Hello friends, How are you doing?
Home for the holidays — a fraught topic for adoptees and the adoption constellation. What does home mean to you? Are you in a reunion with your biological mother and family? Are you still connected to your adoptive parents and family? Whether adopted or kept by one's biological parents, holidays and birthdays can be emotional minefields.
From my adoptee perspective, the complex, nuanced conversations that reverberate across the adoption constellation on social media, the talk and support groups that reveal a need for help, the voices that echo through “Adoptionland" in dedicated and public pages demonstrate the need for validation of the deeply personal feelings shared by adoptees.
Although I've engaged in many similar exchanges, lately, they have been too painful, and I've had to distance myself. As I advance in age, I prefer to avoid troubled exchanges. In social media speak, I lurk rather than interject my thoughts. This is new for me. I used to pipe up as I learned the language of grief and loss we share. Sometimes, the collective adoptee psyche is too much for me to process. Still, I empathize.
Excavating for my memoir, I unearthed the source of my lifelong anxiety and panic. I tie it to my newborn abandonment, to the effects of continuous military family separation and its upheaval on my tender psyche, as well as to the injustice of sealed adoptee birth records, identity confusion, and the lies, falsification, secrecy, and myth around the institution of adoption.
Growing up adopted, the word “related” had an uncomfortable ring to it. I wasn’t quite like the others. I’d landed like an alien within a pod of “real” relatives — not part of their clan, and not understood. My non-biological cousins seemed guarded. Maybe it was me, or maybe their parents had set up the barrier that distinguished us from one another. It seemed to me that everyone had siblings and lots of cousins in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Our closest family members were my mother's parents and my father’s siblings. I was deeply attached to my grandparents, to a lesser degree with my aunts and uncles, and not so much with the children. I guess the cousins, even the ones close in age to me, were as suspicious of me as I was of them. I gravitated to the close adult relatives who doted on me.
Was it the special status I enjoyed as an adopted child — for my first eight years, an only child -- that set me apart from my cousins? But I envied them! They had brothers and sisters! What did these kids know about me other than that I was chosen? I might not have even been born! My default was uncertainty about their origins. I had seen a few pregnant women in those early years, but never made the connection with a physical baby. Is that atypical of kids with no babies at home; that they don’t make the flesh and blood connection?
At any rate, there was no rivalry between me and the adopted baby who came to live with Mom, Dad, and me. We enjoyed each other while we shared the same space.. My little sister has lived thousands of miles away for many years, and it’s been just as long since we’ve been together on Christmas. In recent years, we chat on holidays and birthdays.
We were an Air Force family. That’s the reason the Holidays were rarely spent with extended family. But when Dad’s duty or rare leisure allowed, he would drive us up from one of the southern states where we were stationed to New Jersey and our home-away — my mother’s parents’ home. His siblings would drive over from N.Y.C. for Christmas dinner, and didn't bring their kids. I never bonded with those cousins — several years older than me — city kids.
Home was a fluctuating concept with many temporary abodes. I have learned that among former military dependents, it is never easy to settle down. I've demonstrated this tendency by my uneasy relationship with all my adult residences. My husband has been supportive of this inclination to move, until now. We are retired. No more moves!
Among many family transfers during my childhood, Tokyo meant the experience of a new culture, and of being apart from our U.S. family for three years. To compensate, and because Dad was often away, he and Mom expended great effort for Christmas: boxes of presents bestowed in love, mail ordered from the Sears catalog, arrived at the Base Exchange -- the warmth of toys and dolls my baby sister and I would have missed by the absence of our grandparents, aunts and uncles.
This adopted person is in reunion with my South Carolina paternal and maternal biological siblings, all of us close in age. We can’t be together over the holidays, and recently lost a brother and sister. Our biological parents have been deceased for many years. I never knew my father, and met my mother at age 43. My adoptive parents and grandparents are gone.
My daughter and her two sons who live in the Midwest won't be with us. If all goes well, my husband and I will join his family in northern New Jersey. That will bring cheer to Christmas day.
These separations of home and family have tried my resolve to ward off the emotional triggers. But, really, the alternative isn’t bad. Our home in coastal Delaware is cozy and quiet and suits us fine.
I wish you the peace and joy of the Holiday season! I wish you a home in your heart!
Maybe my Celtic genes are in play. Hiraeth, a concept known in the Adoption constellation, is from the Welsh for nostalgia or homesickness. It suits a feeling of separation from the spirit, heart, or something inside that is missing.
Felinfach.com Description of Hiraeth
Hiraeth often described as nostalgia or a deep longing for a place or time that may never have existed, or that may have existed only in one's memories or imagination. It brings together the feelings of homesickness, nostalgia and longing or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past. Hiraeth is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost – a unique blend of place, time and people that can never be recreated. The word Hiraeth has a complex and nuanced meaning and is an important part of Welsh culture and identity.
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