Lesson from the Forest

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The Fern and the Bamboo

One day, I decided to quit. I wanted to quit my job, to quit myrelationships, to quit my spirituality; I even wanted to quit my life.
I went to the woods to have one last talk with God. "God", I said,
"Can you give me one good reason not to quit?"

His answer surprised me. "Look around", He said, "Do you see the fern
and the bamboo?""Yes", I replied.He said, "When I planted the fern and the bamboo seeds, I took very good careof them. I gave them light. I gave them water. The fern quickly grew fromthe earth. Its brilliant green covered the floor. Yet nothing came fromthe bamboo seed. But I did not quit on the bamboo.""In the second year the fern grew more vibrant and plentiful. Andagain, nothing came from the bamboo seed. But I did not quit on the bamboo.""In the third year there was still nothing from the bamboo seed.But I would not quit.""In the fourth year, again, there was nothing from the bamboo seed.Still, I would not quit.""Then in the fifth year a tiny sprout emerged from the earth.Compared to the fern it was seemingly small and insignificant. Butjust 6 months later the bamboo rose to over 100 feet tall.

It had spent the five years growing roots. Those roots made it strong
and gave it what it needed to survive. I would not give any of my
creations a challenge they could not handle,"He said to me. "Did you know, my child, that all this time you havebeen struggling, you have actually been growing roots? I would not quit onthe bamboo. I will never quit on you! Don't compare yourself to others.The bamboo had a different purpose than the fern. Yet they both make theforest beautiful. Your time will come," God said to me. "You will rise high.""How high should I rise?" I asked."How high will the bamboo rise?" He asked in return.
"As high as it can?" I questioned.
"Yes", He said, "Give Me glory by rising as high as you can. Andremember...I will never leave you, nor forsake you. I will never giveup on you. I will never, ever quit on you."
Everyone has days when they want to "quit". When there arestruggles...obstacles in life, remember we're just growing roots!!
God has a purpose in mind for each one of us and we need to talk
to Him and let Him help us realize that purpose.

He will never quit on us. Psalm 103:2-5

Lifelong Issues in Adoption

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Lifelong Issues in Adoption

by Deborah N. Silverstein and Sharon Kaplan
Adoption is a lifelong, intergenerational process which unites the triad of birth families, adoptees, and adoptive families forever. Recognizing the core issues in adoption is one intervention that can assist triad members and professionals working in adoption better to understand each other and the residual effects of the adoption experience.
Adoption triggers seven lifelong or core issues for all triad members, regardless of the circumstances of the adoption or the characteristics of the participants:
1. Loss
2. Rejection
3. Guilt and Shame
4. Grief
5. Identity
6. Intimacy
7. Mastery/control
(Silverstein and Kaplan 1982).
Clearly, the specific experiences of triad members vary, but there is a commonality of affective experiences which persists throughout the individual's or family's life cycle development. The recognition of these similarities permits dialogue among triad members and allows those professionals with whom they interface to intervene in proactive as well as curative ways.

Many of the issues inherent in the adoption experience converge when the adoptee reaches adolescence. At this time three factors intersect: an acute awareness of the significance of being adopted; a drive toward emancipation; and a biopsychosocial striving toward the development of an integrated identity.
It is not our intent here to question adoption, but rather to challenge some adoption assumptions, specifically, the persistent notion that adoption is not different from other forms of parenting and the accompanying disregard for the pain and struggles inherent in adoption.
However, identifying and integrating these core issues into pre-adoption education, post-placement supervision, and all post-legalized services, including treatment, universalizes and validates triad members' experiences, decreasing their isolation and feelings of helplessness.
Loss
Adoption is created through loss; without loss there would be no adoption. Loss, then, is at the hub of the wheel. All birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees share in having experienced at least one major, life-altering loss before becoming involved in adoption. In adoption, in order to gain anything, one must first lose--a family, a child, a dream. It is these losses and the way they are accepted and, hopefully, resolved which set the tone for the lifelong process of adoption.
Adoption is a fundamental, life-altering event. It transposes people from one location in the human mosaic into totally new configuration. Adoptive parents, whether through infertility, failed pregnancy, stillbirth, or the death of a child have suffered one of life's greatest blows prior to adopting. They have lost their dream child. No matter how well resolved the loss of bearing a child appears to be, it continues to affect the adoptive family at a variety of points throughout the families love cycle (Berman and Bufferd 1986). This fact is particularly evident during the adoptee's adolescence when the issues of burgeoning sexuality and impending emancipation may rekindle the loss issue.
Birthparents lose, perhaps forever, the child to whom they are genetically connected. Subsequently, they undergo multiple losses associated with the loss of role, the loss of contact, and perhaps the loss of the other birth parent which reshape the entire course of their lives.
Adoptees suffer their first loss at the initial separation from the birth family. Awareness of their adopted status is inevitable. Even if the loss is beyond conscious awareness, recognition, or vocabulary, it affects the adoptee on a very profound level. Any subsequent loss, or the perceived threat of separation, becomes more formidable for adoptees than their non-adopted peers.
The losses in adoption and the role they play in all triad members lives have largely been ignored. The grief process in adoption, so necessary for healthy functioning, is further complicated by the fact that there is no end to the losses, no closure to the loss experience. Loss in adoption is not a single occurrence. There is the initial, identifiable loss and innumerable secondary sub-losses. Loss becomes an evolving process, creating a theme of loss in both the individual's and family's development. Those losses affect all subsequent development.
Loss is always a part of triad members' lives. A loss in adoption is never totally forgotten. It remains either in conscious awareness or is pushed into the unconscious, only to be reawakened by later loss. It is crucial for triad members, their significant others, and the professional with whom they interface, to recognize these losses and the effect loss has on their lives.
Rejection
Feelings of loss are exacerbated by keen feelings of rejection. One way individuals seek to cope with a loss is to personalize it. Triad members attempt to decipher what they did or did not do that led to the loss. Triad members become sensitive to the slightest hint of rejection, causing them either to avoid situations where they might be rejected or to provoke rejection in order to validate their earlier negative self-perceptions.
Adoptees seldom are able to view their placement into adoption by the birthparents as anything other than total rejection. Adoptees even at young ages grasp the concept that to be "chosen" means first that one was "un-chosen," reinforcing adoptees' lowered self-concept. Society promulgates the idea that the "good" adoptee is the one who is not curious and accepts adoption without question. At the other extreme of the continuum is the "bad" adoptee who is constantly questioning, thereby creating feelings of rejection in the adoptive parents.
Birthparents frequently condemn themselves for being irresponsible, as does society. Adoptive parents may inadvertently create fantasies for the adoptee about the birth family which reinforce these feelings of rejection. For example, adoptive parents may block an adolescent adoptee's interest in searching for birthparents by stating that the birthparents may have married and had other children. The implication is clear that the birthparents would consider contact with the adoptee an unwelcome intrusion.
Adoptive parents may sense that their bodies have rejected them if they are infertile. This impression may lead the infertile couple, for example, to feel betrayed or rejected by God. When they come to adoption, the adoptors, possibly unconsciously, anticipate the birthparents' rejection and criticism of their parenting. Adoptive parents struggle with issues of entitlement, wondering if perhaps they were never meant to be parents, especially to this child. The adopting family, then, may watch for the adoptee to reject them, interpreting many benign, childish actions as rejection. To avoid that ultimate rejection, some adoptive parents expel or bind adolescent adoptees prior to the accomplishment of appropriate emancipation tasks.
Guilt/Shame
The sense of deserving such rejection leads triad members to experience tremendous guilt and shame. They commonly believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with them or their deeds that caused the losses to occur. Most triad members have internalized, romantic images of the American family which remain unfulfilled because there is no positive, realistic view of the adoptive family in our society.
For many triad members, the shame of being involved in adoption per se exists passively, often without recognition. The shame of an unplanned pregnancy, or the crisis of infertility, or the shame of having been given up remains unspoken, often as an unconscious motivator.
Adoptees suggest that something about their very being caused the adoption. The self-accusation is intensified by the secrecy often present in past and present adoption practices. These factors combine to lead the adoptee to conclude that the feelings of guilt and shame are indeed valid.
Adoptive parents, when they are diagnosed as infertile, frequently believe that they must have committed a grave sin to have received such a harsh sentence. They are ashamed of themselves, of their defective bodies, of their inability to bear children.
Birthparents feel tremendous guilt and shame for having been intimate and sexual; for the very act of conception, they find themselves guilty.
Grief
Every loss in adoption must be grieved. The losses in adoption, however, are difficult to mourn in a society where adoption is seen as a problem-solving event filled with joy. There are no rituals to bury the unborn children; no rites to mark off the loss of role of caretaking parents; no ceremonies for lost dreams or unknown families. Grief washes over triad members' lives, particularly at times of subsequent loss or developmental transitions.
Triad members can be assisted at any point in the adoption experience by learning about and discussing the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Kubler-Ross 1969).
Adoptees in their youth find it difficult to grieve their losses, although they are in many instances aware of them, even as young children. Youngsters removed from abusive homes are expected to feel only relief and gratitude, not loss and grief. Adults block children's expressions of pain or attempt to divert them. In addition, due to developmental unfolding of cognitive processes, adoptees do not fully appreciate the total impact of their losses into their adolescence or, for many, into adulthood. This delayed grief may lead to depression or acting out through substance abuse or aggressive behaviors.
Birthparents may undergo an initial, brief, intense period of grief at the time of the loss of the child, but are encouraged by well-meaning friends and family to move on in their lives and to believe that their child is better off. The grief, however, does not vanish, and, in fact, it has been reported that birth mothers may deny the experience for up to ten years (Campbell 1979).
Adoptive Pants' grief over the inability to bear children is also blocked by family and friends who encourage the couple to adopt, as if children are interchangeable. The grief of the adoptive parents continues as the child grows up since the adoptee can never fully meet the fantasies and expectations of the adoptive parents.
Identity
Adoption may also threaten triad members' sense of identity. Triad members often express feelings related to confused identity and identity crises, particularly at times of unrelated loss.
Identity is defined both by what one is and what one is not. In adoption, birthparents are parents and are not. Adoptive parents who were not parents suddenly become parents. Adoptees born into one family, a family probably nameless to them now, lose an identity and then borrow one from the adopting family.
Adoption, for some, precludes a complete or integrated sense of self. Triad members may experience themselves as incomplete, deficient, or unfinished. They state that they lack feelings of well-being, integration, or solidity associated with a fully developed identity.
Adoptees lacking medical, genetic, religious, and historical information are plagued by questions such as: Who are they? Why were they born? Were they in fact merely a mistake, not meant to have been born, an accident? This lack of identity may lead adoptees, particularly in adolescent years, to seek out ways to belong in more extreme fashion than many of their non-adopted peers. Adolescent adoptees are overrepresented among those who join sub-cultures, run away, become pregnant, or totally reject their families.
For many couples in our society a sense of identity is tied to procreation. Adoptive parents may lose that sense of generativity, of being fled to the past and future, often created through procreation.
Adoptive parents and birthparents share a common experience of role confusion. They are handicapped by the lack of positive identity associated with being either a birthparent or adoptive parent (Kirk 1964). Neither set of parents can lay full claim to the adoptee and neither can gain distance from any problems that may arise.
Intimacy
The multiple, ongoing losses in adoption, coupled with feelings of rejection, shame, and grief as well as an incomplete sense of self, may impede the development of intimacy for triad members. One maladaptive way to avoid possible reenactment of previous losses is to avoid closeness and commitment.
Adoptive parents report that their adopted children seem to hold back a part of themselves in the relationship. Adoptive mothers indicate, for example, that even as an infant, the adoptee was "not cuddly.'' Many adoptees as teens state that they truly have never felt close to anyone. Some youngsters declare a lifetime emptiness related to a longing for the birthmother they may have never seen.
Due to these multiple losses for both adoptees and adoptive parents, there may also have been difficulties in early bonding and attachment. For children adopted at older ages, multiple disruptions in attachment and/or abuse may interfere with relationships in the new family (Fahlberg 1979 a,b).
The adoptee's intimacy issues are particularly evident in relationships with members of the opposite sex and revolve around questions about the adoptee's conception, biological and genetic concerns, and sexuality.
The adoptive parents' couple relationship may have been irreparably harmed by the intrusive nature of medical procedures and the scapegoating and blame that may have been part of the diagnosis of infertility. These residual effects may become the hallmark of the later relationship.
Birthparents may come to equate sex, intimacy, and pregnancy with pain leading them to avoid additional loss by shunning intimate relationships. Further, birthparents may question their ability to parent a child successfully. In many instances, the birthparents fear intimacy in relationships with opposite sex partners, family or subsequent children.
Mastery/Control
Adoption alters the course of one's life. This shift presents triad members with additional hurdles in their development, and may hinder growth, self-actualization, and the evolution of self-control.
Birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees are all forced to give up control. Adoption, for most, is a second choice. Birthparents did not grow up with romantic images of becoming accidentally pregnant or abusing their children and surrendering them for adoption. In contrast, the pregnancy or abuse is a crisis situation whose resolution becomes adoption. In order to solve the predicament, birthparents must surrender not only the child but also their volition, leading to feelings of victimization and powerlessness which may become themes in birthparents' lives.
Adoptees are keenly aware that they were not party to the decision which led to their adoption. They had no- control over the loss of the birth family or the choice of the adoptive family. The adoption proceeded with adults making life-altering choices for them. This unnatural change of course impinges on growth toward self-actualization and self-control. Adolescent adoptees, attempting to master the loss of control they have experienced in adoption, frequently engage in power struggles with adoptive parents and other authority figures. They may lack internalized self-control, leading to a lowered sense of self-responsibility. These patterns, frequently passive/aggressive in nature, may continue into adulthood.
For adoptive parents, the intricacies of the adoption process lead to feelings of helplessness. These feelings sometimes cause adoptive parents to view themselves as powerless, and perhaps entitled to be parents, leading to laxity in parenting. As an alternative response, some adoptive parents may seek to regain the lost control by becoming overprotective and controlling, leading to rigidity in the parent/adoptee relationship.
Summary
The experience of adoption, then can be one of loss, rejection, guilt/shame, grief, diminished identity, thwarted intimacy, and threats to self-control and to the accomplishment of mastery. These seven core or lifelong issues permeate the lives of triad members regardless of the circumstances of the adoption.
Identifying these core issues can assist triad members and professionals in establishing an open dialogue and alleviating some of the pain and isolation which so often characterize adoption. Triad members may need professional assistance in recognizing that they may have become trapped in the negative feelings generated by the adoption experience. Armed with this new awareness, they can choose to catapult themselves into growth and strength.
Triad members may repeatedly do and undo their adoption experiences in their minds and in their vacillating behaviors while striving toward mastery. They will benefit from identifying, exploring and ultimately accepting the role of the seven core issues in their lives.
The following tasks and questions will help triad members and professionals explore the seven core issues in adoption:
List the losses, large and small, that you have experienced in adoption.
Identify the feelings associated with these losses.
What experiences in adoption have led to feelings of rejection?
Do you ever see yourself rejecting others before they can reject you? When?
What guilt or shame do you feel about adoption?
What feelings do you experience when you talk about adoption?
Identify your behaviors at each of the five stages of the grief process. Have you accepted your losses?
How has adoption impacted your sense of who you are?

What is "Love"?

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This is the most inspirational video of what Love really is.....the video is only a couple of minutes.
http://cjcphoto.com/can/
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist seesthe opportunity in every difficulty.. . Winston Churchill

My Secret

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Here's what I sent to Oprah upon her request for Americans to send in their "secret":
My secret:I am an adoptee. Akin to amputee. I must play the role that mankind court-ordered for me. My birth certificate was sealed and a new one issued. A new identity. My old identity, birth history, family, heritage lost. I fulfilled the desires of a new family, and learned to adjust. But are adoptees forever children? In the eyes of the law, yes. In the eyes of our parents, yes. In the eyes of society, yes. We are never given permission to 'grow up' and have differing feelings or opinions about the decisions made for us by mankind. The birth certificate we live with our entire lives and pass on to our children is false. We are a secret. 6 million of us in the US. Government forbids us the same right as other citizens to know our biological identity, heritage. It is painful being a secret. Not just having a secret - but being one - for a lifetime. We are second-class citizens and live shamed and forced to be "happy" about our "chosen, lucky" status. If we dare speak out or become courageous enough to face our rejection, our fear, our saddness at losing our true identity at birth - we are deemed bitter and angry. Sounds much like the entire black population who had to fight for their rights. But we are a quiet chamelon. We have to make everyone else happy - we can't hurt the parents who raised us, we can't express our real feelings for fear of being rejected again.
I found my birthmom who was also searching for me - but it was too late. She had already passed away while searching. My records are sealed from me and from her - so I can't even get medical history as I should. Adoption has too much money involved to ensure ethics - I am a product of an industry. As a human, that hurts. I can't share my true feelings to anyone because it hurts them - my Mom who raised me - I can't be real with her - to protect her feelings as an adoptive mother. I can't share my true feelings to my birth family - because they so want me to be "happy". I was born Baby Girl Lowe, but didn't know my name until it was too late to meet the Mother who gave me life.
Good books -The Primal WoundTwenty Things Adopted Kids WishThe Girls who Went Away

Adoption Down the "Tube"

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Last night I happened to flip by the final episode of "The King of Queens" and heard Carrie talking about wanting to adopt a baby. She and her husband were temporarily "separated" but they were getting back together and she was trying to talk him in to accepting a referral from an adoption agency for a Chinese baby who was available for adoption. When she took out her cell phone to make the call, she said, "I can't believe I'm making this call. I've ordered Chinese before, but never a baby." (canned laughter in the background).

I bet the "adoption community" is going to be up in arms about this statement. But in my opinion, I thought it was classic. I don't think we should gripe to the TV networks when they pull stunts like this - I think we should PRAISE them. Because really they are telling the TRUTH. That is exactly what it is like. It feels like that to an adoptee, so why try to sugar-coat it and be "politically correct" in order not to "offend"?

Adam Pertman and all the others who are trying so hard to make adoption "politically correct" should just let general society speak the truth, because those who are on the outside "get it" better than those who are trying to change the face of adoption. They understand that adoption is ordering a child for a family, which leaves the older street kids and those with disabilities out in the cold. The more desirable the kid, the higher the price. Face it.

Happy Mother's Day

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"Your Mother is Always With You"

She's the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street;She's the smell of beauty, and the flowers you pick, she's your breath in the air on a cold winter's day. She is the sound of the rain that lulls you to sleep, the colors of a rainbow. Your Mother lives inside your laughter. And she's crystallized in every tear drop. A mother is in every emotion...happiness , sadness, fear, jealousy, love, hate, anger, helplessness, excitement, joy, sorrow...and all the while, hoping and praying you will only know the good feelings in life. She's the place you came from, your first home, and she's the map you follow with every step you take. She's your first love, your first friend, even your first enemy, but nothing on earth can separate you. Not time, not space...not even death.
Her love lives inside you, and you carry that with you wherever you go.

Still Hiding

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Ok, I'm back....had to go hide the flowers my natural father sent for my Birthday, because my aMom is supposed to be here soon. It feels so nasty to have to rearrange my whole house depending on who is coming over. So false. Not contributing to any sense of realness or spiritual/mental congruance, to say the least. But I guess that's part of it. It started with the rearranging of the birth certificate, I suppose, and leaves a long legacy, probably even to the grave and beyond for my children. From a youngster, I remember praying to God in my bed that I wouldn't die in the night and would indeed wake up the next morning. I think it was my way of coping with the question of "no beginning, so how could my future be intact?"

After writing all this down to try to work through it (it helps, and believe me, this is only the surface), I had to leave to take my 2 yr old to a "playdate" at the park with a friend from church and her 4 yr old - who is adopted. Yep. Not surprised. I feel a special knowing bond with this little 4 yr old. Like I can sense a little of the "lostness" he feels inside, even though on the outside he appears like every other kid. We were climbing up the slides and having fun, when a little 4 or 5 yr old oriental girl started playing with us too, on the playground equipment (isn't this new playground equipment the best, nowdays!!!! So fun!!!!) Anyway, she came over, saying that "someone is going to buy my house", and "I'm moving to Australia". I said "Man, I've never been there - I bet it is pretty!". She said, "There are kangaroos there!" And we kept playing. But then I had to study this little girl alittle closer. Where was her parent - just had to know. He was sitting yards away on a park bench carefully watching this little independent, smart child carry on a practically "adult" conversation with others. She was the perfect little adoptee. I could tell - "shining" in her lonely existance, appearing so confident. But pleasing and charming all those around her.
Adopted kids are everywhere - all around us - and to fellow, awakened, adoptees - we see them with almost exray vision, because they are "us" at that age. Yet people love to discredit us as just the "few", the "fringe", the "angry". We were that little girl several years back. Becoming adults with understanding is our only difference. Think about it.

Thank you, Dad

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Ok, now for the good stuff!!!!!

Here are the words on the card my natural father gave me!

"Daughter, You are My Precious Gift" (just think in reunion I can be a gift, not just in adoption)

This next part says it all:

"No one can count on the future or know what they someday might do.
But if I could have chosen a daughter, my heart would have reached out for you-
I'd have wished for your warm disposition and dreamed of your spirit and style, I'd have hoped for your love and affection, imagined your beautiful smile....

Life holds some gifts and surprises, and one of the best there could be
Is having a daughter as precious as the one who was given to me."

Happy Birthday, with All my love, Dad

And when he gave it to me he mentioned that he looked for the "right card". It was so special, I can't even express.

Murky Waters

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My heart and spirit are still swimming in the murky waters of reunion wake up. So many thoughts pour through, with the feelings coming slower, or at least the recognition of feelings. Instead of just "auto pilot".

Yesterday when my Mom made her surprise visit, it really touched me. It was truly for me, and it felt good. She came specificially to wish me a Happy Birthday, even though we had not made plans as usual. She didn't push herself in to find out my plans, which has been common in the past. She didn't put a guilt trip on me about it. Her face looked freer and more touched with pain, though, simply because we have plowed through a lot of apron strings and obligation and barriers to keep us in our pen of "good 'ole adoption roles". It cost a lot to break free, and I had to be the instigator, the bitch, the painful one (for all), but it was worth it. Sometimes I'm surprised we both lived through it. The more healthy boundaries - etc. Still not perfect, by far. But closer.

And yesterday proved a little of that to me - and helped me feel loved more for who I am, than who I could play the role of. And it felt good. She didn't pout and shy away because my plans were not revealed and did not include her, as usual. She came over, didn't intrude, but just wished me a Happy Birthday. My post-reunion, awakened self received it, and it felt good. Thank you, Mom.

But so many interesting little things I could overanalyze. As she was leaving she said something like "Yes, I sure remember 38 years ago today". It hit me - 38 years ago today, she didn't even know I existed. She got the call from her attorney a couple days AFTER my birth (back in the OLD days of adoption that was more common, I guess). In fact, according to her, they only "got" me because the couple who was before them on the waiting list "got pregnant" and so the attorney called and asked if they wanted a "red headed baby girl". She wasn't there on my true birthday, nor had she even met me, or been aware of my existance. So what made her say that? In her mind, she must have needed to somehow believe it.
But to me, maybe that is why my birthdays have always been very challenging? Because she WASN'T there, but it was celebrated as if it was all so right? Don't know.

Not to mention that she got my age wrong. I had to stop and think, but figured out I was truly 39 yesterday, and not 38 yrs old. I said, "I think I'm 39 - wish I was 38 - but was born in 1968 - let's see? - yep 39." (after my slow mathmatical brain did some counting). She had simply lost count. Understandable. Right?

I wanted to post the words from the card my natural father gave me, and I will, I promise - but I guess my little mind is trying to process my adopted side right now. I was re-reading the card my Mom gave me - (aMom, of course, as my nMom passed away before I could find her).

Here are the words in the card my Mom gave me - with a little bit of weirdo thought-pattern of this adoptee, thrown in -

"Thank you for my Daughter, Lord"
"Dear Lord...thank you for my daughter" (my thought: thank you for her tragedy of losing her natural family, so that I could have the priviledge of being her "mother")

"For her warm loving ways" (not always warm or loving (guilt) - except as a child and very young adult, before Frankenstein peeked and found out she was a frozen entitity and quite scary at times).

"For every smile and tear we've shared since her early childhood days" (the golden years I'm sure),

"I often whisper "Thank you, Lord" to heaven up above for the blessing of a daughter whose as sweet as you to love." (thank God in the crap-shoot of adoption I at least got one who held on ALMOST my entire life to the role she was bought to fill).

Then she wrote - "I love you very much, You are a blessing to me." (I love my Mom, but that just seems to reiterate to me how I was born to be a blessing to others, without regard to my own loss or pain in order to fill those roles.) Not that I don't want to be a blessing. I just need validation and healing and not expectation from birth to death to be "ok" with being switched out.

So there. Sometimes I wonder if aparents read this if it is too harsh. I'd be totally embarrassed for those in my "real" life to read this, except for a very few (and thank God for them). But it does feel kind of good to be honest.

Birthdays

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Ever have one of those days that you know is a "pinnacle" moment, but you just can't "feel" it because of being shut-down emotionally for so long? Yesterday was one of those.

Usually my Birthday is spent trying to squash down feelings of saddness, conflict, grief - telling myself that Birthdays are supposed to be celebration and esteem, validation, etc. After many years of this, it is totally different to be able to feel true fulfillment, connection, validation and happiness about being born. But it came after a million tears, allowing myself to feel the pain that had been locked up and fearful that it would completely consume. It didn't. Thank God. It still hurts to even think about the walk of grief that unlocked my feelings as an adoptee. It almost brings flashbacks of pain that are so scary I try to avoid even thinking about - post trauma. But I'm glad I walked through it. I'm still trying to completely unravel and make sense out of it - birth, loss, adoptive family, natural family, identity - at 39 years of age.

But yesterday was truly the best Birthday I've ever had. I finally let myself enjoy and embrace the showing of love from my family - all sides. Usually I'm so busy feeling guilty on all fronts that I can't receive it. I felt guilty for yearning for my natural family, when my adoptive family tried so hard. I felt guilty for wanting more than they could give me. I felt like their possession - faking it to be happy, but with inner conflict and turmoil.

Even after "reunion" I would not let myself break away from making my adoptive family happy and do what I truly wanted to do - be with my natural family on that day. But YESTERDAY I did. WITHOUT the guilt. And man, it felt GOOD. Freedom. Freedom. Glorious. I don't know why it took so many years to get to, but I'm glad I finally got to experience it on my Birthday.

I didn't feel guilty when my aMom came over early in the day to wish me a Happy Birthday, and fishing for my "plans" for the rest of the day. She has even let go alittle, realizing that I am not controlled by her. She has had to grieve instead of using me to fill that void she so held on to - and me too. I love her so much.

Last night my husband and son and I met my natural father at a restaurant and had a casual dinner, and then went down the street to a park - just hung out, climbed, slid down slides, swung, and played. We just played. I finally got to just play. With my own parent. And my son got to play with his Papa. We walked arm in arm and talked. His stature and flesh felt so comforting to my arm as I embraced his shoulder and back and walked, and talked. No other feeling in the world - just right. I finally felt "right" in the world. With my own. I guess it doesn't make sense, unless you've lived your whole life without it. Off kilter. Disconnect. Realizing how much so, once you find it again. Bitter sweet. But, oh so sweet.

Mind you, I've known my natural father since 1990. But it took that long for me to unthaw, open up, feel emotion, embrace him and myself as part of my true, natural family. Because it hurt like hell. Because hell had attacked it from my conception, and taken away the Heaven that it was supposed to provide. The natural order of self.

My aMom will always be my Mom - but REALITY is that she was my substitute. That doesn't diminish what we experienced. It just acknowledges the truth - that I had lived without and suffered with - not acknowledging my own reality, my own truth - to please others. It hurt. It brought turmoil and self-hate, because I couldn't succeed at it. Sure, on the outside it looked perfect, I looked like I was pulling it off perfectly - but inside I was seething. If an adoptee can't acknowledge their truth - they turn it inside and hate themselves. Thanks, adoption industry. For your abuse. Your slavery. Your dishonesty and invalidation. Your coercion, buying and selling, your agreement with lies.
It hurts everyone. Adoptive parents, adoptees, natural families - can only hold on for so long - and then the pain comes. For adoptees it is a criminal act against us. From our birth. Happy Birthday to you. Yep. Adoption should NEVER be in the same context with celebration, balloons, festivity - it is more like a funeral. Without the coffin. It is asking adoptees to celebrate their own funeral of self - put our birth certificate in the coffin - might as well. Cut off an arm and put it in a coffin - and then go celebrate with "Gotcha Day". And then wonder where the anger comes from? It lives in the children - perfectly hidden and disguised with all the "Best Mom in the World" pictures they create. It is trying to find relief in those.

I want to post the words in the card my natural father gave me yesterday. Reading them was like being re-born and validated and loved and celebrated and embraced and allowed me to embrace my birth and self. I'll post soon!