Adoptees and Hope

William F Lynch, a Roman Catholic priest calls hope

the fundamental knowledge and feeling that there is a way out of difficulty, that things can work out, that we as human persons can somehow handle and manage internal and external reality, that there are solutions in the most ordinary and biological and physiological sense of that word, that, above all, there are ways out of illness.

His view of reality is that it is not ultimately conflictual. He believes that

being immersed in reality, belonging to it, provides the foundation for the beginning of hopefulness for all human beings, despite what may be the very difficult circumstances of relinquishment and adoption.

It is said that we are to find hope in our ‘future stories’, in our possible futures with our questions answered, and ideally, with our reunion needs met. We are to find and cling to the hope that some day, we will receive that letter from our birthmothers, that we will have that teary reunion in the airport, that we will no longer need the fantasy birth parents that we spent a lifetime creating.

But what happens when we do receive that letter? What happens when we do have that teary reunion, and we get to know the men and women who gave us away? And what happens when everything you expected to happen doesn’t? How, then, do we deal with the insatiable longing that still lurks in us?

It must be a common occurrence that upon meeting for the first time, or even over periods of time, we realize that what we dreamed our birth families to be can never exist. In fact, it must be an unavoidable truth. The fantasy we create in our minds cannot exist outside of our minds. Our mothers are not Queens, our fathers are not Kings. They are not flawless. They are humans. They are like us.

So how do we deal with reality? And how, when there is an unrequited interest in reunion, do we achieve a maintained sense of hope? How do we keep from falling into a pit of hopelessness when it would be so easy to focus on everything that did not happen according to plan in your reunion?

Moreover, what happens when your questions are answered by our birth families.. and we still cannot come to terms with the reality of our existence?

It seems there are still more questions than answers. And it seems there is little else to do but to continue to hope that they will be answered - if not by our birth families, then by ourselves in our journeys.