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THE KUSHI INSTITUTE
I had started menopause when I was forty-six and thought my life was over. Severe symptoms lasted for six weeks and then my body simmered down to peri- odic hot flashes, night sweats and occasional mood swings. It was now ten years later and I was still sweating.
I had never considered hormone replacement therapy because of the negative aspects associated with it: increased risk of breast and reproductive cancer, fibroids, headaches and migraines, vaginal yeast overgrowth, elevated blood pressure and triglyceride levels, blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and depletion of vitamin E and zinc. Why would anyone even consider such odds?
I tried progesterone cream derived from wild yam, homeopathics lachesis and nux vomica, extra vitamin E, evening primrose oil, and licorice tea, which stimulates estrogen production. I had visited a nutritionist, a homeopath, a Hawaiian herbalist, naturopaths, chiropractors, an acupuncturist, a neuro spinal bioengineer, and a colonic therapist; but my sweats continued. Diagnoses ranged from a congested liver, a kidney imbalance and just menopausal symptoms. I read books that recommended dong quai, black cohosh, red clover, oat straw, chickweed; drinking a lot of water; exercise; no red meat or dairy products; and eliminating stress and anger. Stress? That might be something beyond my control. Anger? That surfaced as resentment and I was working at it. It takes a great effort to visualize good things happening to a person towards whom you feel resentment. Since I couldn't seem to drop it, I must be getting something out of it, like playing the victim, feeling sorry for myself, and therefore not having to take on the responsibility for changing my life. I knew I had to be able to forgive myself in order to forgive others. Aware that repressing these emotions caused illness, I had been meditating regularly. But my sweating persisted.
Steve had been bothered by gout for many years due to a life in the fast lane, sometimes needing crutches or a cane when the attacks got bad. He seemed to have it under control during his oral chelation regime but after seven months, a call to his mother, who was in a nursing home, crippled him. We hadn't hiked all summer and were hesitant to make plans in case his foot flared up. As a result of eating organic food for twenty-five years, we rarely got colds, had no major hos- pital incidents, and lived active lives. Our friends thought us the picture of health. However, we were desperate!
On one of our regular trips to Calgary, Steve was on crutches and depressed because his pain would not stop as it had in the past. I called Elizabeth who had been studying at the Kushi Institute in Becket, Massachusetts for the past seven months. She told us about the miraculous cures people experienced on a macrobiotic diet, and when she heard my desperation, said we should come now. It didn't take long to decide. She was going to try getting us an appointment with Michio Kushi, the man of macrobiotics.
Our wilderness cabin was secure except for the contents in the fridge, which were taken care of with a call to our neighbors. The garden was well on its way, the weather wet, and they would water if necessary. Our house in Calgary, where we were, was more difficult, but a friend agreed to mow the lawn, take in the mail, and water the plants.
Seven o'clock the next morning the shrill ring of the telephone startled us. There were two cancelations a week from Monday, which would give us ample time for a cross-country drive. Elizabeth, living at a blueberry farm near the Institute, exchanging work for free rent, said we could stay with her. We called our friends in New York, who spent weekends at their country home in Great Barrington, close to Becket, and told them we were on our way. They couldn't believe we were coming east (we hadn't been there for over twenty years) and invited us to spend time with them. My cousins, Becky and Saul in Ontario, insisted their home be a pit-stop on our way.
We left Calgary eight days before our appointment, with Elizabeth's two-burn- er electric stove, cooking utensils, food, filtered water, and ten audio-tape books from the library. We had come to Calgary for the weekend and had only our laundry, which became our wardrobe. Just past Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, blue skies, oil wells and a rainbow, arched above the vast curvature of the Earth, reminded us we were on the prairies. Fading light and continuous rain compelled us to pull into a small motel in the border town of Estevan. The odometer, having started at zero in Calgary, now read 950 kilometers / 594 miles.
In Minot, North Dakota, we changed our U.S. coins, having carried them around for fifteen years, into paper money and headed east through fields of black- eyed Susans, amber waves of wheat, round hay bales scattered over green pastures, and grain silos against a cloudless sky, listening to the 1940’s pop music of Gene Autry, the comedy of Red Skelton, the cowboy adventures of Hopalong Cassidy all the way into Minnesota. At Duluth, on the western tip of Lake Superior, we found a small motel and a health food store. The odometer read 1923 km. / 1202 miles.
Scattered clouds floated in the morning sky as we parked on a bridge which spanned a tiered waterfall cascading through forested banks, leaving polished pools in rocky ledges far below. After buying some organic food, we continued around the lake, fascinated by the antiquity of the sprawling port with its quaint, turn-of-the-century stone buildings, fleets of freighters in the harbor, steel stacks, and a prodigious bridge that took us into Wisconsin. As the western sky turned or- angered, we crossed the famous five-mile Mackinac Suspension Bridge between Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, a high, intimidating structure that seemed to depend on invisible sky hooks to hold it up. South of Indian River we left the thruway to fill up our gas tank in a small town; it had no garage, and, too tired to go on, we found a modest, slightly rundown motel with individual cabins in the trees, no phone, a fridge, great television, no remote. The odometer read 2617 km. / 1636 miles.
It was difficult leaving Bogart and Bacall on TV in the morning. We headed back to the thruway and the next town for a service station. The leaves were changing colors and the sky was powder-blue as we approached Flint and turned east for the Canadian border. In the late afternoon we pulled into the driveway of my cousins' two-hundred-year-old, pale yellow-brick house on the corner of a treed city lot. Saul, my father's nephew, reminded me of my father. He looked and walked like him and had the same mannerisms and inflections. Becky, a spunky, ageless, warm-hearted, compassionate woman, served us black bean lasagna and red wine for dinner, and we caught up on our families. With Saul estranged from his oldest son and me from my middle daughter, we had much to talk about. I was surprised at his attitude when it came to my search and adoption. He thought I was making much ado about nothing, and it was Becky, frustrated at his insensitivity, who came to my defense. It is very clear to me that people who are not adopted do not have the slightest idea of what it is to be adopted. They don't think there is any difference between knowing one's real parents and not. And why bother to go to all that trouble? It only makes for unhappiness.
"It may be almost impossible to understand fully the intensity of this need to know of the adoption and background information about their biological parents without having experienced, firsthand, the frustration of knowing that information exists, but is unavailable to those it most deeply affects." 1
In the morning, while I baked a cornbread they had remembered from their visit to our cabin in B.C., Steve, my multi-talented partner, drew a cartoon of Saul for a logo on his stationery. The men left to get it printed and while they were gone, I listened to Becky recount her heartrending story about the birth of her daughter, a Down syndrome child, the circumstances involved around the decision to raise her at home, and the subsequent start of a daycare and school facility for other children like her. At first the doctor wouldn't admit anything was wrong with her newborn and then refused Becky's pleas to see her own child. It went from bad to worse until she took matters in her own hands, going to the hospital, getting her baby, and bringing her home. Sometimes I don't understand how we human beings live through the life we have chosen and get through with our wits intact. Actually, I believe few of us do.
The next morning my cousins took us to see their first love, a non-profit organization they had founded after their precious fifteen-year-old daughter died. We watched handicapped kids ride around the giant, heated indoor arena, toured the stables, and met the staff. Here these children and some adults were provided