That Old Familiar Feeling
An Adoptee's Birthday
No matter that an intensive search with the help of angels yielded my birthmother’s name, and that I united with her and maternal kin over thirty years ago; that, decades later, having learned my father’s name via Ancestry DNA, I have united with paternal half-siblings and cousins whom I wouldn’t have otherwise known, and I now have the structure of a true biological family tree, yet unresolved, the cycle replays, and her troubles resurface with mine. Her necessity to leave me with strangers, soul-wandering, second-guessing, and the existential grip that held my mother back still stumps me at every birthday.
The remains of abandonment, the fragments of why she left me with the nuns in St. Francis Hospital, and the questions around my first mother’s dilemma lay undisturbed by my adoptive parents. I believe my origin did matter to them, but my closed adoption and the sealing of South Carolina birth records would have made potential efforts to know anything about her futile. Loss began at birth; its effects made more complex by the transience and separations of my military childhood. Sadness and loneliness took hold in my teens when I struggled like many adoptees with identity bewilderment. My parents were preoccupied, and impatient. Although educated, they were unprepared for my turbulence, my trauma, my series of personal fumbles and failures, and the shocks and disappointments that self-perpetuated into my twenties. The fog began to lift in my thirties. Not until I turned forty did the mists start to clear. Who and where is she? My first mother’s restlessness and uncertainty still mar my birthday.
I heard the simple words from her lips a year before she died. She had no husband, no friends or relations to help her to support another child. She could give me nothing, not even mothering. But she did give me a name! Wasn't that love?
Thank you for reading!
(born Ruth Ann)
Thank you, for sharing this. It was wonderful. Happy belated birthday.
Happy (Belated) Birthday! I'm glad that you were able to get an answer from your birth Mom. It was sad to read how she felt she had no other choice. I can only guess about my birth father's reasons for rejecting my mom and me.