Month: November 2020

I’m part of an adoptee group where we are encouraged to write and tell our stories. Recently we’ve been talking about using our megaphone voices as a way to shout our truth, and that experience left me physically rattled one night. After the class, I returned to my family for our typical evening meal. We ate, I cleaned up the kitchen, and it wasn’t until I sat down on the couch that I realized how fast I was breathing. I sounded like I’d just come in from a long hike. My whole body was still in a heightened state from the class, and it took a night’s sleep for me to reset my senses and regain a sense of calm.

I’m a math nerd, and here’s what came to me from all of this. I have lived my life as a number in a column. I’m a place holder with place value. An object. I have filled the blank of another person’s void. Need a kid? BAM! This one will do. Need someone to manage your household? BAM! Insert wife and mother roles. Want a well-run office? BAM! Here’s the girl who can juggle it all. All the while, though, I’ve never really known what I was doing. When I was separated from my mom, I lost the natural role I was supposed to fall into. I lost my compass, and I have been wandering in chaos ever since. I tried to be who my adoptive parents needed me to be. They needed a kid they could proudly display for all the world to see. I got good grades, I followed the rules at school, and I performed in events where they could brag in front of others. They needed to appear as good and capable parents, and I was the visible proof of that endeavor. At least on the outside. I have built my life around making sure I’m needed. I’m highly efficient in the roles I’ve chosen to take on. Most people don’t see the internal struggle behind the external façade. As a baby, I had to figure out how to survive when everything my tiny body expected to find was not there. I learned how to check my surroundings by observing and watching for reactions, and then I did my part, first to make sure I stayed safe, and eventually to ensure that I was needed. Now that I’m unraveling my truth and learning to allow myself to have voice, it is unsettling. It is foreign and scary. But it is also liberating. I am shedding the roles I’ve fulfilled for the sake of others and learning to believe that I have space and value, simply being fully present as myself. I don’t have to perform to stay needed. I will be safe.

My mom and I made an agreement this past September. We won’t use the phrase, “I’m sorry,” when we are talking about my adoption/relinquishment. We have both endured life-long consequences of the event that neither of us had a voice in. By using “I’m sorry” in our conversation, it places blame or ownership on one party or another. That won’t do either of us any good, and it only continues a dialogue that has been steeped in trauma and pain for long enough. In order for the two of us to continue to have a healthy and healing relationship, there cannot being any insinuating verbiage that points to blame. Instead we try to focus on what we are each feeling, or how we wish that our circumstances could have been different, and how we work with that moving forward.

By the two of us making the decision to choose our words more deliberately, it has also shifted how I see and use that phrase elsewhere in my life. Don’t get me wrong. There are times when it is appropriate and absolutely necessary to say, “I’m sorry,” to another person. If I am in a situation where I have done something that has resulted in pain or difficulty for someone else, I have a responsibility to apologize and say, “I’m sorry.” I have a moral obligation to recognize and own my role in another person’s hurt. To that end, I have been reflecting on some conversations I’ve had with my adult kids. I’m wondering if shifting the verbiage with them might be a little freeing for all of us.

There has been a long-running dialogue in our family about how our youngest son is being raised versus the way they were raised. The youngest boy falls last in line with a gap of eight years between he and the next oldest sibling, and there is a span of twenty years between the youngest and the oldest child. In total, there are five of them. It is often said by the older kids in light-hearted jest to the youngest that, “Dude, you have it so easy!” or, “I wish I was raised by this mom.” The truth of the matter is, big kids, I wish things could have been different, too. I wish that I could have been jostled out of the fog of adoption by my first pregnancy instead of my last. I wish I could have known that my deeply hidden and unknown trauma affected my ability to be a fully present parent. If I had known then what I know now, I would have recognized and appreciated the mirrored glances we exchanged with each other when you were infants. I would have been more patient with your sometimes endless need to be held if I knew that the reason it frustrated me was because I’d never internalized being held as a place of comfort and security. If I’d been able to gain a sense of self-worth and self-confidence sooner, I wouldn’t have allowed the toxic influence of my adoptive parents be a part of our collective lives for as long as I did. I wish I’d been able to be more playful and sillier with you. I wish I’d appreciated your little arms wrapped around me in the same way that I do when your little brother does it now. I know I have told you, “I’m sorry you didn’t have the same mom your youngest brother does,” and I wish there was some magical way I could change that. What I need you to hear is that my heart aches when I think about the opportunities I missed during your childhood. Thank you for still willingly hanging around and letting me better appreciate you now, all of who each of you are, and for understanding that I gave you the best version of me that was available. You are beautiful, gracious people, and I love you.