This is what it’s like to be “rootless” in your own family. Now some people will sit there and call this being adopted. I like to sit here and call it being lost. Some people who are adopted have this magical ability to not want to know their heritage.
They never have any questions about where they really come from because the identity of who they have built is so strong that not even the truth can break them down. These people are fucking super hero’s and I often wish I had that strength.
I sometimes would beg for the strength to not want to know or understand where I came from. To just be okay with having “enough”. But, then late at night when I’d try and sleep the questions would chip away at my mind when I only wanted to sleep.
Real-life would hit and I’d have to go to a doctor that would ask a silly question like my medical history… While most people don’t find this as much of an inconvenience as I would. As an adoptee essentially I’d a blank slant.
I have no real answers to mundane questions like who died of a heart attack, who had cancer, or if twins run in my family. Again here I am lost in a room full of people with “family” at my side during my appointment. Often times I”ll look through crowds of people searching for who I look like. Looking for belonging is often times the loneliest thing I’d find myself lost in.
Then the day might come where you will be lucky enough to connect some dots on your very empty family tree. But, this is the hard part here. Often times where adoptees often feel so confused. In the deep murky feelings of being left out of a family, a true blood family is the feelings of the people who made the choice to give you up.
Their memories are more or less filled with pain just around your very existence. It’s an extremely fine line between asking for a reunion and actually getting one. Not everyone in the family will welcome an adoptee. Often times it’s the adoptee that has to meet the birth family in the middle of their feelings on wanting a reunion and on what terms and conditions.
The lucky few are welcomed with open arms. There are far too many who are met with rejections and left to wander the world without closure. In these last few words are often the realities of being an adoptee that no one really stops to think about. If it’s a closed adoption we depending on the state we live in we can’t have our original birth certificate or our adoption records. As most birth parents who do not want to be identified will give permission to have the records unsealed.
What happens after an attempt to find that hidden spark of connection. You have to grieve a family that could have been and replaces it with what is. What changed is that you come out the stronger person then the people who rejected you. That’s a hard light to see in the vast darkness of unanswered questions that have been on your heart and in your mind for a lifetime. Just know and understand where ever you are in your search you are not alone.
Also, if you are the lucky individual to grow up with both parents and grandparents hug them a little tighter you have every adoptees dream (that is searching for family).
