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Duality23:24 Apr 04 2010
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Often I've heard people saying how they wish they were adopted, and I have always laughed and told them I am. It had always been a funny throw away line to make people laugh, one that I gave little thought to as a sort of self-defence mechanism. The truth being that the knowledge of my adoption only added to my sense of displacement, lack of involvement and in many cases isolation.
The funny thing is I had never felt abandoned by my birth mother, to me it some how made perfect sense for her to give me away, and instead I would wonder why my adoptive parents would bother to adopt me.
Then two years ago I found her...
And now here I am, a fully grown woman with children of her own, thrust into this strange double life of being a daughter to two very different women. I thought finding my birth mother would finally complete me, would answer all my questions and give me a sense of belonging and roots. Because in truth that has all I've ever wanted, somewhere to belong.
I should have remembered that nothing is ever that easy, that everything you do has a cost to pay. I've found that in a short space of time this woman who'd given birth to me then went on to live her life, is the perfect reflection of myself. We look the same, we've lived through the same kind of things, even down to things as personal preference we are the same. For 32 years we had gone our own way, yet our body mannerisms, speech patterns and how we react to things is as if we are twins not mother and daughter.
And each time we say goodbye I feel a little bit more unreal, taking days to try and fit back into the person and life that existed before we finally met.
I feel like I'm slowly splitting apart within the same body. There's the me that is desperate to reach out to my birth mother, wants to rest her head on her lap and never let go. Who wants to embrace her birth mother's husband as the closest thing to a real father she'll ever have, and who so desperately wants to stand as big sister to the half brother and sister she discovered she had.
But then there is the me that just feels old before her time, the one who's seen and survived through a little too much and has the physical and mental scars to prove it. Who's learnt the hard way that trust is one step away from betrayal, that family means only more pain and happy endings only exist in books and tv.
The fact that from the first moment she entered the place we'd agreed our first meeting would be, we “knew” each other. That within seconds we were talking over our coffees as if we'd never been apart, doesn't matter. Even the fact that my birth mother has never been much of a hugger, yet always has a hug for me, just doesn't seem to count...
I just still keep getting left torn up inside, lashed at from both sides for wishing for what I know I can't have, and slowly bleeding for what is right in front of me, yet I'm too frozen inside to reach out for.
And in this confusion is the debt I feel I owe to the woman who raised me, who may not have managed to protect me, but who had never caused me harm either. How do I reach out for another when I have never reached out to her? How can I so quickly bond with another, when no bond was ever formed with her? And how can I share my children with a whole different family, when she has done so much for them and has always been a wonderful and consistent grandmother to them?
How do I join together what feels like two different lives?
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COMMENTS
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Eleanna
08:22 Apr 05 2010
That must be such a hard thing to do i cant imagine, its like shes your birth mother so you probably want to form some kind of relationship as shes family but at the same time if you've not really had much to do with each other all these years how do you just suddenly act as if you've never been apart?? Think will probably take time and meeting up for a while before anything clicks into place, when you messaged me yesterday and said about your 2 mothers being there i did wonder but didnt like to ask!! :)
Angelus
15:18 May 08 2010
Oooooh, I wonder, did I share my story, with you?