Writing My Wrongs

Phoenix Rising

"It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes." - Ann Baxter

I am working from home today. It is the start of a long weekend and many employees in my office are on vacation. I had no meetings and plenty of work to do so I decided to be remote.

Right now classical music (violin) is floating in my front windows from somewhere in the neighborhood. I am not sure if it is recorded or if someone is practicing. It is quite lovely. I don't want to put on my headphones to continue editing the supremely boring wav files I have to slice and dice for a CBT I am developing. I would much rather listen to the faint sound of violins. Another option is Leona Lewis. I am addicted to her "Bleeding Love".

I have been avoiding this audio editing like one would avoid the bubonic plague. I need to learn the program (goldwave) and then I need to take four large wav files and slice them into a bunch of small ones and synch them up with slides. Not fun. I am struggling with the program. I wonder if there is an easier one I can buy and use?

I also have a newsletter to write and layout and a logo to design. Got any suggestions for visual imagery for the word Confluence? This is the name of my department newsletter.

Oh, wait, adoption, right, this is my adoption blog.

So yeah, I wrote to my daughter last night (I knew the words would come) and proposed a contact schedule. Also asked her if she had any organizations she would like me to donate to in lieu of sending her gifts. I told her if I don't hear back from her (approving the contact schedule or other feedback), I will move ahead with my own idea of the scholarship in honor of her and also contact her around Christmas.

I feel good about it all. So good in fact, I am about to put another relationship in order. This is a toughie. Tougher in some ways than my relationship with my daughter. However, it has been hanging around me for years, draining me and giving little back. I have been avoiding dealing with it, the pain of letting it go.

Time to move on so I can move forward.

I would like to enroll in school in the fall (new media and communications stuffs) and also make some serious progress on my book. I am still struggling with autobiographical fiction or memoir? My sense is that the autobiographical fiction approach will have a wider reach. More on that in another post.

For now, as my LiveJournal ID indicates, I am a phoenix rising from the ashes and reaching for the sky.

Seeing the Light

"A codependent feels their value is predicated upon a willingness to devalue themselves" - Eric Roberts

I am doing okay.

I am feeling that now, after nearly three weeks since I heard from my daughter, that I am recovering from the pain of our latest exchange. I feel okay about myself and how I handled it and the decisions I am making regarding the future.

I reflected a great deal on our three year reunion (technically, it is nearly six if you count the fact that she found me before I found her but she did not contact me) and much to my surprise completely overlooked our "anniversary" date of June 28th. The day passed without emotional incident.

I have spent alot of time analyzing my own behavior and expectations and interestingly was able to draw from my therapy and past work with codependency. I realized that much of my feelings, reactions, expectations with my daughter were very frighteningly similar to those that I have had in other one-sided or hurtful relationships. Common themes in those relationships, like the relationship with my daughter, are:

1. Me focusing on their needs and feelings and believing theirs matter more than mine
2. Consistently putting aside my own hurt feelings and rationalizing and defending their actions - no matter how poor, abusive or justified they might be. 
3. Believing that I deserve their poor treatment of me because either I believe I caused their problems or I am supposed to be able to fix them and I am unable to.

I reread some Melody Beattie and also picked up one of my favorite books on boundaries - Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting and Enjoying the Self by Charles Whitfield.

I still feel a bit shaky and anxious but the overwhelming feeling is a positive one and a belief that I do not need to be accepted or wanted by my daughter to feel whole or believe I have value as a human being.

I assign that to myself. She does not.

While I will likely continue to be sad that my daughter chooses to not have a relationship with me or her brothers, I must continue to believe that is a reflection of her and her choices and not me or mine.

She has given me many clear signs that I have foolishly ignored or avoided or simply did not see. She has never written me unsolicited. She has never asked any questions about her story, her first family or even her medical history. She has not responded to any emails or drawings her brothers have sent her. She has not acknowledged them. She has never mailed me anything via USPS. She has only once acknowledged a birthday or holiday. She has repeatedly said she is not wounded, does not want or need a relationship with me.

I don't state these things to highlight her behavior but rather to show how dense I was. In light of all that and more, I still wrote to her even when she gave clear signs she would prefer I didn't. I relied on common reunion thinking and believed, perhaps correctly, perhaps not, that she was "testing" me. I followed that reunion bible teaching of staying in contact even when gifts were refused and emails went unanswered. In the end, I fear I did nothing but make myself into what appeared to be a neurotic, clingy mother who could not take "go away" for an answer.  For certain, I continually set myself up to be hurt. 

Why?

I was looking at our relationship through glasses colored by my adoption work with others. My years in adoption search, support and reunion have provided me with access to a significant number of adoptees and mothers that want to know each other. I have helped close to fifty adoptees or mothers reunite and watched from afar (or even up close) as they struggled through those relationships. I have talked to them late on night on the phone or computer. I have comforted them and they have comforted me. My view of adoptees and mothers was limited to those that consciously wanted to know each other and were working hard at getting through the roadblocks of reunion. I therefore struggled with why my daughter might not be like them. It had to be me, right?

Again, no.

I see that now. Her last email was so, well, it was something. Lets just say that it contained the final ingredients I needed to put this reunion dish on the back burner. I will no longer stir the pot.

I get it now, M. I do. I will leave you alone.

I realize the appropriate thing to do is to let her know I wont be in contact anymore and as she has indirectly requested, I wont send her any more presents. (I am instead working on developing a scholarship for young, single moms using the funds I would have normally spent on her).

The words haven't quite formed yet in my heart and therefore my head and fingers are unable to craft them. I hope within the coming weeks I will find the words. The general theme will be that I am not leaving her but respecting her apparent wishes and should she ever want more contact,  I will be here. I will suggest a contact schedule (perhaps once a year?) and hope she agrees with it.

I am confident the words will come.

There is a great deal lacking in my life but words are usually close at hand.

What is IS?

"No one can blame you
For walking away
Too much rejection
No love injection
Life can be easy
It's not always swell
Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl
'Cause it hurts like hell " - Music and Lyrics By David Bowie
From the Labyrinth Movie Soundtrack, 1986

To practice acceptance do you have to know what you are accepting?

Byron Katie likes to use the phrase "loving what is". Well, what if you don't know what is, IS. How do you love it?

How do you accept something you are not sure is the right thing to accept?

I don't know what I am supposed to accept. I probably should know that first, no?

Am I accepting a bad reunion? Is my reunion bad?

Am I accepting a daughter whose adoption worked and wants nothing to do with her first family? Do I know that for certain?

Am I accepting that my daughter wants nothing to do with me? Should I infer that from her writings? While she has not told me to eff off, you could read between the lines and assume that. Should I?

What am I accepting?

That I will never know my daughter?

Can I know that for certain?

Justice says "accepting what IS?"

I don't know what IS is.

How do you accept what you don't know and don't understand? Sure, the religious peeps can turn it over to God. Not believing in God, I cannot turn this over to the magical deity floating in the sky.

As a child I was taken to Alateen meetings by my mother. Anyone who has attended any sort of support group or twelve step type program is familiar with the serenity prayer.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference..."

I don't know what I cannot change.  How do I accept them? I believe I am pretty courageous in changing the things I can.  I know about them and I attack them head on. I am, however, sorely lacking in wisdom to know the difference.

Where do I go from here?

Extraction and Relocation

"Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.” - Andre Gide

A dear friend of mine is retired from the army after twenty five years of service. He is a great guy, a wonderful friend, and I am happy to have him in my life.

He is also an adoptive father.

He is also a trauma survivor.

His friendship is quite valuable to me.

When I share my reunion status and challenges with him, he nearly always draws some parallel to army or military tactics. Some might find it annoying but I find it rather amusing and often incredibly accurate.

Consider this statement from him sent during my last difficult exchange with my child:

"I wish there could be some common person in your lives. It's recon by fire without that kind of intermediary--a frightening process fraught risks. When I used to do reconnaissance in the infantry, I made it a practice to go slow. 100 meters at a time, sometimes only 5. Then hunker down, look, listen and smell. The impatient ran into more ambushes and ill-prepared fights. I wish you the sustained patience to feel your way to the goal."

I chuckled at this when I first received it but read it over and over again and realized it made a helluva lot of sense in relation to my reunion.

I found myself wanting to reach out to him today and ask him about extraction. How does the military pull back from a battle? How do we admit defeat or at least pull back to change course?

I have been working on extracting myself from my own expectations and from the state of my reunion. I have been making subtle, but impactful changes, to help minimize my pain.

I cannot control her behavior or actions but I can control my own.

I changed my passwords. My passwords to various systems were combinations of my children's names - that includes my daughters names - both original and amended. I equate this, now, to a daily dagger in the heart. The passwords have been changed.

I have decreased, nearly ceased, looking at her flickr album. It is the only album she has left open for me to see.

I have decided to decrease - nearly stop in fact - writing her. I cut down significantly over the years but always sent the benign "hello, how are you, happy holidays" type of messages. I suspect I may just go down to the once a year Merry Christmas and maybe Happy Birthday email. I have been routinely advised that I should let her know this will be my approach. I will calendar to do that. I haven't done it yet for I am afraid it will bring about another tirade from her and I am not yet strong enough to handle it. I don't want her to think I am angry or ignoring her. She seems to want space but is unable to ask directly for it but rather strikes out passive aggressively. I will grant her the space and quite likely help myself in the meantime.

I pondered taking down her pictures from my family mantle and even my office. I have not done so and doubt I will. I fear this will prompt questions from her brothers and I just don't want to explain to them what cannot be explained. How could I possibly explain to them how their sister feels about them and I when I don't understand it myself? Better to leave it alone.

I have ceased making reference to her in general conversation or daily activities. I never did this with intent, the referencing that is. She was just always a part of our life and conversations.  I easily said my daughter, your sister, etc. I am, now, however, making a conscious effort to not talk about her. That is hard. It is like I am back where I started nearly twenty three years ago. I suppose the difference is that this is a self-imposed gag order versus being shut down by my family, society or other.

I even pondered ceasing this blog. She has objected to it and it is a bit of a daily reminder of her and my situation but I decided against this. I continue to feel very strongly that regardless of whether or not my daughter ever embraces her entire identity, I cannot and will not stop fighting for the mothers of today and tomorrow. My daughter might one day give birth to a female. It is for that possible grandchild, and my sons wives and children, that I continue to fight for what is right and natural.

Mothers and children should never be separated due to poverty, religious influence, stigma, lack of resources, coercion or intimidation. It is a crime to separate them and pretend their connection does not exist. It is legalized lies and accepting the infliction of trauma on a mother and child.  It must stop.

I cannot help my daughter but I do believe I can, and have, and will, help others.

I will not extract myself completely. I will relocate myself from a somewhat hostile environment and reposition myself in a more secured, safe area. As in the military, I will rescue myself from the immediate conditions that I am incapable of surviving within.

I will draw new battle lines and continue the fight against the true enemy - the American Adoption Industry.

Reveille!

Developing from the Negatives

"If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won't, you most assuredly won't. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad.” - Denis Waitley

Many mothers I have met have assumed they would be welcomed by their child. Other mothers expect to be rejected. Still others aren't sure what to expect but they do share one thing in common. They all want to be able to love their child and have their child love them back. And when we are not, when we are pushed away, rejected, we are often left with a feeling of "why should I bother?". Our children rejecting us, for whatever reason, can be very triggering back to the days when we were rejected and abandoned by our family and our children's father. It is often hard to separate out the old rejection from the new. And we reject back, we project, we get all mixed up in this crazy dance that is often rooted in unrealistic, unspoken, expectations. 

Many of us, myself included, fight the urge to throw in the towel and flip the bird to our self centered children who we sacrificed everything for and have ached for years to find. Some of us do and still others, like me, hold on.  Do the ones who hold on find a way to manage what we get or do we change our expectations? Do we mature beyond that abandoned teenage girl and realize that our child's rejection of us is not really rejection of US but the pain adoption has caused them? Do we realize that we are the physical manifestation of a pain they may not be able handle?

I personally don't believe I can ever expect my daughter to view me, treat me, value me as a mother. In her emotional world I am nothing like that to her. I do however hope (expect?) that over time we can develop a relationship that is something between friend and mother and it might even be more valuable and special than what I would have had with her if I was viewed as her mother. I already know that she shares things with me that she does not share with her adoptive mother. I feel honored.

But, I have done this, and been able to do this because I was able to manage my expectations.

Let me explain by using a very recent example from my life.

Fresh off the heels of a very amicable divorce, I have spent a great deal of time pondering relationships, my role in them, my expectations, my thoughts on love and respect, courtship, friendship and more. I have spent countless hours in therapy with a very skilled professional discussing what brought me to my marriage to my ex husband and what took me out of it.  As a result, I have gained some very valuable insight into myself and what makes me tick and what makes my relationships work (or not). I am clearly still a work in progress but what I see developing from the negatives is an amazing wonderful picture of a pretty cool woman and wonderful mother.

Several months ago I met and began crushing on an amazing man. Academically brilliant, highly educated, well traveled and well spoken, I was hooked rather easily. I find intelligence to be incredibly attractive.  To move this gent higher up on a pedestal, he also possessed an incredible emotional IQ.  He had been through a number of challenges in his own life and, like me, had spent many hours in therapy due to PTSD.

I fell and I fell rather hard. I could have devoured him whole. Every phone call, email, personal interaction was like an IV line of a mind altering drug to me. I couldn't get enough of him. Lust? Not so much. Not in the usual sense. It wasn't really on a physical or sexual level (though the potential was there for me). It was something. I don't know what it was but it was. But I had to have it. He made me laugh. He challenged me. He debated me. He validated me. He respected my pain and my trauma. He was skilled in repartee.  We had fun.

I must be clear and share a balanced view. It is important to the point of my story. There were also things about this friend that I was a bit uncertain about. Things I did not understand. Stories that did not quite make sense to me that made me a bit nervous. Decisions I may not have agreed with but hey, it was not my life. I have always felt that truly loving someone meant loving what you dislike about them and not what you like. The good stuff is easy to love. Its the not so nice stuff that poses challenges. I made note of the things that gave me pause and mentally filed them for future reference.

They did not slow the Crush Train. They were merely extra baggage in the caboose. I have my own. His seemed to match mine. I was okay with it.

Months passed and during this time frame we decided to be friends and not lovers or partners or whatever the younger crowd would call us these days.

At first, this really disturbed me. It actually left me in tears. He was romantically involved with someone else. He was sharing that with me and I was doing my best to be mature about it.  Alone, not seen by him, I was stomping my feet like an angry teenage girl. I was seeing things in a very black and white manner. Either I got all of him or I got none of him. At that point I could have walked away from him and gotten nothing or I could have re-evaluated my own expectations and walked away with something - perhaps even something more valuable.

And so I did.

Did I care he was off having sex with some woman? Nope. Sex is sex.  While I find physical relations and the typical "O" quite pleasing, I find orgasms of the soul even more appealing.

What I cared about was that he might be sharing all that wonderful stuff in his head and heart with someone else and there might be less for me. Worse yet, there might be none for me. He might never call me or email me again.

I thought more and realized that I wasn't feeling like I had lost a lover or the potential for a relationship, I felt like I had lost my best friend. Still more thought and I realized that I was actually getting a better deal than the women he will date. He considers me one of his closest friends. Love, sex, flings, dating - they can be very fleeting and are rife with a host of issues that friendship is not. Once I thought about it this way, I felt wonderful. I am not losing a friend. I always had one and without the noise of the standard relationship issues, I may actually get more of him than I ever imagined. Be still my heart!

How the HELL does this story relate at all to adoption or reunion?

For me, it illustrates my point that it is all how we look at things.

If we want only what we want, and we don't get it, then we often lose what we might have gotten. And what we might have gotten might be even better than what we wanted to begin with.

I couldn't be my daughters mother in the traditional sense.

I was not deemed worthy or capable of raising her.

I lost a great deal. I suffered a permanent wound to my heart and soul.

So did she.

I can push to feed that fantasy of mine to be the mother I was not allowed to be. She can push back and tell me she has a mother, one who did not abandon her as a helpless infant. We can both walk away mad and hurt and try to prove who hurts more and deeper and harder.

Or we can re-evaluate.

There might be something bigger and better ahead of us.

Life is what we make of it. 

I don't want to be stuck in what I lost. I know that all too well.

I want to focus on what I might gain. I want to continue developing from the negatives.

Whether or not my daughter ever chooses to embrace me, I still have this life of mine to lead and I want it to be as positive and successful as I can personally make it.

P.S. I mean really, what is a relationship? Who defines that? Is it fixed? Can it change with time? Do we all approach life with someone else's view of what we should be and how our relationships should be? Is every couple identical? Every marriage?  Every mother daughter relationship?  Someone else decided for me, and I listened, what kind of mother I could or  should be.  I am not about to let them have that power again. Clearly I have more to say on this topic but that will be another post.

Bottom line, again, our lives are what we make of them -  not what others tell us they should be.  Don't listen to the church, to the agency, to the preconceived notions of what should be. Listen to your soul. It might very well be orgasmic.