Birth Mother

Note: This post is not a review of the latest episode of This Is Us, but it will contain spoilers for it. Be Ye So Warned. 

Isn't it wild how the universe seems to align at just the right moments? Isn't it also wild how it seems to be plotting against us, adding to our trauma over and over and over until we crack wide open, screaming into the void?

Yeah, clearly I don't believe in fate. My life has been a series of events, unfortunate and even some fortunate, and it brings me comfort to think it's not part of some plan, some preordination. Shit happens, a lot of it, usually perpetrated by selfish and greedy people, but also sometimes just by people who didn't know what they were getting into.

But this last week was too uncanny not to sit up and pay attention, not to think someone or something was tossing rocks at my window, shouting at me that this right here is a moment of significance. 

Okay, thus stops my existential soliloquy and begins the relevancy:

Despite surviving the latest Year of Trauma (TM), I somehow thought it was a good idea to delve back into my adoption trauma. Not that I ever stopped delving into that, therapy-wise, but I just felt ready to start the search for my bio family yet again, which unleashed more shit from the depths of shit. If you read this post here, you know what I'm talking about. I don't know why this felt like the right time, considering we're facing a never-ending pandemic, economic uncertainty, and massive national insecurity, which has triggered all my depression and anxiety, but the truth of the matter is that, being unemployed has meant the time to contemplate it and, since my brain is a freight train with no engineer, there was no stopping it whether I wanted to or not. 

And, to be honest, with all of the death around us, and the many years I've put off searching, I feel like there's no more time to waste. 

So, in all of this, I've been thinking more and more about my birth mom, about who she must have been and how she must have felt, about her trauma, and how much has failed us both, and about how I've never grieved her death. 

Wait. I need to back up. 

If you've been reading, you know that, just under a decade ago, I discovered that my birth mom had died back in the eighties. I have to tell you now that the first thing I felt upon that discovery was relief. But let me explain! There are three big reasons I felt relief:

1. I'd been raised by a narcissist mother, meaning that I felt over-mothered my whole life, that every second of my world until I cut her off was about my mother. She was a giant presence, looming over everything I said, thought, and did. This was my biggest example of motherhood and I was afraid that, when I met my birth mom, she'd try to mother me too. I'd had more than enough mothering and didn't want or need any more of it. I had this strange thought that I wanted to be this imagined perfectly established adult, so we'd meet as equals and not as mother and daughter. It was naive, but it was self-preservation. So I felt relieved I'd never have to cross that bridge, never have to fight that dragon, never have to set those boundaries. I was off the hook. 

2. I also felt guilty for putting off looking for her for so long. I'd been living in fear of that moment, of what it would mean, of how huge it would be, that I just avoided it. So when I found that she died when I was a child, well that meant that I hadn't really missed my chance after all. I couldn't have looked for her at 7 years old! It was out of my hands and that was a relief and it also freed me up from any urgency. She was dead and there was nothing I could or had to do to change that. 

3. I didn't want to explain to her that I'd been abused. I have to assume that she'd hoped, by giving me up, that I'd have a better life. That's the adoption propaganda right? I'm sure she felt this was her only choice and I didn't want to have to be the person to tell her that I didn't have a better life, that my life was extremely traumatic in my adoptive home, and that would somehow invalidate her choice. I know now I'm not responsible for her choice, but I felt like I was and that it would break her heart to know I suffered. 

But, you see, in all that relief, I didn't grieve. Maybe it was too soon. Only a few years before this discovery, I'd grieved my adoptive mom. When I cut contact, which is the best thing I ever did for myself, I had to grieve that loss anyhow. I grieved her like she died, but mostly I grieved the mom I deserved but didn't get, the one that would have loved me like a mother is supposed to. I did that grieving thinking my birth mom was out there somewhere alive, but not really considering her, not really factoring her into my grief, because it was too big for her then. 

But then I learned she died and I felt relieved, not grief. Then I felt numb. Then I pushed on with my life, as one does. I pushed on and didn't think about her at all. 

Then a few months ago, I told my therapist that I felt like I finally needed to grieve my birth mom, but that I didn't know how. I didn't know how to grieve the death of someone I'd never met. 

Which brings me to last week's episode of This Is Us, titled, "Birth Mom." 

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

I knew the episode would be emotional. I knew it would be personal. I knew what Randall's journey has been up to now. I knew where my adoption and his differed (namely transracial adoption, which I was not), and I knew the shock of discovering his story was different than he thought. I knew it would be hard, so I was prepared and I watched with my husband nearby for support, and some tissues handy. 

Aside: we were talking about watching this episode ahead of its airing in one of my adoption support groups and someone said she was going to watch it alone so her husband doesn't see her break down. I said that if I wanted my husband to never see me break down, I'd never see him. I'm basically always crying haha! Crying and then laughing and laughing about crying. 

Anyway, what I wasn't prepared for was the huge wave of grief that would unleash from within me.

I did okay for most of the episode. I was with Randall and his impatience with the storytelling. He was on this journey at the same time I am. It felt so real time to me. I wanted to get to the meat of it with him. I wanted to answers. I was hungry for it, as he was. We came ALL THIS WAY! Give us the answers. 

And then we got them. We saw her trauma and her grief and her fear, we saw her fleshed out as a real person, not as Birth Mom, a mysterious orb of a person that barely exists, but as a person who lived, and hurt, and then died. Someone real. And much of Laurel's trauma is not my birth mom's because of Blackness and whiteness and systemic racism and oppression, but it was her realness that hit me most. She was Laurel, a whole person with a whole life and a whole big personality. 

See, birth moms aren't ever truly real for adoptees. We're either brought up thinking of her as some sacred vessel that delivered us to our adoptive families or we're brought up vilifying her for unknown and assumed crimes, the worst of which is abandonment, which serves to prop up our adoptive parents as our saviors or our fates. That's a huge problem, because it dehumanizes the very real people who birthed us and carried the pain and trauma of relinquishment. And, yes, while some birth mothers might be actually awful mothers, the fact is that we don't exist as archetypes. We're not villains and saviors; we're humans living in a complicated and traumatic world. So you see how powerful it is to see Randall's birth mother as a fully dimensional human and all that entails? 

It's so powerful.

And then the show gave Randall the biggest gift that no adoptee with a dead birth mom will ever have: they gave him a moment with her. She told him she loves him and he got to say it to her too. It was gorgeous. It was powerful. It was a massive gut-punch. I felt so much loss that I'd never allowed myself to feel in all my 40 years. 

This was the moment that smacked me in the head and screamed at me that I needed this. I needed to be shown how to grieve and what to grieve. I need to grieve that I will never have that moment, that this is what is stolen from us as adoptees, that we'll never hear our mothers tell us she loves us. I'll never have that chance. I'll never know her, never see her face or hear her voice or know what she felt. That's gone forever. It's a deep wound that I didn't even really allow myself to feel before. 

That's what I'm grieving now. 

And friends?!?! I'm bawling here thinking of it. I'm sobbing here as I write this. Are tears bad for MacBooks? 

I know a lot of friends of mine whose mothers have passed found power and grief in that episode too, and that's fine, but I'm begging you to see that this one isn't about you. It's not about dead moms; it's about adoption trauma. If you ever felt loved by your mother, you don't understand. You knew your mother; I did not. I feel for your grief and it is valid, but mine is a different pain. 

I'll never really know the trauma of transracial adoption like Randall, of the complicated colonial underpinnings and white supremacy, and I'll never claim to, but I understand adoption trauma and I'm telling you that unless you've lived it, you cannot understand it, cannot possibly get the depth of trauma when you're ripped from your mother at birth. In fact, it's only in the last couple decades that they've even begun studying it. So just try to take a step back and recognize that it's not a personal failing that you don't understand it. You just can't. But I appreciate your empathy anyway. 

I don't know how this all aligned for me, how that episode came just when I was ready for it and shoved me headfirst into the deep end, but I needed that shove. So, thank you, This Is Us. I told my friends that everyone has an episode of that show that destroys them and this week's was mine. I want to hold it close to me. I can't explain how much. 

My birth mom and I, the closest we'll ever get