The Ghosts that walk behind me have died.

 My biological mum passed before I could find her.  And the sire.  Little sister, too.  My sister.  I had a sister.  I found out at the age of 54, in an email...the same email that told me I had a brother, living.  And another sister, in another country, lost still, in the absence of names or dates or places. (So much to process, one day I'll get around to it)

My adoptive mum and dad passed in my 20's.  There's so much beauty in my life, such an intensity of love and life.  So much to be grateful for, and so much good living to do.  So much.  I don't want to give a precious second of it to sorrow or tears, but I will lay their place at my table, the same as I do for all the other feelings.  They are all valid, they will come and go, come and go.

No-one says, "I'm sorry for your loss."  How can they understand that the ghosts who walked behind me all my childhood have died, and now I must find a way to mourn them.  Soon, I must visit their graves and make it real.  I'm so blessed to know where their graves are, so blessed.

Whilst they lay dying, I would have been working, walking, hoovering, cooking, oblivious behind my not knowing.  How could this be?  I don't know.  Thank goodness for our adoptee community where someone else will know this feeling too.  Know this dark and wild place where the winds howl and the rain drives and the sky, like the aeons is endless, silent and wide.  To walk along the ragged edge of the world alone, suspended in trust and hope and other vaporous unseen forces which are now our reality.  When our reality should be her body, her/my milk, her voice, her aura, for she is life and the rest is death. A little death, or a big one, I can't be sure that I'm not a ghost, invisible as my grief and I truly are in the fullness of our being.

We wait it out like a long night and give thanks when we come back to precious life, like the sun rising again, but our being holds so much.  So much.

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.

 

I've written before about adoption, about how it feels to be an adult adoptee, 'long lost' and searching, wondering about my origins and my family.

 I was adopted at 9 days old by my lovely mum and dad, both in the Heavenworlds now.

Christmas Cards

  I’m writing Christmas cards to people I’ve never met.  I send them off nice and early to give the recipients time to send me one back, because the novelty of seeing the handwriting of people other than my descendants to whom I am related, has never diminished.  My brother in England, my late birth mother’s husband in England, her sister and family in Ireland.

  When we first connected three years ago, it was as heady and full of promise as the beginning of a love affair.  Would my dream of a warm house full of my people be about to come true?  People I could get to know, people who wanted to get to know me, and love me like they love the rest of their blood kin, people to welcome me home.  People in whose faces and features I could see my own.  People I could give to my children, my grandbabies, the bloodline, the culture, the language, their roots.

The image of the crowded, warm, bright dream home has been always been in my heart, alongside the bone-deep knowledge that the energy for such a home that could welcome me in that part of my line was too shattered, too fragmented. I would have to create it myself if I wanted it, and I did. My home, the table, the family I hold the space for is the pride and joy of my life.  My adoptive parents gave me the gifts of themselves and their love, and more precious than gold, their honesty.  I lived 54 years with the knowledge of a handful of bare facts.  That my father abandoned her, that she ran away when approached by my parents’ solicitor, that I was born in a maternity home in London. 

As well as those facts, and three or four sheets of paper, there are the cellular memories.  My lifelong deep and unshakeable comprehension of the brokenness of their union.  The secret nature of my existence.  The shame.  The place where their cultural shame became their personal shame, that seamlessly became my shame at my own existence in a physical form.  The recognition that despite living 54 years as an only child with no suggestion or proof to the contrary, there was always a clear awareness that other raindrops than just me, had dangled and fallen like tears from that web of union spun by my sire with her.  Just like I have the feeling that if my tentacle didn’t uncurl itself over the Irish Sea and land with a wet, sickening smack on the doormat in Holy Cross twice a year, there would be no further communication.

I don’t know if my mother’s husband has made it through another year.  I don’t know if he will live long enough for me to persuade him to show me the graves of my mother and little sister, or to let me see the inside of her house, my mother’s house, her home, just one time.

I don’t know if my brother will ever find a way or a wish to meet me in person. 

 And so my little stack of cards goes off, to stand on mantle shelves I may never see, or to hide in drawers, or maybe to burn in a fire of shame, our secrets returning like shadows, to dust.