National Adoption Month : Day 5

I used to think - and truly believe - that I could compartmentalize my life in regards to my adoption.  I believed that I could tuck my status away, take it out when I needed or wanted to talk to others in my circle, to feel validated, to work through some particular aspect of my reunion with my birth mother.  But with each passing year, it becomes more and more clear that there is no escape.  I may not wake up each morning, yawn, stretch, and say “yes, I’m still adopted”, but I have realized that truly, my adoption experience touches every aspect of my life.

Ever since I was young, I felt so strongly that marriage and children were key aspects to my own personal happiness.  It was nothing that was imposed upon me.  I wasn’t raised to believe that those are what would determine my worth.  Still, from the time I understood what a bride was, I wanted to be one.  I wanted to poofy dress and the bouquet.  I wanted to be swept off my feet.  I wanted someone to love and to be loved by.  

Likewise, I always wanted to be a mother.  Painfully aware as a child how difficult it had been for my mother to become pregnant, I knew that “playing pregnant” would upset her.  Games of house were played in secret.  Innocent games that I see my friends’ children playing in the open were hidden, forbidden thing.  I remember vividly on one particular occasion, my friend and I were playing “house” in my room.  I had stuffed some plush bear under my costume dress and walked around waddling and groaning about back pain - until my mother walked into the room.  I hit the floor like a bomb had gone off.  I’ve never moved faster in my life.  I dropped, not wanting her to see, not wanting her to hurt.  But I wanted it - desperately.  I wanted to see my face in someone else - something I had not known until late in my teens when I finally found my birth mother. 

But I have never been in a serious relationship.  The longest I was ever with any one person was just about six months - and it was semi-long distance.  The longest relationship after that, with one who was within reasonable distance, lasted all of a few weeks.  I would lament this - for years.  I was crushed that marriage - and children - seemed to be things that simply were not meant for me in my life.  Now, with a little more wisdom behind me, I’m more than certain that my adoption experience has tainted both of these things.  I cannot be in a relationship for long.  I always want to leave before they can leave me.  I don’t want to get too close.  I don’t want to ever be attached to anything.  It took me years to even get a cat because I didn’t want to love it - I didn’t want to get attached.  Knowing that about myself, how can I even consider children?

How cruel would it be to have a child, only to keep my distance so that I’m not hurt?  How selfish?

Being in reunion for almost ten years, I have only begun to scratch the surface with my birth mother.  It’s been ten years of one step forward, two steps back.  Most recently, just as I thought we had finally come to a place of understanding, where my own expectations of the relationship would no longer taint it or hinder it, I was contacted by a man claiming to be my brother by Her.  I assured him he was mistaken, that we had been in reunion for ten years and certainly she would have mentioned it.  But I was wrong.  In fact, she had two sons after me who she also placed for adoption.  When I confronted her, she stated it simply, as if it were such an easy thing to give birth and hand her babies over.  Those are my genes.  That is who I have come from.  Why on earth would I consider having children when my very being has been written and created by her.  I feel like a monster.  Or that I at the very least have the potential to be a monster.  Monsters should not have children.

At best, I see myself as damaged from my adoption.  A “half” person.  Broken.  How could I ever ask someone to take that on?