Adoptee in the Reunion Tsunami

CW trauma, self-harm, suicide, abortion, adoption

My therapist wants me to write about this to help me process, and so here I am, but I honestly don't want to. I'm tired. I'm tired of feeling all of this. I'm tired of talking about it. I'm tired of sharing. It's too big and I'm exhausted. But I need to process it all so here I am. 

Let me back up. 

I finally mustered the courage to message my biological aunt on Ancestry maybe a month ago now and she's been lovely and kind and welcoming and I couldn't have asked for anyone nicer to be the first genetic relative I've ever "talked to," albeit only over email thus far. 

So we've been emailing. And she sent me some photos and tried to remember as much as she could to share with me. Immediately, it was exciting and overwhelming. Learning about the family you came from but never met is bizarre and weird and difficult and confusing. But I want this. 

Me, understanding that it must be hard for her to even know where to begin to share, told her I'd come up with some questions I had, as a place to start. So I asked about family medical history, anything she could remember about my birth mom and my pregnancy, anything she could remember about the other two girls my birth mom relinquished for adoption, and how my birth mom died. 

My aunt delivered! Boy did she deliver. She wrote me a 3 page document answering everything she could remember and more, including an overview of my birth mom's very traumatic short life and how she killed herself at the age of 30. I can't stop picturing it. 

It felt (and still does feel) like a tsunami, a car wreck, and a bombshell all in one. 

In retrospect, I wish I'd held off on the last question, because learning so many things about who and where I came from is big all on its own without adding in the trauma of the woman who was, essentially,  my mother, who I came from, who forced me into the world. It's enough to cope with without adding in a mountain of grief too. 

But you can't turn back time.

So now I'm struggling to cope with it all. It's plunged me into old coping mechanisms, bouncing between trauma responses, and having, ultimately, an existential crisis. 

I feel anger. I feel grief. I feel traumatized. I feel the weight of the storm in which I was born and now must carry the burden of. I feel deeply sad. I feel exhausted. 

I wanted this. I needed this. I do want the answers, the pieces. They're part of me and I needed them to feel some sort of wholeness, if that's ever even possible as I'll never get what I truly needed: a mother. 

But the knowledge that my life would be supremely traumatic and motherless with or without adoption is too big to bear. And yet that knowledge does not in any way lessen the trauma of my adoption itself. 

I wonder why I even exist. And that makes me mad because I've worked SO HARD to love myself, to love my life, to feel my value on this rock, and now I'm feeling like, why didn't she just choose abortion? She brought 3 babies into the world, which she was unable to parent, and now we bear the weight of those choices. It's totally unfair that I have to live with this. My very first developmental experiences were traumatic.  I never had the chance to develop without trauma, and that trauma wired me for how I'd experience the world, and I feel so resentful of that. 

And then I feel guilty because I don't want to judge her or her choices. She had a traumatic brain injury. Her life was extremely hard. Many men hurt her. Lots of things failed her. Psychology and understanding the brain has advanced sooo much since then. I wonder who she'd be if things were different, but who am I kidding? Mental health care and physical health care in this country still sucks ass. 

Still. she did the best she could with what she knew. Nobody knew how traumatic adoption was back then, either for baby or for mom, and they certainly didn't know about epiginetics, about genetically inherited trauma (and my therapist absolutely thinks I inherited a lot of her trauma). 

Her life was traumatic on its own even before the trauma of relinquishing three babies for adoption. I was the third of four children, the second of three relinquished. The first must have been traumatic enough, let alone three. 

Birth moms/first moms have extremely high rates of depression, suicide, and drug use (self-medication). Statistically, a mom's mental health fares better with a miscarriage or even a stillbirth than with relinquishment. They grieve just like a baby's death, only they know that child is alive and they're told not to grieve. They're told they made that choice so they should live with it. They're told they did what's best and to just be strong. They're not allowed to show just how traumatic giving away your baby is. 

And she gave up three.

So I hurt for her, for her hurt, for her trauma. Yet I also hurt because of her choices and I feel like I need to forgive her for that, for not choosing abortion, for not having knowledge, support, or resources. None of that is her fault, but I still have to live with that. 

There are also a million little cuts that I've just thought of as facts but am finally starting to feel the pain of through this, like that she never named me, that she never held me, that I was just left in a hospital nursery for who knows how long, nameless and alone, until my foster mom came. I'm sure it made things easier for her, but it sure as shit has made it harder for me. And she's certainly not around to explain why. 

Years ago, when I was much younger and didn't know my birth mom had died, I was scared to meet her because I didn't want to explain to her that I didn't have the better life she was promised, that I had a life of abuse and trauma and financial struggles. I was scared to tell her I never felt safe or secure and that I never felt a mother's love. 

I'm positive she thought she was giving me a better life. Adoptees will tell you that adoption doesn't guarantee a better life, just a different one. Now I know my life would've been hard regardless. If she hadn't died, if I'd be able to talk to her today, I don't know what I'd tell her. I just don't know anymore. My therapist thinks I should write her a letter, but I don't know what I want to say, not yet anyway. 

Even if I'd gotten that "better" life, I still lost so much, lost siblings, lost aunts and uncles, and grandparents, and the knowledge of a heritage I belonged to and didn't feel the need to earn. I feel like the branch of a tree that was chopped off and expected to thrive regardless.  

Or even if we say that I am someone who would've been adopted regardless (and that's impossible to know, but it's sloshing around in my brain), given my birth mom's struggles and I haven't even started on my birth dad's shit, if I'd had an open adoption, a true open adoption, that could have changed so much for me. I could have had those connections. I could have known my roots, however messy or painful. I wouldn't have to be walking through fire right now, because knowing my full family would be my norm. 

I wouldn't be in a tsunami because I would've experienced these people and their lives alongside them as all families do. So many people think adoption shields adoptees from trauma, but LIFE is trauma, and so it's hard to explain this, but I feel like I have a natural right to experience the fullness of my family, however painful and hard and traumatic, and I had the right to experience their pain alongside them. Family isn't just about the good stuff; it's about belonging to the complete experience of a people and that was taken from me and now I have to integrate it suddenly in order to feel some kind of wholeness. And that's something I grieve as well. 

It's just so monumentally confusing. I don't know how to hurt for her and feel anger and resentment toward her at the same time, so I just bounce around those feelings. Again, I don't want to judge her, but I would make totally different choices if it were me, and that's not her fault either. I really want to forgive her that, but I'm just not there right now. 

But I just keep slogging through, as I've always done. I often wonder how I'm even alive, what with all the many risk factors I have for depression and suicide that must surely compound, and with the several attempts I tried in my youth, but I keep on existing, either through trauma responses or just sheer stubbornness, I have no idea. But I'm still here, somehow. 

Right now, I'm just trying to keep doing just that and to honor my brain and my body, to remind myself that trauma responses are my brain's security system and that it's just trying to protect me. So I thank my brain for doing its job and tell it that I'm safe now and I remind it of the life I've built for myself and the support system of chosen family and friends do keep me safe and loved, because it's so easy to forget when there's so much hurt. 

I'm still here. What's next is all TBD.