Maiden Blog, Maiden Post

Well here I am! I am welcoming me, myself and I to the illustrious world of the BLOGOSPHERE! Yeah! The cheers are echoing! I can just hear them. I'm really good at living inside my own head so maybe I'm just being a semi-legend in my own mind. Whatever it is, the important thing is that this is my way of getting out of my head. I also looked at my journals earlier this year and did kind of an abridgment on most of them because they were just so damned depressing. I just rehashed the same dramas endlessly. I hardly ever wrote when anything was good. So this is my way of keeping my promise to myself to live more fully in the moment. I will write when things are good, not so good, and even downright depressing.

There is a reason for the name of this blog. I am giving myself the permission to my thoughts, my feelings, my reactions. I've spent way too much of my life censoring myself and changing my feelings, thoughts and opinions to make those around me comfortable. Plus I and others have stories to tell. People need to see past the stories that they are sold by the purveyors of adoption. It is not a panacea. It is a more legitimate alternative than abortion but there needs to be WAY more information, education and safeguards out there then there is. Most of all, if adoption does occur, there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking that dictates that the adoptee DOES deserve his/her information, not just patchy medical histories and selectively chosen non-identifying information. Everyone else can have their birth certificates. Why must adoptees pay for the birthparents' mistakes? Yes I am a bastard child. Yes I do get fired up about this issue. But that doesn't mean that I deserve to be discriminated against in the midst of trying to protect my birthparents. But I will save that rant for another blog.

I learned to be quiet and squash my feelings from an early age. My parents never hid the fact that I was adopted. It was always such a joyous thing for them. Aunts, uncles and family friends would always corroborate this story too. Yippee! Everyone is happy happy happy! The only problem was that I wasn't. I was sad beyond belief sometimes. I never said it though. I never felt like I could. I didn't want to seem ungrateful. I got told what a spoiled and ungrateful person I was too many times for other things that I didn't want to have this on top of that. It was just something I had to deal with.....this sadness I felt. I did have a couple of friends who I let my guard down with. I remember my friend Mita from the fifth grade (?). She used to ask me if I ever wanted to find my birthmother. I really did. But something changed at that time. I still wanted to but I convinced myself that it wouldn't be right to try because it would bring up bad memories for her. I denied myself and made it all about my birthmother. Then there was my friend Sarah in junior high. I used to judge her so badly because she was so rebellious and I was the "good girl". I didn't dare rebel especially against my father. I was always so intimidated by him. I also said I was OK with being adopted which I knew deep down that I wasn't. Looking back now I realize that it was my survival mechanism. That and eating, eating, eating. I never got really fat per se but I was definitely pudgy. So that made my growing up years even more tumultuous. I learned to eat my feelings away very early and very quickly. In my twenties, once I was finally away from parental control I lost it. I did everything I had judged my friend Sarah for doing back in junior high......and I had no idea why. It felt freeing but I also became so clingy and vindictive too. I was feeling so small and had literally lost almost everything. But I still had no idea why until...........

One day I was wandering through Target and picked up book called Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. Its by a fellow adoptee named Sherrie Eldridge. I was immediately bowled over by the title and reading it while standing there made me breathless. I felt like I was reading my life story. How did Sherrie know? What was this extremely visceral reaction that I was having ? Was it all possible? All my sadness, craziness and bad decisions were attributed to my unmourned adoption losses? Mourning? What was mourning? Death was and is such a cerebral concept to me. Its one of the few things I haven't been able to touch yet even with all the work I have done. Suddenly everything started making sense. All my survival mechanisms, all my dysfunctional ways of dealing with my sadness.....everything. I started voraciously reading other adoption books by other authors and doing A LOT of thinking and analyzing. I'm going to put the favorites down in my book link section. Now several years later I've made so many strides through several avenues. But this is the one thing that remains......a persistent feeling of voicelessness and helplessness.

So I now declare that through this blog I am no longer voiceless so hopefully it will help in making me feel less helpless and help to dispel some of the madness that surrounds the issue of adoption.

TTFN