An Adoptee and A Mother of Three
She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not
“I’ll just adopt!”
“Just give it up for adoption!”
Adoption! AdOpTiON! ADOPTION!
Just…
As if adoption were an easy thing…
I know she wishes she had aborted me.
It would have freed her from the pain of really losing me, of having one of her roots roaming this world without her. I’ve felt her inability to feed through that root and how it haunts her.
I know she wishes she had aborted me.
I get it. The trauma we’ve both endured from our mutual loss is tremendous. I am lucky enough to have been raised by someone else, though, and in that luck was given the opportunity to shift our ancestral trauma, breaking the cycle she continues to be so persistent in identifying with.
Ah, the great *she*
The ever-present thread of mother we all have running through us. Being adopted away doesn’t mean that thread is replaced by another’s, but rather another thread makes a gift of itself, one that coils its way around you, seeking a hold it can ultimately only feign. An adopted mother’s love feels incredibly external. The internal place it seeks maintains the initial chord woven in the womb, one that grows black with dust, neglect, and desire.
Why was I not good enough to keep?
A child does not have the know-how to strip away that pain and confusion.
I’ve worked hard to have the ability to hold space for my inner child when her feelings of unworthiness arise. To clean off that silt of abandonment and feel into the blessing it is that I am alive and can experience grass under my toes, wind in my hair. I was meant to be here; I was meant to be given these hurdles to overcome and to heal this mother wound. If she hadn’t been able to bring me into this world, I would have come through another way.
My spiritual beliefs hold that everything happens for a reason and that my energy would have existed nonetheless, coursing along the river of existence in one way or another, finding an in to the physical realm to contribute healing to this great blob of good and evil and in-between. If it hadn’t been her and I and her and I and him and him… it would have just been something else. Something else to hurt and heal over.
I am grateful she had the choice to either go through with it or abort the operation. I am grateful she chose to sacrifice her blissful ignorance to give me to my Mother, for whom, the story goes, this really all was for. My beautiful, kind, daughter-less Mother. The one she nannied for, the one she found in the kitchen at midnight all those years ago, crying at the reality of being unable to bear another child, unable to procure the daughter she so desperately wanted.
Both of my Mother’s children were boys and had nearly killed her to have, the first one physically and the second financially, with extreme hospital bills in an attempt to ensure that he was a girl. She was 44 years old and had also already endured a failed adoption in which the birth mother changed her mind well after the agreement was made.
My Mom’s relationship with her mom was one of the ages, best friends and each other’s heroes and all that. My Mom very much wanted to reproduce that relationship on the other end, to be the perfect Mom to an adoring daughter. To dress a living doll up in a skirt and paint a room in lace and pastels.
Her bitter sister always laughed at the fact that she ended up with me, a reckless, messy tom-boy with the stubbornness of the whole of the patriarch. All the dresses and bows in the world couldn’t deter me from prioritizing the sort of play that resulted in scraped knees and a filthy sense of humor.
Where she wanted flowers, I bloomed in stormy clouds.
For the longest time, I blamed my adopted family for the loss of my birth mother, believing that they were standing in the way of her and me and that the selfishness of my Mom’s hyper-focus on gender was the only reason I didn’t get to be raised by the witchy woman who visited once a year.
Her telling me that if I were a boy, she would have kept me certainly didn’t help. It was part of this great legend of a story I was inundated with as a child.
“I made a wish, and then you came.”
She claimed that she would have kept me if I was a boy but that there is no way I would have been, and she knew it before the doctors confirmed as much. She even told my Mother before the doctors, for the night of my true inception was when she found my Mother crying in the kitchen and promised to help her get a daughter.
A year later, when she fell pregnant, she knew she had completed the spell she had started that fateful night.
It isn’t not true, and it also didn’t matter to this little girl whose temperament couldn’t be understood by her keepers but who felt completely seen before the strange yet familiar women who visited only once a year. Genetics are like that; in the argument of nature vs. nurture, I can attest that nature is present from the get-go.
Why was I not good enough to keep?
A child does not have the know-how to strip away that pain and confusion.
I was only 4 when my birth mother became pregnant with my little brother Trysten. We met at the Ala Moana Mall for our yearly visit, my hand small in my Mother’s as we walked through the parking lot. The cars were enormous, and I felt that they were desperately in the way of my line of vision. I sought the moment I could finally lay eyes on her again with urgency and hesitancy coursing through me all at once.
I’ll never forget first seeing her there, round in her pregnancy and aglow with the intention to keep him. She was beautiful in that Summer dress as my 5th birthday neared. My ordinarily rambunctious self was always meek before this tiny red-headed woman. All of my energy would go to absorbing every molecule of memory of her I could hold onto. As I watched my Mother and her talk over lunch at the food court, I could feel all of the space between my ribs. I couldn’t comprehend the story that she was too young to have me if she was so soon ready to have him. I wanted to know him; I wanted him to know me. I didn’t want any of this boiling envy.
The resentment I carried towards my gender and the belief that this was the only reason she abandoned me only deepened. More than anything, I wished I could have been a part of my own blood family to know firsthand what her love felt like. I could only experience it in fantasy, so that is where I chose to live.
These naive stories we tell ourselves as youths to try and make sense of the world deepen the grooves of the very childhood trauma that initiated the storytelling to begin with. Only with advanced maturity can we untangle these stories and return to a place of presence and divine wholeness, collecting the fragments of ourselves with forgiveness and gratitude.
Stories are essential; this right here is a story. Stories are also far from absolute truth and do not need to live in a state of permanence to be valid.
My birthmother copes with the pains of life by rationalizing her actions and normalizing her response to grief through stories that make her out to be either a villain or a fairy godmother.
The truth of the matter is that she is neither, and she is all.
We all are.
We all hold all of the complexities of every archetype. The danger of never healing lies in the inability, or refusal, to accept this complexity. Healing begins with the acceptance that one is not a character in a story but rather every part of the story in its entirety.
God is everywhere, and all that jazz.
We are not separate from anything, let alone everything.
The human condition is limiting; it can never fully hold the gestalt of the story, of all the greatness that is. Our attempt to do so is seemingly constant; look at how religions try to make sense of something as enormous as everything with mere language. As if mere human minds could hold the greatness of the cosmos. This assumption of possibility and the potential resolve within it is why we attach to little bits of the gestalt and claim it to be the whole, attempting to squish all of the greatness that is into a deluded, small understanding. Into a tiny box we call the truth.
In the same way that they say God is everywhere and in everyone, we are the entirety of our stories. No one is just one little speck, character, or shade of an archetype. We are intrinsically all of it and hold the vastness of the universe inside of us.
My birthday is in a couple of days; I am turning 32. I used to get a call from her on this day. However, it has been some years since my phone rang with her on the other end. She has chosen to create a vast distance between us ever since I stopped believing in her stories, ever since I wanted to tell her mine. She has always felt an incredible betrayal that my siblings and I realized her stories were just that, not truths. She needs them to be true or else the melodrama that’s been seemingly forced upon her becomes a choice, and the foundation of her reactive PTSD might evaporate, leaving her with the necessity to take up the responsibility of healing.
The simplicity of thinking anything is “true” confounds me, but that is not my cross to bear. I can only hope that my birth mother chooses to confront this fallacy one day, decide to let her grip on these stories float away, and let me love her.
I guess I'm a day early, but never mind: Happy birthday Julia! I hope it's a good one!