Sometimes it’s easier to share the joy from adoption rather than share the pain that results from adoption. Some adoptees spend their entire lives not knowing the town they were born in or date they entered this world. Some meet their birth families and experience immediate familiarity and belonging. Others feel like strangers. Whatever your experience is with adoption, it’s yours. Just as mine is mine. No one person’s experience cancels out another’s. 

 I’m an adoptee, and this is just a tiny glimpse at my experience

Our subconscious understanding of connection is developed through the health of the attachment we had with our primary caregiver and the state of their own nervous system during our earliest years of existence. If we had a primary caregiver who was physically detached, emotionally disconnected, or chronically activated and anxious then we learned to disconnect from Self in order to survive, building an insecure baseline for connections in future relationships.

As fear took the lead, I paused my writing. Nearly six months passed before I found the courage to come back online.

Much of what we humans subconsciously learn about relationships is experiential, with our earliest teachings coming from our primary caregiver(s). During these first years of our life is when we develop our sense of existence, self-identity, and our ability to relate to others based on how attuned and attached our caregiver(s) was to us; ideally building a secure attachment which later transforms into our ability to find safety within while connecting with others.

A secure relationship with accountability and the skills to repair ruptures with your children go hand-in-hand in creating emotional safety and stability within the parent-child relationship. Cultivating connection, compassion, curiosity, and confidence in both you and your child

Accountability is a skillset that we humans are meant to cultivate during our prime developmental years, per the example of our primary caregiver(s). However, if our parent or caregiver modeled an insecure relationship with accountability then that is what we learned. An insecure relationship develops out of fear, shame, and weaponized blame.

Then something happens, slowly but surely, families and society build glass houses around the girls, to contain them. The boys, though they are groomed to their own set of unhealthy beliefs systems based on their gender, have no such containment for they are offered an abundance of freedom at their fingertips. Girls can watch and observe the very freedoms boys have, but they must do so from within their glass houses. There, within those glass houses girls are raised to be polite, to keep quiet and accept whatever mistreatment comes their way. Girls are taught to be grateful for the indecent ways they are treated in day-to-day life, normalizing it in such a way that our society has become jaded to the dysfunction of it all. We are taught if a boy hurts us, he likes us. We are taught if our feelings get hurt, we are too sensitive. We are taught if we make too much noise or dress a certain way, we will attract the wrong kind of attention. We are taught if we fight back we are the villain, if we get hurt in the process we deserved it. We are taught to carry the accountability for the behaviors of men.

Grief is a powerful and mighty force, and when we are willing to let it in it can bring much growth and peace with it. The key being not to turn your back on it, or it’ll weigh you down. I told my grief it was welcome, and in that moment tears began streaming down my cheeks. With each tear came an image, or understanding, of what I was meant to grieve.

What kept me entangled in the web of dysfunction that was our mother-daughter relationship was my sense of hope. That hope kept me in a fantasy world, unable to see clearly that it was never my role to change her, let alone teach her how to be a mother. My hope enabled her behavior.

Acceptance set me free.

I so desperately yearned for someone, anyone, to love and accept me to the extreme extent in which I felt unlovable and invisible. I felt lost and alone and I blamed myself because that is what happens when a child is raised in a home where love was inconsistent and condition-based. Where your reality is constantly denied for the sake of a false image. Love was not safe, but still desired.

Discomfort is an empowering place to be though, it forces us to consider change, and when intentional it can bring with it healing and growth too. And not just individually, but generationally and societally. When we refuse to change in the bounds of discomfort, external blame and resentment can take hold of us.

For twenty-eight years of my existence the word mother meant pain to me. I was adamant and vocal during my youth and most of my twenties that I was not going to have children. I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting another in the ways my mother hurt me.

What I didn’t tell anyone was that for years, every few months or so in my dreams, a little girl whom I didn’t know would visit me, though she felt familiar.