I do think about Kay's sadness, therefore my own, in relation to her adoption.
Recently I took a workshop from a man who has devoted his life to healing traumatized children, and the adults they become. He reinforced to me the sense the agony adoption is for young people and he put it this way: They have to integrate 4 family lines instead of the 2 that birth children do. I am not so sure I understand it, but if you think about it, it's not just the abandonment, and the wresting away from culture and genetic heritage. It's the coming to grips with all of it, the integration of family lines, that must be dealt with. There is so much we don't know about ancestral influences, only now being researched in the field of epigenetics.
This woman was damaged by being adopted, her anger at being rejected
We don't know what our adopted children's lives would have been, had we not loved and raised them. We did not reach in and uproot children who were in fine, loving, safe, secure, permanent homes. The destabilizing circumstances that led to their adoption had already occurred. The trajectory of their lives had already been disrupted. After that, there were no "perfect" options.
When you think of it, who in life has a "perfect" trajectory. Things I never considered as having an impact on my life, or a major one, my mother's prior abortion and miscarriage for instance, and the fact I was a DES baby. We enter into this life already constrained by the circumstances, that affected us prenatally.
Perhaps it is that we did not sufficiently anticipate how the trajectory of our lives would be impacted by adopting a child.
I would have gone childless, which I was told would happen if I did not adopt, rather than reach out and love a child who is not happy to be here.
This is the crux of things. My adopting my own son, is at the core of my life. I believed it to be the best thing that ever happened to me. For years and years we were content. And then, all of this.
My son is not happy to be here. He hates himself. And he does not see a way out of this. Does that mean that I need to lament my whole life from the time I adopted him? Was it a wrong choice on my part? There are moments that I feel this way. That I made a mistake. This is very painful to write. But the reality is I did not make a mistake. What I did was make my life. Nobody anticipates the future. There is no future without struggles, pain, challenges, tragedy.
I read an opinion piece in the New York Times a months or so ago. It was a youngish mother who described riding on the subway and being attracted to a guy, a fellow passenger. For four years they exchanged glances, until one day, they struck up a conversation. They married and had a couple of children. They were happy. Their life was on an upward trajectory. And then one day he had a brain aneurism and like that, he was dead.
She obsessed about her whole story with him. How such innocence, simple yearning for love could lead her to such grief and loss. That this destiny of a brain defect, had always been present in her husband, and she had voluntarily and unknowingly taken it into her own life. And this is life, for all of us.
I did not adopt Kay to make her sad. I have cried buckets over this.
No. We adopted our children to love them. Just like this woman sought to love and to build a family.
Compared to my other two kids she is a deliberate stranger.
For many years I did not see or speak to my own parents. For the last 6 or 7 years before my father died, I had not seen or spoken to him. In fact, I didn't find out my father was dead for 5 years after he was dead.
These things happen in families. Both of my parents suffered because of my actions. I recognize now that while I saw the responsibility for my actions, as my parents', that their limitations forced me to act as I did, there were real limits in my own personality, that I have struggled with my whole life.
There is nothing fair or right about how each of us deals with our life story, especially how our actions and attitudes affect the people who love us. More and more I think that the answer is to try to find contentment and meaning by making nurturing and meaningful choices in my day to day minutes and hours. I believe now that these life stories of ours are a mixed bag. We need to find a way to make some sort of sense of them, and achieving this gives peace and power.
The thing is that we get trapped in our stories, like in a maze. And when we do I am coming to believe that the best thing to do, for me, is either to fly up like a bird, or dig down deep to go under it. For me, meditation and exercise, and laughter are ways to get out of the trap of my laugh story, if I remember to do this for myself.
If I look at it this way my son, and some of our kids are in the same place as am I. They get trapped in the maze of their life stories, and don't know what to do or how to do it to escape. And then when they get caught, we because we love them so much, lose ourselves in their mazes, too.
And then trapped in these mazes of theirs, we come to define our own lives as mazes, because we can't see our way out or through. I think this takes great will and love, to decide to take ourselves outside of the mazes, so that we can locate ourselves and our lives, in a place of succor, relief, clarity and purpose. But staying inside our kids mazes only distresses us. At any point, at any moment we have the ability to fly up out or dig down deep.
I am not trivializing my own or others suffering or thinking. I am only trying to find a way to experience my own life as having been meaningful and good.
