The slow creep started a couple of weeks ago.

I often blame it on the days getting shorter. As summer evenings begin to cool and the days grow shorter, at first I ponder whether it’s got something to do with the changing season or the atmospheric pressure.

Gradually it builds, this feeling of isolation and loneliness. Rejection seems to seek me, and no matter what else disproves it, I only have eyes to see the negative—each seeming to confirm that I don’t matter.

I feel tired. Deflated. Hopeless. Defensive. Friendless. Flat. Numb. Lacking energy.

Did I mention that my birthday is tomorrow?

Like many adoptees, I find my birthday to be a complicated day. I equate it to the mixed feelings many people—adopted or not—say they feel about Christmas. Like Christmas, birthdays get built up as joyous occasions, significant celebratory events. Yet lurking below the surface is often a well of emotions—many of which, if they were to be expressed, wouldn’t match cultural expectations AT ALL and so must stay tucked inside.

For adoptees, our birthdays often remind us of our losses. For those of us relinquished at birth, our birthdays may not be remembered but our bodies and brains hold on to the feelings. Disorienting sadness can overshadow everything, and we can develop a strong instinct to oppose festivities around our day.

Birthdays didn’t always make me feel this way, as you can tell by this gleeful picture taken during my eighth birthday party at The Organ Grinder:

This is partly because we process adoption differently at various stages in our lives. It’s also because my mom was the ultimate Magic Maker when it came to marking special occasions—Christmas always top of the list, but birthdays a close second!

In kindergarten, as in most years, my birthday fell on the first week of school. My mom built up my day by bringing in musical instruments—enough for every student. I still cherish the memory of marching in circles around the rug with my 16 classmates—tooting plastic horns, rattling tambourines, and shaking maracas as we paraded through the classroom to celebrate my big occasion.

This style of lavish treatment continued through college, with giant boxes of presents and handwritten love letters shipped to my dorm, and proceeded into my adulthood—well into it. My mom and dad flew to Seattle for my 41st birthday—unwilling to let the day go by without fanfare.

But then my mom died. Now birthdays are a reminder that I lost not one, but two moms.

Often times, I wish my mom had been able to spot my childhood grief. I wish she had raised me during an era where adoption-savvy information was readily available and she could have known about adoptee trauma and attachment wounds.

Other times, I realize that I had enough of a natural lens for sadness. And I love that my mom had blinders to it—at least on my birthday. The magic my mom created on my birthdays helped counter my sense of worthlessness in ways I only realized after she had gone.

I’m preemptively thanking you for any birthday wishes here, friends, and letting you know that I’m taking tomorrow off from social media to celebrate my birthday, Mom-style. I’m ready to come up out of my dark birthday funk.

I wish you were all here with me in person, and that Covid wasn’t restricting us from gathering together in person, so you could join me in a parade, blasting plastic instruments while shuffling in circles.

But I’m going to imagine my mom leading you in doing that, anyway. And you can imagine me smiling just as freely as I did when I turned eight.

The post Birthday, Mom-Style appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

First published by Red Letter Christians—

“You’re God’s gift to us.”

“God brought us together.”

“It was God’s will for you to join our family.”

Have you ever said things like this to your adopted child? For adoptees like me—growing up in Christian circles where adoption is often presented as biblically sanctioned and as abortion’s golden opposite—these blessing statements are often enthusiastically shared—both directly with adoptees and with others when our adoption stories are told.

While you’re likely speaking your sincere truth, and while God certainly may have lent a divine hand in bringing you and your child together, this kind of spiritual-speak can be dangerous. As someone who grew up hearing these messages again and again, I’m warning you that it could erode your parent-child relationship—and possibly your child’s belief in a loving God.

As a child, my journey with this started when I was a seven-year-old, following a huge yellow and black veined butterfly all over my front yard. Sadly, my butterfly friend was hit by a car. I stayed by her side as she suffered and ultimately died. As an adoptee prone to sensing and feeling anguish, I felt the butterfly’s death so deeply I thought that I, too, might die.

My mom didn’t know how to console me, especially as I spent days mired in tears and grief. She figured the best way was through church—and the promise of heaven.

Only … it was my mom who was consoled …. and transformed—into a full-fledged “born-again Christian.” She dove in big—first with a Mothers of Preschoolers group. Then by starting a neighborhood Bible study.

“It’s because of Sara that I found God,” my mom would boast to her friends and religious cohorts. Sooner or later, she’d launch into a re-telling of my butterfly story, which became a public talk she gave over and over throughout my life. Thanks to adoption, my mom was given the blessing of a child—who led her to her loving Savior.

People delighted in my mom’s beautiful story of a double blessing. But there was a long-term cost when it came to our mother-daughter relationship. There was also a cost to my faith.

While children are undeniably blessings, being overly effusive about “God’s divine plans” when it comes to adoption discounts the very real loss for adoptees and first/birth families—as if only one family’s triumph is what matters to God, as if the lifelong consequences for adoptees and first/birth families don’t matter.

Anytime we look past loss and grief in order to center ourselves in a story, we’re presenting an overly simplistic, and oppressive, view of religion. Touting “God brought us together” is the equivalent of saying, “Your tragedy is God’s will for my own benefit.” I’d even argue that declaring God’s very mysterious will with strong authority could violate the third commandment: “God won’t put up with the irreverent use of his name.” (Exodus 20:7 MSG)

What’s more, for adoptees—already prone to feeling unworthy from the moment of relinquishment no matter how wonderful the circumstances are in our adoptive homes—this presentation of God’s preference reinforces our tendency toward flawed thinking. It becomes more proof that we are broken, unwanted, insignificant. We’re already inclined to silently hold on to this pain and feel ashamed. Feeling that God is all about our adoptive parents, and we’re merely a tool to bring them joy, fulfillment, and family, can reinforce a belief that we don’t matter, further silence us, and alienate us from the God our faithful parents are desiring to point us toward.

This alienation is not entirely the result of religious messaging, to be fair. Adoption, by its very nature, can lead adoptees to question God. Nancy Newton Verrier, an adoptive mother and psychotherapist focused on separation and loss in adoption, has referred to a common experience for adoptees in infancy, where “the overall feeling is a betrayal of the universe, of God, of the cosmos, of the infinite being. This was not supposed to happen,” Verrier writes. “It is outside the realm of the natural order of life.”[1]

Adoption is not natural—and we gloss over this with heavy leaning on spiritual speak. An infant is not supposed to be separated from the mother whose womb brought forth life. Isn’t that at the heart of the pro-life argument?

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that so many adopted children raised in the Christian faith run from it as adults. Similar dissonance that adoptees notice in widespread religious messaging around adoption is real:

• God takes sides, and it’s not mine.
• Premarital sex is a sin … but it may also be God’s will to bring a baby to a family in need.
• We can be sure of God’s will … when it suits—because it couldn’t be God’s will for anyone to struggle with infertility and not have a child.
• Adoption is the answer to abortion … but pro-life isn’t as important when it comes to the historical and still prevalent use of corruption, coercion, and racism that can factor into adoption.

My private adoption happened to be the result of coercion. My adoptive mom had a hint that something wasn’t right about the circumstances surrounding my adoption, but she wanted a baby so badly she didn’t ask questions.

Knowing that she was a good person, I have come to understand that she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if she thought she’d taken another mother’s baby. She had to believe that my adoption was divinely arranged. Once I realized this, the spiritual-speak began to make a lot of sense.

Similarly, once I understood God in my own way, apart from religious justification, I could see that God always cared deeply about me as an adoptee. There was a holy hand looking out for me in my adoptive family. But I’ve come to understand that same divine presence would have been there had I stayed with my first/birth family, too.

I share all of this not to make you wrong for adopting—nor for fiercely loving your child and saying so. But out of a sincere hope that adoptive parents will steer away from the blessing language to be more honoring to adoptees and to God.

“Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven.” (James 1:17 MSG) Children are no exception, no matter how they come to your family. Thank God for the child who has blessed your life—but keep it private, remembering that adoption is always more nuanced than simplistic religious language can possibly convey.

[1] Nancy Newton Verrier, Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up (Baltimore: Gateway Press, Inc., 2003), 354.

© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published by Red Letter Christians.

The post The Dangers of Adoptees as Blessings appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

Mother’s Day can be hard—for other reasons besides missing my mom. That’s because I have another mom—the woman who raised me for my first nine months in utero. She delivered me into this world before we were pulled apart by shady adoption practices in an era when patriarchy was left totally unchecked.

I felt the mother loss throughout my entire life. I wondered about my birth mother constantly. I imagined what she looked like, and if I looked like her. I wondered if she thought of me. I looked to see myself in any older woman I admired. Fantasies held so much promise and power, they ruled.

RELATED: “Real” Talk in Adoption

Sadly, my mom had unresolved issues of jealousy and felt threatened by my first mother. My closed adoption was not only literal, but also emotional. I opted not to talk about my birth mother because I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings. But it added a layer of complexity to Mother’s Day—and to my relationship with both mothers every day.

Even now, as an adult, I struggle with fearing I’m hurting one or the other mothers in some way on this loaded occasion that is Mother’s Day. If I celebrate one mother, will the other mother feel left out? Is it dishonoring to one mom to honor the other? How can I honor both mothers?

RELATED: Moses and Me: A Biblical and Personal Case for Honoring Birth Mothers

Women being jealous of other women is commonplace. My mom was certainly not the first to feel envy of another woman—nor was she the only mom to feel pangs of worry and fear over the thought of losing her daughter to another mother.

In a way, it’s natural. When our hearts dare to love another deeply, the thought of losing that love cuts to the core—and there is almost nothing as fierce as mother-love.

I was reminded of this last night at bedtime, when my young daughter (biological to me) asked me in a whisper, “What’s your greatest fear, Mom?”

Losing you. My heart promptly whispered back. (But sharing this with my daughter in that moment felt inappropriate, so I responded in a murkier way that suggested the same thing.)

Even if fear of loss comes naturally to us as parents, though, that doesn’t make it okay to let fear take hold. Honoring both mothers is not an adopted child’s responsibility. Children are not meant to take care of their parents’ feelings. Children shouldn’t have to choose between mothers—both of whom hold a significant place in their child’s heart.

Today is Birth Mother’s Day. I only learned of this holiday recently, and I love it. It rounds out Mother’s Day weekend. Reaching out to, or talking about, your child’s birth mother today, in that same spirit of appreciation and love intended for Mother’s Day, will not only help lessen the mother-conflict for adoptees, but also remind everyone that that both mothers are part of a team.

As they say, there is strength in numbers, and it is a wonderful thing for a child to feel love for, and to be loved by, both mothers.

The post Celebrating Birth Mother’s Day appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

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Both the Hulu series and book by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere, have sparked a blaze in me as I devoured both from the perspective of an adult adoptee, mother, daughter, and writer. In celebration of both the book and the on-screen adaptation, over the next several days I’ll be sharing some of my reflections on various themes that stood out for me. There will definitely be spoilers in this review series, so if you haven’t yet watched and/or read, you may want to flag these for a different time, once you have.

 

Little Fires Everywhere and Giving Away Precious

Today I’m ruminating on what it means to give away that which is precious to us—factors that propelled key characters to make such sacrifices, and the benefits/rewards and ultimate cost of doing so. This time, I’m primarily concentrating on the mini-series, where certain plot points are portrayed differently than in the novel.

What leads us to sacrifice that which is precious to us?

I loved how Little Fires Everywhere had me considering this question in so many situations, such as:

• Lexie giving away her virginity
• Mia giving away a cherished piece of art
• Mia giving away her body for another family’s baby
• Bebe giving away her infant

First of all, I have to commend the series from a writing perspective, headed by showrunner and executive producer Liz Tigelaar, inspired and influenced, of course, by author Celeste Ng. What an artful setup of the characters’ pain. Their suffering feels all the more intense to us when we come alongside the characters’ emotions and know exactly what is precious to each of them … before it is given away and short-term rewards are overshadowed by complications that fester and burn into one of many little fires.

In all cases, desperation is the overwhelming driver. But what puts each character into that state of desperation, and the consequences that ensue, are unique for each character.

Lexie’s Virginity

Early on, we see it’s important to Lexie to hold off on having sex with Brian. She insists they wait until prom for their consummation, to model after Brenda and Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210.

But before long Brian pulls away from Lexie, after learning that she’s stolen Pearl’s story of personal struggle to use in her own Yale application essay. Lexie moves into desperate mode. Sex, she impulsively decides, is the only way to keep Brian close, and so she gives away that virginity she’d been holding on to as precious.

The reward? Lexie is able to hold on to Brian for a little while longer. She also gains a sense of superiority, being first among her friends to lose her virginity and brag about every detail.

But the cost is long-term intimacy. Lexie knows her fix is temporary and grows insecure and manipulative. Ethical and racial tension builds, and she has to work harder to protect her fragile relationship. Lexie recognizes the futility in the couple’s shallow level of relating soon after becoming pregnant. They’re not close enough for Lexie to honestly confide the pregnancy to him, especially after Brian makes it clear he’s not up for becoming a parent. Neither sex nor a potential baby would keep her relationship intact, so the sacrifice had been futile.

Mia’s Artwork

In episode four, “The Spider Web,” Mia finds herself in a situation where she decides to sell a piece of artwork that is especially meaningful. Over the course of several episodes, we learn of two cherished pieces of art—one a photographic expression of Mia’s “terrifying” side, created under the guideance of her mentor and eventual love interest, the renowned artist Pauline Hawthorne—and another, a photograph of Mia taken by Pauline Hawthorne. When Elena offers to buy the first piece, Mia tells her it’s not for sale. When Anita reminds Mia which piece would make the kind of money she needs, Mia at first insists she can’t sell that one.

But desperation pushes Mia to compromise her stand. She’s projecting all kinds of pain onto her co-worker and friend, Bebe, wanting to help fight a battle for a child in a case against privilege that echoes her nightmares. Out of desperation she first offers to sell one piece of art to Elena, and when that fails, sends the Pauline Hawthorne art to Anita.

The cost, though, is that Mia’s very efforts to keep her daughter close end up pushing Pearl away when the Pauline Hawthorne photo leaks to the media. The privacy Mia’s worked so hard to build, ever on the run to stay hidden from her past, is now compromised. Pearl is rightfully angry with her mother, questioning Mia’s lies and their life of unnecessary hardship and transitions. These are substantial costs.

Mia’s Body

In episode six, we finally come to understand Mia’s past. Always a passionate artist, she’d been elated to move to New York to attend a prestigious art school for a degree in fine arts. Soon university offers more than a honing of Mia’s artistic talents, when her mentor takes an interest in Mia.

But after Mia’s financial assistance is rescinded, she becomes desperate fast. As a struggling student without support from her parents, Mia doesn’t have the means to come by $12,000 to stay in school. She takes her brother’s advice to heart, “There’s always a way,” saying yes to an offer of surrogacy so that she can hold on to both art school and Pauline. The same body Mia had been honoring through her art, and through following her sexual longings, gets sacrificed.

Mia gets to stay in school. Her relationship with Pauline progresses to a deeper level. The cost, though, is that Mia finds she cannot go through with the surrogacy arrangement. After her brother dies and she loses her parents due to their shame and ostracizing, Mia can’t handle additional loss. Fleeing from New York and changing her name, Mia ends up creating for herself a lifetime of running—instability for her daughter, while Mia is plagued with nightmares of Pearl’s father catching up to her.

Bebe’s Baby

When we are fully introduced to Bebe’s story, we are dropped into the scene that shows what she holds most precious—right in her arms. But Bebe is in her moment of ultimate desperation—an immigrant experiencing difficulties breastfeeding while alone and living in poverty, unable to afford electricity to heat her barren apartment or formula for her ceaselessly crying infant, May Ling. It’s easy to see, though, how much May Ling means to her, through Bebe’s desperation to keep her baby alive.

As Bebe’s desperation escalates into hopelessness, she makes a life-changing decision and gives precious May Ling away—leaving her at the fire station.

The reward comes for May Ling. She is treated for the hypothermia she’d suffered and placed in a new home. There, she’s nurtured by two loving parents who’d been desperate to finally have a child to care for and bestow with a plush and cozy life thanks to their means.

The cost, though, is that May Ling can’t rest until she knows where her baby is. She’s haunted and overcome emotionally at the sight of other young girls who would be her daughter’s age. She’s full of regret and desperately wants to reunite with her baby.

And while May Ling is too young for words, the additional cost is to her sense of self. No matter how plush and loving her new life with the McCullough family may be, her formative experiences of taking in the world are based on the ultimate separation: between mother and child.

As an adoptee, I know too well how deeply the trauma of this loss will affect May Ling (renamed Mirabelle) for the rest of her life, throughout all of her relationships. It will be harder for her in a family that has shown an inability to acknowledge the importance of her heritage and first mother. She will likely feel a divide between the two mothers, giving rise to fantasies and secrecy as she pines for her first mother.

Like many adoptees, Mirabelle may feel pressure to live up to her adoptive parents’ great expectations—unspoken, but inferred: that she fill the hole left by their tragic season of infertility. If the significance of Mirabelle’s adoption is unacknowledged and her preverbal grief left untreated, she’ll likely either embrace the role of people-pleaser at the expense of her true self, or she might show any number of signs of what could later be labeled rebellion—both are common destructive paths for adoptees in similar situations.

This is not to say the cost to Mirabelle is completely hopeless, but her parents are going to need to wake up soon! (And based on the ending, this is likely a moot point.)

So … are such sacrifices of the heart worth it?

As I look at the collective of these examples in Little Fires Everywhere, it’s easy for me to judge. Giving away that which is precious to our hearts ALWAYS seems like an unwise path to choose—at least in hindsight. In fiction and engaging on-screen drama, it amps up the plot and engages us in the story. But as far as what is good for the characters, the cost seems too great in the end to have made sacrifices of the heart worth it.

This is how life is, though, isn’t it? And off-screen, there’s more to it than that. Outcomes of each complicated heart-choice build into a series of other complex heart-choices, each bringing about other rewards and costs. A reader recently shared these words about a conversation she had about my book:

“Life is drama. We DO have ups and downs. Those hard parts of the story are the parts that need resolution. And Sara showed us that resolution and redemption. In other words, don’t judge a book by the messy part of the plot.”

I believe her words apply to Little Fires Everywhere, too. Without the drama, without the ups and downs, without circumstances that sometimes result in hard choices sacrificing the precious, there is no opportunity for change and growth. To quote from my memoir, Searching for Mom—not to be shameless, but because there seem to be a lot of complementary themes:

“Mistakes of all kinds are messy. Mistakes are painful. Mistakes hurt—often others. My mistakes hurt you, and all those who haven’t had a chance to know you. But mistakes help us grow. Mistakes offer us the opportunity to transform.”

To that end, I’ve enjoyed how Little Fires Everywhere has transformed me, pushing me to consider so many examples of ways life brings us to the point of choices, and the impact of those choices when our core values are most compromised.

There are even more examples of other key characters giving away that which is precious: Pearl, Elena, Bill—to name a few and the list could go on. What things touched you in this regard? Join me on Facebook and Instagram for conversation. I’d love to discuss more!

RELATED: Little Fires Everywhere, Narcissism, and Mother-Blaming

The post Little Fires Everywhere—An Adult Adoptee’s Reflections: Giving Away Precious appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

Both the Hulu series and book by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere, have sparked a blaze in me as I devoured both from the perspective of an adult adoptee, mother, daughter, and writer. In celebration of both the book and the on-screen adaptation, over the next several days I’ll be sharing some of my reflections on various themes that stood out for me. There will definitely be spoilers in this review series, so if you haven’t yet watched and/or read, you may want to flag these for a different time, once you have.

 

Little Fires Everywhere, Narcissism, and Mother-Blaming

In today’s reflections on Little Fires Everywhere, I’ll touch on narcissism and mother-blaming—another oft-practiced form of misogyny.

Were you at all like me? I found it incredibly easy to dislike, and sometimes hate, the character of Elena Richardson throughout both the novel and screen adaptation. Elena made me bristle especially in the book, when I got more of a glimpse into her tainted motives than I did when watching the ever-effervescent Reese Witherspoon play Elena (where my fan-girl mind had to do some serious mental gymnastics to despise her).

Elena could be so calculating. Her striving to be perfect, to look good at all costs, and to present the idealized image of herself and her family members came off as abrasive, to say the least. (I cried at her cruelty over Izzy’s shoes during the Christmas photo re-take.) The way Elena meddled in others’ affairs was troubling. The subtle ways she dropped compliments and helped others, less out of altruism, and more because it made her feel good about herself—ick. And what about that uncomfortable, squirmy feeling that comes over other characters, and viewers, whenever Elena is giving herself props to appear “woke,” and in so doing, negates the impression she’s working so painstakingly to craft?

Little Narcissists Everywhere?

Personally, I think the word “narcissist” is dangerously overused in this day and age, almost to the point of meaninglessness caricature. Still, the word came to mind often as I both read and watched. I could see some of my own mother in Elena, and I’ve heard from others—many fellow adoptees—who have been affected by seeing their mothers in Elena’s character, too. While Elena is not an adoptive mother, adoptive mothers, like any other mother, can sometimes act in self-serving ways that compel adoptees and therapists to refer to them as narcissists.

If I’m brutally honest, I could also see some of myself in Elena at times. (Speaking of “woke,” that seems to be one of Celeste Ng’s wake-up calls: that we inspect the hidden, and sometimes darker, sides of ourselves that scare us.) I love an organized, color-coded family calendar as much as Elena does, for instance, and I get a dose of neurotic joy beautifying Pinterest-worthy lunches for my kids—both of which can be annoying to those around me if not tempered. I, too, have gotten frustrated when my great plans for sentimental photos are thwarted by the reality of others’ emotions that are out of my control.

RELATED: MY PHOTO LESSONS

But is this label fair for any mother—or woman, for that matter?

When Elena’s ex called her a narcissist at the end of their New York meetup scene, the word no longer seemed to fit. Somehow when a man was calling Elena a narcissist on screen, it woke me up. His name-calling reminded me of other words that are used to label women. Bitch. Cunt. Psycho. To name a few. In defense of Elena and all women who’ve been painted with any of these labels—by men and complicit women alike—I felt protective.

It would be easy to write off Elena as a narcissist—or any other degrading label of choice. As I wrote in my memoir, Searching for Mom, I took a significant life detour labeling my adoptive mother a narcissist. Easy. What was hard was the deep emotional work in looking away from my judgmental lens to see my mom as a whole person—to consider the wounds she suffered as well as the many gifts she brought to the world.

Labeling mothers and women as narcissists is almost always too easy—and too misogynistic, which is dictionarily defined as hatred, distrust, or dislike of women. Like I came to realize with my mom, there is more to Elena’s character than what some would coin her “nasty” actions. There is more to most of us than that. That’s the problem with caricatures: they mold complex people into one-dimensional objects of derision. Maybe I’ve been extremely sheltered or just plain lucky, but I’ve never gotten to know any person who is as simplistic as that—even those who seem to be among the most flawed.

Father-Blaming

Did you judge Elena’s husband, Bill Richardson (played by Joshua Jackson) on the same scale as Elena? At my first pass through the series, I’ll admit that I did not conjure any labels to throw his way.

But why not? Celeste Ng gives us many examples of ways we could father-blame, after all. Bill is largely absent when the four children, each born within a year of each other, are young and Elena is exhausted, struggling, and completely alone and unseen. During his kids’ adolescent years, Bill continues to be checked out a lot of the time, missing sibling conflicts as they take place under his nose that he turns away from in order to move along with his own agenda.

Most destructively, he knows important things about his daughter, Izzy, that would have been important to share with his co-parent—not at the sake of Izzy’s trust in him, but in the name of helping Elena, as the more engaged parent, come alongside Izzy, too. Had she understood more of Izzy’s feelings as she struggled to make sense of her sexuality, perhaps Elena could have grown more in her own understanding and acceptance. There were seeds planted that perhaps such understanding could one day be a possibility. Had Bill participated and coached Elena more, one of the main fires could have been extinguished before it had a chance to ignite.

Further, in episode one as Elena expresses concern about her daughter, Bill interrupts to ask his wife, “Have you considered talking to someone?” Not that therapy wouldn’t do Elena some good, but the implication is that Elena is entirely the problem. There’s no joint responsibility as co-parents, and underneath, there’s mother-blame.

All of this is not to say Elena isn’t problematic as a mother, nor do I mean to excuse diagnosed narcissism and abusive mothers. But in Little Fires Everywhere, Elena is not the sole problem.

Blaming mothers, and labeling them, are just other faces of misogyny that miss the grey areas that are a reality of humanity and life. Grey areas are what make people and this world interesting, and it’s why Little Fires Everywhere, exposing so many of these complexities, is so compelling.

What did you find particularly compelling about the book or the show? What are your thoughts on narcissism and mother- or father-blaming? I hope you’ll join me in the conversation on Facebook or Instagram.

RELATED: Little Fires Everywhere and Surrogacy

The post Little Fires Everywhere—An Adult Adoptee’s Reflections: Narcissism and Mother-Blaming appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

Both the Hulu series and book by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere, have sparked a blaze in me as I devoured both from the perspective of an adult adoptee, mother, daughter, and writer. In celebration of both the book and the on-screen adaptation, over the next several days I’ll be sharing some of my reflections on various themes that stood out for me. There will definitely be spoilers in this review series, so if you haven’t yet watched and/or read, you may want to flag these for a different time, once you have.

Little Fires Everywhere and Surrogacy

One of the things that struck me as I read the book was the theme of surrogacy.

Born by Surrogacy

There is the obvious storyline of Mia hired as a surrogate—a plotline that fascinated me because surrogacy is something that I don’t often ponder on a deep level. I’m thankful for Little Fires Everywhere for bringing this to my attention, helping me reflect on how children born through surrogacy can mirror some of the experiences of relinquishment that affect adoptees. Questions common to both experiences include:

• How is your identity shaped by not knowing a significant genealogical relative?
• How does parental loss and wondering affect you growing up, especially as you embark on the adolescent journey that’s all about making sense of who you are?
• How can withheld information and secrecy erode your relationship with the caregivers you need to trust?

In addition to the literal storyline of surrogacy, I also relished the way Little Fires Everywhere made me think about other expressions of mother surrogacy.

Mother Surrogates

Izzy and Elena had a strained mother-daughter relationship for various reasons. From my perspective having studied child development and attachment dynamics for the last decade through The Neufeld Institute, Izzy was born more sensitive for this world. This was portrayed through her difficulties breastfeeding and coming to a place of rest as an infant, and at the onset of adolescence, through her keen ability to pick up nuances that hardly blipped on her siblings’ radars.

Izzy (portrayed by actor Megan Stott), is also full of counterwill—a resistance that’s only natural during adolescence, but especially so when her mother’s agenda is so strong and leaves little room for anything that doesn’t squeeze into her tight box of what is considered “perfect.” Counterwill is important and necessary, but since unwelcomed and fought by Elena (played by Reese Witherspoon), it made for an especially rocky mother-daughter relationship with Izzy.

Izzy and Mia

Because of this strain, Izzy goes on the search for other mothers. As someone who’s written about my own experiences searching for other mothers when my own didn’t live up to my idealized image of “perfect,” I could really relate to Izzy as a character.

I also felt immense relief for Izzy as she found a mother surrogate in Mia Warren (played by Kerry Washington). While less than ideal that Izzy needed to go outside her family to find a caring adult who could see and accept her as she was, Mia turned out to be exactly the caring adult who Izzy needed, at exactly the right time. Mia, as a role model and mother surrogate, normalized Izzy’s complicated emotions, nurtured Izzy’s natural artistic emergence, and filled Izzy with hope for the future.

Pearl and Elena

Likewise, there were ways Elena Richardson served as a mother surrogate to Pearl (played by Lexi Underwood). Even if Elena had ulterior motives at times (portrayed in greater detail in the novel), she offered Pearl maternal support in ways that Mia could not: career advice, a sense of structure, and a more gushing form of affection. In the novel, Pearl’s initial observations are noted this way:

“Mrs. Richardson was quick to hug her—her, Pearl, a virtual stranger—simply because she was one of Moody’s friends. Mia was affectionate but never effusive; Pearl had never seen her mother embrace anyone other than her. And yet there was Mrs. Richardson coming home for dinner, pecking each of her children atop the head and not even pausing when she got to Pearl, dropping a kiss onto her hair without a moment of hesitation. As if she were just one more chick in the brood.”

Sometimes children are hard to parent. Other times parent do miss the mark in certain areas—especially when our own stuckness or humanity rubs up against that of our children. Sometimes we aren’t meant to be everything to every child all of the time. Sometimes we need the support of others from the community to fill in the gaps. And sometimes there is simply a natural human tendency to want what you don’t have. It’s where expressions like “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” are born.

This isn’t always sinister. Even though it made more compelling drama on screen by having a dose of suspicion and secrecy at play, mother surrogacy doesn’t have to equate to two mothers pitted against one another. Because at so many times Little Fires Everywhere showed Elena pointing Pearl back to her mother for permission, and Mia doing the same, this important nuance felt honored. It was subtle, but we saw that two women can be allies in mentoring and mothering children together, even without intention.

But are mothers replaceable? This is a key question I had to wrestle with extensively as an adoptee and as a mother, and have written about as a key theme in my memoir, Searching for Mom. And so it is a question I considered throughout Little Fires Everywhere while thinking about the multiple mothers and daughters portrayed.

May Ling, or Mirabelle, and Bebe/Linda

This brings me to the emotionally charged situation of young May Ling (or Mirabelle) and the battle—in court and in the media—between her first/birth mother, Bebe Chow (played by Huang Lu), and her adoptive mother, Linda McCullough (portrayed by Rosemarie DeWitt). Again, two mothers pitted against each other: the adoptive mother, a surrogate for the first mother who gave up her child for a variety of complicated factors that I’ll get into in a different review.

As we learn the story of both mothers, it’s hard not to sympathize with each of them in different ways. Both Bebe and Linda have experienced a lot of loss—more loss than seems humane or fair for any mother to bear.

And here is where I had hoped for a little less subtlety. As an adoptee who has felt a massive mother-divide and spent a lifetime yearning for an honoring of both mothers, I really wanted Little Fires Everywhere to go a bit further in showing that both mothers could be the answer.

RELATED: Moses and Me: A Biblical and Personal Case for Honoring Birth Mothers

We see that, of course—through Bebe’s ongoing missing and pursuit of her lost daughter, and through the caring Linda expresses through physical closeness, affection, and an entire extra room filled with toys (however misguided coming from a place of such privilege). But we’re left to form our own opinions. This is always important in storytelling.

And yet, I would have loved a hint to an answer to the question, “Are mothers replaceable?” to be a bit more leading. I yearned for at least one character—even if not a major player, but the social worker, one of the lawyers, or simply a news reporter—to more strongly point Linda in the direction of honoring both mothers. It may not have been realistic, especially for the time period in which Little Fires Everywhere is set, when open adoption and honoring of first/birth mothers was still so new to the scene. But it would have been more helpful to the adoption conversation in this era.

Speaking of conversation, let’s have some! I’ve been really interested in others’ perspectives on the thought-provoking Little Fires Everywhere and surrogacy as it pertains to all of its expressions of motherhood. Are mothers replaceable? In what ways could both mothers be honored in each of the various mother-daughter relationships depicted? Is adoption surrogacy, or is it something else? What other examples of surrogacy did you pick up on? Join me in the conversation on Facebook or Instagram.

RELATED: Little Fires Everywhere, Narcissism, and Mother-Blaming

The post Little Fires Everywhere—An Adult Adoptee’s Reflections: Surrogacy appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

First published by Lavender Luz—As a child, I embodied the role of Fearful Adoptee as if it were a paid Broadway gig. Fretting? Check. Nail-biting? Nailed it. Teeth grinding? In my sleep, baby … though I always slept with my eyes partially open—an unconscious attempt, I now know, at spotting danger coming before it could creep up on me.

The catalog of my childhood fears was longer than my holiday wish list and included such terrors as The Dark, The Basement, thunderstorms, tornadoes, fireworks, spiders, snakes, Ferris wheels, roller coasters, burglars, and Freddy Krueger. In my memoir, Searching for Mom, I wrote: Everywhere I looked, it seemed I had no control over the world around me. I had no idea that as an adoptee I was predisposed to remain in survival mode, that “when trauma happens at such an early age, fear is part of the residue.”¹

Now that I’m adulting, I have tools to settle my fears when they threaten to unravel or freeze me. Being conscious of attachment wounds and their effects goes a long way, as does maturity and a host of skills and resources that stretch my brain out of its primal mode that’s driven by fear.

Under Stress: Fears & Needs of Adopted Children

But my fears haven’t been completely vanquished, so imagining how my younger self would have felt during a global pandemic is fairly easy. As COVID-19 first began showing itself in my region, the frightened adopted child in me certainly sought to take over. For this I’m glad, because it helps me relate to the emotions of others—particularly, today’s adopted children—who may be experiencing similar thoughts in response to today’s crisis.

Here are four things parents need to know about adoptees during times of pervasive stress:

Let me know that I’m not alone.

Now that we’re more than a month into it, I’m not so sure I would have felt as threatened as a child by the COVID-19 pandemic as I was by so many other things that rattled me. The common thread in my childhood fears was that I felt alone—it was up to me to notice the threats. It was my job to pay attention and move to safety. I believed it was my sole responsibility to save myself and my family. It was an impossible load for a child to shoulder, and failing left me feeling isolated, frustrated, and even more scared much of the time.

For decades I awoke to recurring nightmares, I wrote in Searching for Mom. Nightmares where tornadoes would be whipping wildly around, right outside our living room windows. But my parents wouldn’t join me in retreating to the safety of the basement.

One of the silver linings in this pandemic is knowing that we are all in it together. Noticing the danger of COVID-19 is no longer the sole job of the hypervigilant adoptee. Almost everyone, around the globe, is paying attention to the threat.

What a relief this would have been for me as a child, as it is for me now, to know I’m not alone in seeing the menace of this virus and taking it seriously.

Home is my safe place.

When I was six years old, I had a school assignment to fill in the blank for the statement: I feel safest when _____________ . My answer? When I am at home. Home is a place where most children feel safe — assuming they are living with at least one caring adult.

With the exception of parents who are front line workers, or those living in areas without mandated sheltering-in-place protocols, right now parents must stay home with their children. The resulting togetherness can be comforting to young children, even in the midst of danger, and it has been for me as an adult, as well. I’m physically holding my loved ones close—closer than ever before possible.

For the first time none of my loved ones, near or far, across generations and birth/adoptive/extended families, are risking their lives in many of the usually unnoticed ways: driving on the freeway, bicycling in traffic, participating in sports, going to school. More than I like to admit, my adoptee brain is ever on guard for accidents that could take away my loved ones, creating an undercurrent of worry that has been resolved by the fact that the pandemic is keeping everyone home.

There’s still worry, obviously, but right now it’s funneled into one fear—that one of my loved ones contract COVID-19—rather than directed at any number of identified and unidentified catastrophes that subversively hum in the back of my mind.

I’m hyper-aware that my parents could die.

Speaking of ongoing worries, the fear that we could lose our adoptive parents any moment is a real, ongoing threat for many adoptees, even if we’re unaware of how pervasive this fear is and how it can drive our emotions and behavior. After all, we already lost our first parents. No matter the circumstances, loss precedes any adoption. Even if we don’t recall the relinquishment, our brains remember, and have responded accordingly, to parental loss.²

Facing real or imagined separation of our adoptive parents, which we presume could happen anytime, can be equally, and sometimes more, traumatic. For adopted children with any knowledge of COVID-19, who’ve heard that older adults are at a higher risk for death, this can be immensely alarming—even more so for adoptees with family members personally affected by COVID-19.

If we’re old enough, we want to be leveled with. Denying there are monsters under the bed or bad germs that can kill is gaslighting and crazy-making. We want and need the truth, as developmentally appropriate, together with confident assurances that our family members are doing everything possible to minimize the risk and that we will be cared for and loved no matter what.

I need to cry and I need to laugh.

If I’m not crying or laughing regularly, I’m prone to raging. There’s no way around it—right now I’m full of emotions—frustration, sadness, alarm, lack of control.

Emotions need to move. This is not specific to adoptees, nor to children, nor to this pandemic. But adoptees already hold a lot of emotion inside. Plus, we have a tendency to suppress our emotions even in normal times. In a time of crisis, our basket of emotions can overflow pretty quickly if not regularly emptied.

To empty my basket, I need a lot of sad books and movies. I need funny books and movies. Sometimes I need scary books and shows to play with my alarm in a not-for-real, non-threatening way. I need to write, paint, journal, dance, and play the piano. What do these activities have in common? They cater to my natural bent, aren’t outcome-based, and give me a chance to express emotions from another angle, rather than tackling them head-on.

Child developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld calls these, “safe emotional playgrounds for our frustration.”³ Such playgrounds are important to everyone’s mental health right now—adopted and biological children, as well as adults.

More to Come on Adoptees & the Covid-19 Pandemic

These are just four of my pandemic-related thoughts to shed light on dynamics for other adoptees and nonadopted children.

In part two, I will share specific ways I’m parenting, informed by both lived experience as an adoptee, as well as my studies in attachment and child development. My hope is that these strategies will help you bring down your child’s alarm, keep loved ones close, and even offer the opportunity for fun in the midst of these difficult times.

¹ Nancy Newton Verrier, Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up (Baltimore: Gateway Press, Inc., 2003), 58.

² Paul Sunderland, “Adoption and Addiction: Remembered Not Recalled,” LifeWorks Community, January 1, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3pX4C-mtiI .

³ Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., “Taking Care of Children in Alarming Times,” Neufeld Institute editorials, (March 30, 2020), https://neufeldinstitute.org/taking-care-of-children-in-alarming-times/ .

© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published by Lavender Luz.

The post Fearful Adoptees & the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Guide for Parents appeared first on SARA EASTERLY.

But I didn’t always use these words as a weapon, and deep down, I didn’t intend for them to be. The “real mom” tumbled out of me without conscious thought, coming from an unspoken place of longing, since infancy, for my birth mother and pain over the very real feelings of relinquishment. A time or two I shared with her more vulnerably that I wondered about my “real mom.” In neither case was the “real mom” making a statement about my adoptive mom as being lesser or being unreal. It both cases, “real mom” was really about my grief.

Like many adoptive mothers, mine took issue with the word “real.” She took her job as my mother seriously and felt offended by the suggestion that she wasn’t real. She cried. She tried to educate the word out of me. She’d remind me of all the ways she was my “real” mother: packing my school lunches every day, showing up at all of my gymnastics meets, engaging with my teachers, volunteering in my classrooms, standing by me through struggles with friends or boyfriends.

She was a very good mom, no question—in fact, an exceptional mom in most ways. But I wish my mother had paused to realize the inherent compliment I was giving her when I mentioned finding my “real mom.” I felt safe enough with her to lash out in anger. But more importantly, secure enough in her love to reveal my inner, deep, usually very private feelings. The person closest to me was my adoptive mom, after all, and I relished sharing myself with her. My deepest yearning was for my adoptive mother to know and love me—ALL of me.

It is only natural for adolescent adoptees, as we develop and grow, to change and transform when it comes to our understanding of adoption. Relinquishment affects us differently during adolescence—already a time of great sadness and pining over the lost innocence of childhood. Feeling an additional loss of our first family, and our origins, can be even more overwhelming—so much so that our protective brains try to numb it.

So when my mom tried to talk me out of my grief and steer me away from the “real mom” who was a part of me, I shut down. I did what any Good Adoptee would do: I gave her what she wanted, and in doing so I refrained from being honest. I kept myself hidden. I’d already lost my first “real” mother. I couldn’t afford to lose my next mother—my equally “real” adoptive mother. I learned to toe the party line in my family, morphing myself into the daughter my mom needed me to be and hiding any parts that might disappoint her or threaten her love.

This sort of worked for my mom. But it didn’t work for me. Over the years, I became unhealthy emotionally. I learned to censor myself with my family. I had to lie to my mom, as well as to myself, about who I was and who I wondered about. Psychologically I had to pretend I wasn’t adopted and that relinquishment didn’t shape my identity in significant ways. I was forced to live “in the fog” of denial and numbness.

My mom had no idea that I kept her at an emotional distance. From the outside, everyone, including my mom, thought we were a bonded mother/daughter duo. And we were indeed close in many ways. But my mom did not succeed at winning my heart—which had been tucked safely away in a thick, protective case—particularly closed off to her. Mothers go away, my pre-verbal brain had long ago noted. It felt dangerous to get too close to my adoptive mother. How could I believe her love was “real,” if I’d never been able to show her my “real” self?

So … was it really working for my mom? It wasn’t until she was dying and I was in my forties that our relationship finally had its moment of truth.

My new book is a spiritual memoir about our complete mother-daughter journey. I published Searching for Mom in hopes that by sharing my real and raw perspective, I can help others understand the often-misunderstood hearts of adoptees … and ultimately find hope. I share the story specifically for adoptive parents—and for adoptees. I hate that it took my mom’s death for our relationship to deepen. My wish is for adoptive parents to win their adoptees’ hearts well before that, and for adoptees to know what it’s like to bask in the feeling of being fully known and loved—for ALL that they are.

Sadly, the more adoptees are silenced, the more we stay secretive … and the more we stay secretive, the more we enable the false narrative about adoption that our culture has been fed: that adoption is purely a saccharine-sweet fairy tale—a happily-ever-after story that starts and ends when a family gets the child they’ve longed for. Yes, it can be happy. It was that for me. AND … it was also very hard.

Adoption is much more complex and nuanced than we as a culture have been led to believe by viral YouTube videos and messaging from adoption agencies or the Church. What an adoptive family gains is a direct result of what an adoptee has lost. Scientifically, there is a bond created between mother and child—pregnancy and childbirth were designed to facilitate that. No matter the noble, tender, loving circumstances, when that bond is disrupted, there will be some level of fallout.

Let’s continue to share the fluffy and happy stories. We all need those in this day and age, for sure. But let’s balance it with equal discussion and honesty about adoption’s heartaches and complications—the mother-longing that adoptees carry inside, whether consciously or unconsciously, that leads to a terminology battle between “real” mothers. Acceptance of the inner conflict is the only path toward equipping adoptive parents to understand the adoptee’s psychology. That’s the only way we can truly bring about closer, more authentic relationships for everyone. The truth is that’s the only “real” that matters when it comes to adoption.

© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published by Lavender Luz.

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I am incredibly touched that Searching for Mom has garnered a gold medal in the memoir category of the Illumination Book Awards, “Shining a Light on Exemplary Christian Books.” What an absolute honor and what fine company I’m among.

A part of me wants to keep this on the down-low, after prattling on so much about my journey with this book—how I came to realize that looking for outside validation in order to prove my worth and share my voice wasn’t serving me: only keeping me silenced and feeling unworthy. Is it okay to be crying joyful tears over outside validation right now?

But I can’t help it. I am truly so moved by this award—which is feeling especially impactful personally because it’s in the Christian space. I am aware that my story and my faith may not be for everyone, and that’s totally okay. But there has been some very damaging messaging in the evangelical space for decades when it comes to adoption. It’s very hard to break into the Christian space as an adoptee memoirist and speaker because there is such a clinging to that message. There is almost nowhere where adoptees are silenced more than in the church, where the focus can be largely about “doing God’s work,” with little knowledge or regard for the wake of grief that’s experienced by first families and adoptees. And so there isn’t a lot of literature about how adoption affects our primary attachments—especially to our adoptive mothers and to our God.

It was confusing to grow up surrounded by this messaging. It took me an entire memoir to work through it, and I’m still processing it. To sort of understand what it’s like, imagine your mother dying and not a single person providing comfort or room for your sadness—only telling you over and over again how “God is so amazing and wise in his ways” for making sure everything worked out so beautifully for the person who is telling you this. You’d find it off-putting, to put it mildly.

I did not understand this as an infant or as a child—nor for much of my early adulthood. I only knew that I seemed wired to keep both my adoptive mother and my family’s faith at an arm’s distance from my heart. And then, as my mom was dying—my second mother-loss—I experienced a profound shift when I discovered that God had been grossly misrepresented. God was there for me and cared about my part of the story, too, all along … only I had no idea until I got to know God myself, without any go-betweens. Unfortunately as humans we are all flawed, so misrepresentation is going to happen when it comes to putting a face on any religion. And no matter how well-meaning and loving any family may be, we all have blind spots. The grief that is a part of adoption is a huge blind spot within many Christian families, as well as in our culture.

Now that the book has been out for a few months and I’m hearing from and talking to real readers, I’m also understanding that it’s no longer about just me. Allowing others to silence me wasn’t serving ANYONE. Telling the truth is the only way to break through to authentic relationships. Holding secrets close when it comes to adoption’s heartaches supports the false narrative of adoption. A lie. Being truthful, while still holding on to hope, is the only way to honor God, those closest to us, as well as today’s adoptees and their families.

For all of these reasons I’m overjoyed to have received this recognition for Searching for Mom. I hope that it gives my mother-daughter story some extra wings—to help broaden its reach for the large numbers of people who are touched by adoption, as well as anyone impacted by complicated mother-daughter relationships, grief, or the twists and turns in their own spiritual journey.

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First published by This Adoptee Life—My domestic U.S. adoption took place in the 1970s when I was two days old. I’d been told it was a “grey-market adoption,” and as a teenager who loved a good story to tell, I relished the avant-garde sound of that. A story with a hint of scandal and intrigue helped make up for the brokenness I felt inside. Even though I’d always been told that I was special because I’d been “chosen,” that wasn’t a story I bought. Deep down, I felt abandoned, discarded, unimportant. Unwanted.

Just before turning 40, I finally worked up the courage to tell my mom that I wanted to search for my birth mother. I’d spent a lifetime secretly longing for her, and by the time my milestone birthday approached, my near-constant, unconscious searching had escalated to such a dramatic point that it became clear it was time to attend to my emotional baggage.

My mom didn’t handle the news well. In between tears, she turned downright cruel. To be fair, she had recently gone through a double lung transplant and the cocktails of drugs were wreaking havoc on her emotional system. Still … there was a reason it took me so long to work up to being honest. And as if permanently a child in survival mode, I’d been afraid that telling her that I wondered about my first mother would mean losing my adoptive mother. Given my mom’s health and fragility, I was also scared the news might literally kill her.

Judging by her wild reactions, my fears seemed to have been valid. In addition to her hurt and anger, my mom was also confused. After all, I’d spent a lifetime parroting the adoption propaganda and pretending that I didn’t care about my origins. When I tried to explain what Nancy Newton Verrier refers to as “the primal wound,” my mother flapped her hand dismissively, and then, for the first time, let it drop that my birth mother had had a change of heart. She’d wanted me.

This news radically changed me. As I write in my recently released memoir, Searching for Mom: “My entire life had been built around the belief that I was broken and unwanted. Being, feeling, knowing I was completely and totally unlovable. Then trying to prove that wrong. Trying to be noticed. Trying to be good enough, big enough, perfect enough to prove my worth, to be wanted.” How I wished my mom had thought to tell me this important part of the story, rather than focus on the “chosen baby” tale that often reigned in adoptive family folklore!

Once I found my birth mother, her story confirmed that she had indeed decided at the last minute to keep me. Shortly after my birth, as my birth grandmother left the hospital to purchase diapers and onesies, the obstetrician pressured my birth mother into giving me up—not so unusual for the era, where patriarchy and lack of regulation wielded its weapons of shame over unwed young mothers.

When I shared the story with my mom, she wasn’t surprised, and in fact recalled that something had come up at the hospital on the day that she and my dad were supposed to have picked me up there. It was then that I deduced that in her longing for a baby—me—she had turned a blind eye to my birth mother’s situation, not wanting to dig deeper into what, exactly, had come up.

Even though reunion with my birth mother and her family was overall a positive experience, it was a very difficult time for my mom and I. To protect my mom’s feelings from my anger and to stop unconsciously putting her needs ahead of mine, I had to create space between us for a while. Our relationship felt turbulent for about a year (compounded by other circumstances in my life that take too many words to describe, hence the need for a memoir!). Suffice it to say, though, that when my mom went into rejection from her lung transplant a year-and-a-half later, we were abruptly faced with a ticking clock to heal our relationship before my mom died.

Even before our reunion-related troubles, my mom and I weren’t always close. We were, in many ways, but something was missing. My heart.

From the outside, nobody would have known. I’d worked painstakingly hard at winning my mom’s love, molding myself into the daughter she wanted me to be. But my heart wasn’t into the relationship. Part of the problem was that my mom wasn’t perfect. My brain needed to tally her faults, as if to prove mothers aren’t safe. Besides, I was too afraid of revealing the real me, the complete me—too scared of losing her love.

As a result, I never had a chance to test whether her love was real. My mom loved the façade me. But would she love the authentic, complete, sometimes messy me? The longer I hid my true self, the more insecure I felt deep down.

But as my mom was dying, I was given an opportunity to test this out, after a secret that I’d been keeping wrapped in a hidden box of shame was opened. My mom didn’t judge or go away, though. In fact, she wasn’t able to peacefully die until she finally pushed through my thick protective walls and I grasped, at last, just how much she loved me. I feel incredibly blessed to have felt my mom’s complete love land in my heart, and in return, to forge my way into forgiving and more vulnerably loving my imperfect mother.

What happened afterwards was spiritually transformational. But again, in the interest of staying focused for this guest post, I’ll close by sharing that while I’ve basked in this mother-love, I’ve also had to grieve that it took my mom’s death in order for our relationship to progress to a deeper level. I wish it hadn’t taken so long.

I have come to believe that this may be my life’s challenge: learning to love deeply, and to accept being deeply loved in return—in spite of my wounded history, no matter the risk, and before it’s too late. It’s not a challenge exclusive to my mom, nor is it one that’s exclusive to me as an adoptee. Perhaps this is simply the ultimate opportunity for any of us humans wishing to thrive in spite of living in this wounding world. It can be a dark and alarming place here on Planet Earth. But it can also be a beautiful place … especially when we feel free to fully love and be loved by those who truly deserve a place in our hearts.

© Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.
This essay was first published by This Adoptee Life.

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