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.
