expanded the nine-page story on which these reviewers were commenting into a two- hundred-and-nine page memoir, I have had more room to explore the shadows, which I believe the earlier rays of sunshine deepen, and which, in turn, bring the sunshine into relief. At the time, though, another reviewer wrote, “Too happy and too personal? I think you want to present a new view of adoption where everything comes out great in the end, but there‟s 4 not much for a reader to „chew on‟… It seems „unfair‟ that when you are happy and life is good, you are not as believable.”