Adoption, Both Hope & Sorrow.
November is National Adoption Month and as an adoptee, I have many feelings about adoption. It’s all so complex and confusing at times. Within me are still many wounds that I’m learning to sit with and integrate into my system in ways that allow connection and growth. The biggest of all, abandonment. Through IFS Parts work I’ve done amazing healing with non-verbal parts that used to have a deep hold over my fears and would easily intensify in romantic relationships. And yet, despite so much healing, so many of my other wounds and fears still stem from the abandonment of adoption, though at a less intense level. Everyone’s experience is unique to them. I’ve learned that no two adoptees have the same outlook on adoption.
Sometimes it’s easier to share the joy from adoption rather than share the pain that results from it. 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.
For me, on one side of the adoption experience I’ve been filled with absolute gratitude that because of adoption I was raised by an incredible father, who has played a crucial role in who I am today; in who I am as a parent. On the other side, it took me almost thirty years to unravel the messiness and heal the mother wound that was not only the result of my birth mother but the result of the woman who raised me too. These two women are connected to deep pains and wounds that I’ve spent a lifetime healing. That I’ll spend the rest of my life healing.
Adoption opened up financial privileges that my birth mother could not afford me. But resulted in handing me over to a mother who didn’t know how to love me courageously, but instead led with her own fears, resulting in a love that was tainted with chaos and control, resulting in unnecessary amounts of pain.
Adoption led me to the path of meeting the man who I chose to start a family with. And when I think of the ways my love for my daughter inspires me to grow, it all seems kismet. Yet, sometimes when the sadness in my heart is extra heavy, the cost of adoption feels like there’s been far too much pain in my life to make sense.
Adoption is both hope and sorrow, intricately woven and forever connected.
