Do I have the right to make myself known to my biological family?

The head may well understand the reasons behind relinquishment, and some will be able to find a place inside themselves of non-judgement and compassion for the biological mother despite the culture around us which allows us only certain expressions and no others. Of course the head can comprehend the reasoning behind our adoption and the fact that in some cases, mine included, we are absolutely 'better off' with the adoptive parents. 

 But the heart never stops yearning, and searching.

Pregnancy and birth are supremely physical, spiritual and emotional rites of passage for both the mother and the baby, and nature prepares both in a very precise physiological and physical way for their new life together post-partum. Mother Nature is not wasteful, and growing a new human is a costly exercise in terms of time and energy so the design for post-birth attachment, nurturing and feeding is impeccable and rarely fails amongst mammalian species.  Of course human mammals, with our large neocortex and our capability to overthink everything to the point of destruction, have departed too far away from the biological norm in our quest to make these events fit our cultural and social narrative.

This includes our ability to pretend that a human baby can be separated from their mother at birth with no consequence to them.  

A human being grows cell by cell inside the body of their mother, over an average of 40 weeks before going through the most tumultuous journey with her, culminating in the most influential and seminal event of our lives. Our life inside our mothers prepares us for life outside.  From her body, our body receives information about the levels of stress we should expect on the outside, the availability of food, and what that food will taste like.  We learn the sounds of the voices of our mother and the people in her life.  We live a little lifetime in there.  It's where our own body is built. 

No one really knows exactly what starts the labour process, but there is a protein, released by the baby's lungs when they are mature, that signals readiness to the mother's body.  Who can guess what other private communications we are in with her in our collaboration to bring our own soul into incarnation through the journey that she will never forget and that we will never consciously remember.  We are born through her body by the movement of her most intimate parts, to the sound of her roar and the smell and taste of her blood.  You think I can forget her?  Is it the ultimate in disconnect that I can have gone through this with a person but in all my life on earth I never get to look into her eyes...that I can remember.

Once born, our innate reflexes allow us to crawl naked up her belly to her breast and once there, to find her nipple, to latch on and begin to suckle.  Yes, a newborn can do this and will do this in the first hour after a birth where the mother was not heavily medicated or traumatised or anaesthetised or subsequently disturbed by weighing and washing and swaddling and all the other interference.  The ever-present archetype of 'The Journey' begins here, I believe, if it didn't already begin before conception. What a lost skill it is to sit witness to a mother and baby in this interaction, supporting her to support her baby's mission to her breast, without our usual need to 'help' the 'helpless' baby to latch.  

Her nipple will smell and taste of her.  Her milk will taste of the foods she eats, like the amniotic fluid in which we have lived a mini-lifetime whilst we were constructed of those same foods.  Everything is familiar, comforting, and 'of me'.  A continuum of love whilst we learn for the first time to experience hunger, cold, noise, whilst we learn to co-ordinate sucking, swallowing, breathing, whilst we recover from the ferocity of our birth. 

Having gone through this together, and having lost her, we now ask, 'do I have the right to contact her?'  Should I remain a secret, so as not to hurt or offend? 

The answer is difficult to find, it's nuanced, unclear.  

Hearing from me might be my biological mother's dearest wish, or her worst nightmare.  Being twice rejected might be mine.

And if she's gone?  Do I have a right then, to approach family?  And if I do have that right, am I ready for the range of emotions and acceptance or otherwise that I might encounter?

Such a heavy burden of responsibility I feel towards a family system that essentially rejected me.  A family who would not know if I lived or died.  What a trajectory to come in on, and to try to live with. As you may have guessed, I have no answers to the question in question, only more questions.  Which is kind of typical of the adopted life.

My Sister, who died before I could meet her.

 So you were in Brighton one time? (Close to my hometown.  My sister.  Died a few short years before I learned of her existence.  I have a few photos of her.  This is one of them)

Emma.  Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.  Which exact railing was that?  Because I want to touch it.  I want to put my hand where your hand once was.  I want to see what you saw.

I don't dwell in the past, but sometimes my past drives up so fast it sprawls me across its bonnet.

The longing that begins in my gut in my centre and spreads outwards like a arm, a hand, reaching, imploring, yearning for you.  The physical presence of you.

I know that blue sea and the pier and the style and colour of the buildings you would have seen. I know the way the seabirds ride the onshore breeze coming over the waves from southwest and the sounds of those gulls and the traffic from the A259 in front of you, how its rushing roar envelops the laughter that floats up from the beach and Madeira Drive below you.  I know the feeling of the cold old Victorian railings under your hand, thick and rough with layers of peeling aquamarine paint.  I too have inhaled the tang of fresh ozone, exhaust fumes, cigarettes and fish and chips.

When was that taken, and where was I, at that exact moment?  Was I at work, in that very city?  Or 20 minutes up the A23 at home?  Or was I out for the day, a nice fresh walk along the seafront, the sea like a millpond but a bright little breeze in the air.  The traffic, the laughter, the gulls and the people and a beautiful young woman leaning against the railings whilst her husband takes her picture.  One to look at when we're old, I expect he was thinking (except you never got there).  Did I pass and smile and not even know? Or would I have known, how could I have known, how could I not have known? How?  How close, in actual miles, did we ever come to one another after being eggs in her ovary even as she was in our grandmother's womb?  How could I have lost you after being so close?

I don't dwell in the past, but these tiny shreds of paper pictures of the past are all I have of you.  All I have of my sister is in the past.  For you are behind a veil now.  Do you sit at my table Emma, or are you up there in the stars?  Or by a blue sea, near the pier, by that railing. (which one is it exactly?)

Forgive them, free yourself. Here's how to start.

 This is the big one, I know.  This is the one that sparks the most vehement cries of "No!  Never.  Never."

Those cries echo with pain...I know they do.  I've lived inside of that pain before.

That pain felt like the only thing that I had left of her.  The pain of loss was my identity; it WAS me.  My sometimes excruciating pain proved that I once belonged to someone else.  It proved that I once was whole until an unspeakable wrong was committed to me, a wrong which disabled my mind, my trust, and my self.

Did my birth mother commit that wrong?  Or was that unspeakable wrong done to us both?  Can I forgive the culture that disabled her ability to keep me alone, my birth father who abandoned us, but took her back when she had left me, others in my story, (for that's what it is, a story I tell myself) can I forgive them?  And the legion of people since who refuse to understand that anything is broken in that story...we all meet them now and then when we find ourselves revealing our status as an adoptee to a stranger, or sometimes to a friend.

 "Oh you're adopted?  How interesting!  Do you ever feel curious about where you came from? Lucky you for being chosen,  you know that it was so hard back then for women, you mustn't feel bad towards her, the best thing happened, you made two childless people very happy, you didn't lose out, you had a great childhood, people who loved you, gave you everything, you must be so grateful. Why don't you search for your family? Two families, lucky you, you must be so grateful, and curious. Curious, interested in your background? Or not really bothered?"

Does committing to never forgiving leave you something worth hanging on to?

Do you commit to never forgiving because they don't deserve your forgiveness?

Don't you deserve the peace that your forgiveness of them will bring?  Because that's what the action of forgiving can give you.

Does the thought of letting go of this position and forgiving them feel too much like more loss?  Loss of control, loss of the only very real, almost tangible proof you have of the past?  Will it feel like a loss of your dignity, of your self...again?

What if forgiveness was not those things?

What if it was a sense of space?  The nurturing of hurts and wounds and the ruminating on all of the wrongs takes up so much more bandwidth than I ever realised.  Even if I didn't think about the past in any depth, it still occupied space, it still demanded energy from me. 

I needed to draw a line in the sand.  To create a ritual to mark a change.  To choose new thoughts even though the old ones knocked on the doors of my mind again and again.  (I politely thanked them for their attention but told them that our time together was over.  Go Well, thoughts.) I chose to let new thoughts inhabit the space. Simple words, Good bye and Goddess Bless.  I forgive you, and I let you go.  I welcome myself, I belong here.  I am whole.  

Is the change instantaneous?  Yes and no. Forgiveness is an action, one you choose.  Sometimes multiple times a day, an hour.  Don't wait for it to wash over you like a wave, because it won't.  You have to walk into its waters, and immerse yourself, again, and again and again.  After a while, it will become where you live.  A light, spacious place, with opportunity, freedom and maybe even joy.

What if forgiveness was a sense of lightness, freedom, freedom to belong, to belong to yourself and to others, to become born, properly this time, born into your own life.  What if forgiveness is the new beginning that lights your soul, that enables you to create your life, piece by piece, and to belong fully in it, in peace, with love.

Adoptee, you had everything taken away from you at your most vulnerable.  But somehow, a part of you survived.  Let that part now call all the other wounded parts home, for now there is a home inside your heart for them, and it is warm, and safe, and welcoming to them, and that home belongs to them.  To you.  Recognise that, with all that you have lost, no one took away your ability to choose, today.  You retain the ability to choose how to proceed, from right now.

Go well today, with a lightness in your soul, for you are here.