Inside Every Adoptee There Are Two Bears

 One bear says that your mother loved you so much she gave you away and that bear teaches you to equate love with abandonment. The other bear says that your mother never wanted you, so there must be a reason why and so you'll never feel good enough for any relationship after not being good enough for the most important one. 

And both bears try to eat you over and over your whole life while society tells you just to be grateful for the bears because you could already be dead anyway.

I've been battling the bears my whole life and slowly healing from their wounds and I think, even after all this work, I've still never quite shaken them off. I still don't feel secure in any relationship, and I mean any, because I assume, deep down, whether I want to or not, everyone will eventually figure out I'm deficient somehow and leave. 

It's deep deep down. I don't want to feel this way. Logically, in my higher brain, I don't. I know who loves me and values me and I feel secure. But then something happens, anything really. Any small thing that could make the person mad or annoyed or revulsed and my fear center kicks in and I panic that they've figured it out, that this was the moment that I'm found out and they'll be done with me. 

And it comes from that first trauma, that first abandonment, that first person who should have given me safety and security from my first breath and I found fear and aloneness instead. It encoded a deep belief that I'm somehow lacking and that everyone will leave. 

It comes from the narratives that I was loved so much that I was abandoned and also that my mother didn't want me. I clearly remember crying to my adoptive parents at a young age, "Why didn't she want me?" And they'd say, "She did want you! She loved you! She loved you so much she wanted to give you a better life!" And then that life was full of trying to be good enough to be their consolation prize for the boy who died. 

How was I possibly ever expected to have a full, complete, self-actualized sense of self? 

 No matter how old I get, how confident I become, how much I heal, I can't shake the bears off. I fight and fight and they just keep mauling my soul. 

My therapist asked me if I ever think someone else is unlovable or unworthy and I said, "Well these rules don't apply to everyone else. It just applies to me, I think. Those people are whole. I'm the one who was given away."

My therapist asked me how I can find joy in being alive, in feeling worthy for just existing, for being here and now. I said, "I'm not sure how to do that when I don't think I should have been born, that my mother made a huge mistake birthing me in the first place."

But I want to change the narrative. 

I think I can get there two ways, I hope:

1. Despite disagreeing with the facts of my birth, I don't actually wish to change anything. 

I want to stay alive still. I'm here and I've worked so hard that I want to stay here and keep working at it. I want to feel whole and worthy. Part of that is not feeling rooted to anyone or anything, so I want to plant my bare feet in the ground more. I want to focus my energy into rooting into the ground and feel connected to the natural world and feel it connecting to me and giving me legitimacy of existence. 

I use grounding in my witchcraft, so why rooting my existence to the facts of the natural world has never occurred to me before, I have no idea. Alas. 

2. I want my mother to tell me that she wanted to keep me and loved me, but she didn't give me up out of love, but out of circumstance and a lack of support and choices and ability. I want my heart to hear that it was just a shitty circumstance in a shitty country with shitty capitalistic values and she was backed in a corner. I want to hear her apologize for my pain and that it had nothing to do with me or who I am and that I deserved to be kept and loved and protected. 

That will never happen because she's dead and I'll never hear her voice, let alone her saying the exact things I want her to (and many first mothers refuse to acknowledge any of that), but my therapist says that's fine and that I can give it to myself. So I plan to write myself a letter from her and have someone record it for me in their voice so that I can listen and maybe trick my heart into believing it. 

I think it can work. I think writing the letter will be extremely hard, but I need to do it. I need that moment on This Is Us that Randall had with his dead birth mother. I need to hear the things from her. Any volunteers to read it to me? 

And maybe I can finally kick the old bears to the curb.