The Confusion of Adoption Grief

For like 27 years, I lived in complete denial of my trauma, and I don't mean willful denial; I was in a full-time trauma response and my brain was repressing my trauma as a means of survival until it all tumbled out and I couldn't (and honestly wouldn't) put it away again. I've worked very hard ever since to address my trauma and issues and mental illness. 

So when my therapist told me a month ago that it is perfectly healthy to intentionally set one's grief and trauma and processing to the side in order to cope and get through more immediate needs, I was dubious. I was scared that I'd be backtracking.  But she said it's not avoidance or denial to intentionally compartmentalize just to get through life and to intend to pick that shit up again once we're ready to. 

So that's what I did. I couldn't do my job and get through the end of wedding season (for those that don't know,  I'm a wedding planner/coordinator) while mired in a mountain of adoption trauma, grief, and anger, and confusion, and everything else brought up with reunion. 

I'm just now starting to pick it up again and am finding it's easier than before (at least it doesn't feel like a crisis now) but I'm still really confused. Confused because I'm feeling conflicting emotions that are really difficult to square and that I've never had to consider before. Most of all, I'm finding myself both full of empathy for but also really angry at my birth mom, my first mom. 

I don't want to feel angry at her, but I'm clearly feeling that and so I'm attempting to give that emotion space to breathe and process. I'm angry that she gave birth to me at all. I'm angry that at some point she disconnected from me emotionally and I keenly feel that disconnection today. I'm angry that she never held me or named me, that she chose her own emotional survival over my security and safety. 

Then I get angry at myself for feeling angry because I remember that she had lots of trauma and her decision making was probably not the best and it was 1980 and people's understandings of the brain and brain trauma and development and adoption trauma, etc etc ect, were so different then and how can I measure her against a yardstick of today? And I'm sure she did think she thought she was making the best decision, but that decision hurt me anyway. 

It hurt me anyway. 

I was hurt by a lot of people's decisions about my life, however well intentioned. 

Ultimately I think most of my anger isn't at her; it's at the system, at society that left a mentally ill woman unable to keep her children (and still does, pervasively) and, honestly, at my birth father, who I can assume didn't support her/his family and who handled my adoption (leading me to think it was his idea). Given what I know about him, I'm not mad he didn't raise me necessarily, but I do think I get to be angry about his actions which just scream selfishness all around. 

That sort of brings me to another point of confusion for me: that I'll never truly know my whole story, that my narrative won't ever be fully pieced together, that, because my mother was probably mostly alone for my pregnancy and birth (adult-wise), she took my story to the grave with her when she died. I'd hoped my birth family would have more answers than they did. It's not their fault, but I think I have to grieve that part of my origins will always be a mystery and that that's an injustice I don't deserve. 

My therapist says that it's totally healthy to craft my own narrative of both what I think probably happened and what I can cope with and fill in those gaps myself. So here's what I think I can live with believing:

I want to think that she did want me and loved me and I have no reason to think she didn't. I can't live with believing she just didn't want me and she did keep my older sister after all (and she was in a marriage when she had my sister) and I have every indication to think that she wanted her children and wanted to make it work, but was ultimately too unstable and unsupported and just couldn't - or felt she couldn't - parent me. While I don't know how much she was coerced and persuaded and manipulated by my birth dad or by the agency or both, I will assume quite a bit by what I know about the adoption industry. Maybe they didn't let her hold me. Maybe they told her not to name me. Maybe they took away any chance we had at bonding. It's likely and believable. 

I know I wasn't one of those babies subjected to the horrible practice of pre-birth matching and thankfully no hopeful adoptive parents were in the hospital room when I was born (I know because they didn't ID my adoptive parents until months after I was born) and those practices were rare back then anyway, but that doesn't mean my birth mom had full agency and informed consent. I'm sure she didn't. 

So mostly I still just feel immensely sad for her. How devastating and tragic her life was and I feel like I carry a lot of that in me. I'm not sure how to let that go except to grieve it, but how do you grieve someone else's life that impacted your own so greatly but who you never actually got to meet? Maybe I'm really still just grieving for me. And, how do I feel such empathy and sadness for someone when I'm also really angry and resentful of her? Or maybe this is the mother-child dynamic that I've been missing all this time? The give and take and ever-complicated dance of anger and empathy, of love and resentment? Is that what it's like having a mother?

And I feel like grieving that too, that I never really got a mother, not really. 

When I cut my mom off, my adoptive mom, I grieved her, but mostly I was grieving that I never got the mother I needed or deserved. That wound is open again now, telling me I wasn't done, that I may never be done aching for a mother I never ever had.

Maybe that's why I've always, always, even long before I estranged myself from the only mom I'd ever known, I felt like a motherless child. 

Maybe that's my narrative after all.