Danger was encoded into every cell my being built over the months of my gestation.
My embryonic being was constructed inside the physiological environment of a person facing the most desperate of survival situations. My unborn self could not avoid the incorporation of my mother's distress into my own newly-forming structure. Stress hormones flooded our shared system. I heard the sound of her tears, her raised heartbeat making the supposedly safe and tranquil womb, a fragile stopover before the inevitable breaking of our bond.
Conditions in the womb prepare the baby for life on the outside. My little mammalian self was born, fully prepared for death by desertion.
Woven into my fibres is the knowledge that her situation and all its attendant upset, has one root cause, which is the existence of me. That my own existence is a wholly unwelcome threat is not just a knowing, it is an ingredient in my construction. It is me.
Those adopted from birth or as very young infants have no pre-trauma personality to be the gauge of how we were before. Before that thing that shook us to our core and beyond. Before that incident that primed the body away from joyful creativity into anxious, tense, exhausting survival and shattering grief.
Although 'me' must consist of something else, too. Love must have had a hand in there to have enabled the construction of my self. Something external to our situation was at play, and I believe it to be a wholeness, that always existed, and always will.
Growth continues for the entirety of a life. Cells continue to proliferate in an unbroken outpouring of life, renewal and replacement is hardwired into human life as it is to all animal and plant life on the planet. My prayer for each and every one of my new cells is one of welcome. I am here, a fact from which I conclude that I the Goddess, god, Universe, universal intelligence, what or whomever is at the controls, must intend for me to be here as much as the next person, who may have been welcomed, loved the way they needed to be from the beginning.
My prayer for you, dear adoptee friend, is the same. A prayer of welcome, a prayer of love, that you may remember that you were born and therefore have a birthright. Your birthright is to be welcome, and loved and to love on this planet, just as much as any other human being here.
