Feeling responsible for it all.

 Every. Damn. Day.

Have I done enough to find the people I can find before another one passes away.  Did I ask the ones I have been able to connect with all the right questions before those truths pass into time's locked vaults, to become secrets forever?

Aged 18, and knowing that my adoptive father's family were involved in my adoption and may be able to lead me to her, but insisting that I didn't want to know.  When of course, I absolutely did.  And waiting another eleven years until both adoptive parents had passed, to begin my search.  They would have been fully supportive of me wanting and needing to search, but even so, I just couldn't bring myself to do it, I couldn't allow myself to even think about it.

Feeling responsible for it all.  How can that be, I was just a baby.  But I wanted to get born, I chose to come, and in this way.

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.

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.

Friday nights ain't what they used to be. Thank Goddess.

 

Am I going on Friday night?

A simple question, to which I gave a simple answer.  My answer wasn't the whole story by any means. I did, however, tell the truth. Not the whole truth because it's a long story, but I no longer lie about myself, my situation, my feelings.  Because what's the point?  Life's too short.

I said that I might go.  But no I won't be giving you a lift, because I need my freedom to just go whenever I need.  And I don't need to be reminded of myself from that other time.  

Is it because you're worried that you might want to drink again?

God no.  I never want to drink again, even though I know that old daemon will be waiting at my shoulder all my life for the time when troubles come, with a full bottle open ready in his claws.  It's not about being afraid of temptation in those kinds of social situations, it's more about the difference in the experience of them now that I'm not drunk.  At best, I'll have a great time.  At worst, I'll look around and wonder why I'm there, I'll feel like I'm on the outside again, I'll be reminded of school, of how I didn't fit, how I didn't know the right things to say, the right way to be.  I might be able to give space to those feelings, to recognise that they're only feelings as they move through me, or I might not.  They might get me in their stranglehold and dysregulate my nervous system for the next few hours, and I might aid and abet them by telling myself the old, unhelpful stories.  And if that happens, I might decide that I could have taken better care of myself by not going.  

And in between the best and the worst scenarios?  How do I feel on a night out with my drinking friends in places where previously I would have joined them in the sparkly slide into laughing oblivion?

The short answer is exactly that, unlike when drunk, I feel.

I feel all the feels.  I feel the joy of being well, and out and in company.  I feel my usual self-conscious awkwardness at my lack of social skill, my slight difficulty with processing spoken language when there are multiple conversations happening around me.  I feel the beauty of being a part of a group of friends, the shared laughs, the smell of cigarettes in the garden under the starlight, old, impervious, witness to all that went before.  I feel the memories of all that went before.  I feel hiraeth, saudade, emotions for which in English, we have no language...no wonder we have to drink them away.  I question whether I made the best of the time before these things were memories, when I inhabited a different body, with other drives and feelings.  I realise that I probably did not, and that George Bernard Shaw was onto something when he said words to the effect of youth being wasted on the young. 

And I feel my old bad back.  What a great anaesthetic alcohol was.  And boredom.  Quite often at some point in the evening, especially as everyone else becomes intoxicated, I feel bored.  I feel like i could be in my softly-lit room, comfortable in bed with my hot water bottle and book.  Alcohol gave me staying power.  It altered my time perception and an afternoon of drinking could slide into an evening of dancing and I would still be sad and cross and ready for more when the lights went up.

Of course the following morning would bring it's own rewards...the raging thirst, the aching head, the need for coffee, for food, and the realisation that none of those things is going to sort this feeling out, only time can do that.  Hangovers never bothered me much; like most women I'm used to carrying on daily life whilst feeling less than great, but drinking dulls not only physical and mental anguish and the experience of the appreciation of strong feelings, but for me it dulls my creative light.  It used to take me days to relight that fire, and that feels like theft, like the most outrageous waste of life on earth.

So am I going on Friday night?

I'll know that on Friday I expect.  I'll sniff the air outside, and read the old bones, is it an expansive, extroverted, outside kind of evening out there?  Or is it a quiet, introverted, contracted indoors one?  It's simple, really.

I will probably always feel like an outsider. But I'm here to find the love in it.

Does Everyone Feel Like an Outsider Sometimes?

As an adoptee, it feels like a permanent state that I’m learning to live with

Sweet Italian Jesus but its a right old mess over here in the land of the adoptee fog

Family here and there, blood related and not, different cultures and lands…but touching little similarities in the way the old religion seeps through the newer one in the little roadside shrines to Mary in both the countries of my biological origin and my adoptive family’s origin.

I am by DNA 100% Irish, but bought up in England in Italian first generation immigrant and Cockney families.

My Irish birth mother and father are long gone. But five years ago, after 54 years of wondering, of not knowing, my brother found me out of the blue and was able to give me information I’d never had. I saw our parents’ photographs for the first time, and I found out their full, proper names and the counties and little villages where they were both from.

It felt like a miracle.

I discovered the truth about my siblings. Growing up as an only child, I had three imaginary friends, who I thought of and referred to as my brother and two sisters. I always felt that I was one of four, but my adoptive parents didn’t know about my older sister at the time of my adoption. If they had known that three years after they adopted me, a little brother came along and needed a home, they would have adopted him, too.

I am in touch with my brother who found me, but after five years we still haven’t met and I honestly wonder if we ever will. I don’t even know where in the force-field between our hearts the reluctance on my behalf meets the reluctance on his.

Another sibling I missed by just seven years, she passed eleven years ago at the young age of 42, a beautiful woman. And the older one still missing. No name, date or exact place of birth (Eire)

My adoptive mum and dad are long gone too, and very much missed. They adopted me late in life to the astonishment and disapproval of most of their family members. The one aunt who did love me is dead. The others disappeared from my life with the loss of my parents. Dad missed the arrival of my firstborn by a matter of weeks and mum missed my fourth by a few months.

My beautiful babies’ lives have unfolded like flowers, and they’ve grown, and flown and have babies of their own.

I want to give my children and their children, my lovely grandbabies, so much more than this. I have on offer a confused muddle of strands and fragments and faces in photographs, people who bought me up, and people whose faces I didn’t see until my fifth decade, but who are blood of my blood. On top of this, a ridiculous number of Ancestry dot com ‘4th-6th cousins’…so called ‘matches’ who don’t answer my messages, but not the one I’m waiting for, the hope of meeting whom keeps me forking out the monthly subscription; my older sister.

Inside my heart the little version of me stamps a foot and blinks back tears and between gritted teeth says,

‘I don’t want ‘DNA matches’. I want people, I want kitchen tables, I want cups of tea. I want phone calls, messages and the sharing of laughter and tears with people who are of me as I am of them.’

I want real live people, the presence and acceptance from whom will give me my place in the world in the eyes of myself, for my children. For them to know that I am a person who belongs.

I know we all have the propensity for that longing inside of us, adopted or not. For some of us it’s a yearning that may never have the possibility of being realised, a true saudade, because it’s the yearning for something that may not, and may never have existed for us. So us adoptees hold hands together across the void of cyberspace as we each find the way to come home to ourselves.

I believe that I chose this contract to come in to earthly existence on. I chose to come down into this and to learn to see the love in it. To reach beyond the earthly story and to make a meaningful life. To be the first of my line for thousands of years to be born outside of Ireland, to take that deeply concentrated magic over the sea to a land that needs it.

To learn to live alongside the massive missing pieces and entire absent system of my people, my language, my culture, and to learn to live with the profound, unnatural and stressful feeling of always being ‘outside’.

To remember where I was loved.

And to love.