Mom

(Originally posted at Wordpress on 5/14/08)

I have been meaning to write about this for a while now. Mother's Day has come and gone, and it always leaves me with a mixture of feelings.

May 10, 1997. That was the day my mom died. It was a Friday, 2 days before Mother's Day that year. I remember it well...the cancer had been making quite a steady progress at replacing the skin and tissue of her chest with hard, brown callousy tumor cells. She showed them to me one day, the were growing on the outside too, they were scabby looking. I was spending my nights in the day-bed that we set up in the small living room off the dining room, listening to Nick at Nite play on her television, waiting for the sound of that little bell she would ring if she needed me.

And it rang, too often it rang in those last couple of weeks. The morphine wasn't helping. She didn't know where she was. She wondered if she had died or if she was still alive. All through the night, between episodes of I Love Lucy and the Munsters, the bell would ring, and I would go to her.

And we would hug, and cry, we knew the end was near.

I spent my days doing much the same thing...although I also had my brother to look after, my recently blinded and brain damaged brother, the accident that took his vision and half his brain happened on May 9, 1996, one year before Mom died. Our Dad died in July, about a month after my brother came home, so it was just me, my blind brother, and my dying mother. I was taking care of all of us.

Not the easiest of tasks for a 23 year old, but I was glad to do it. I would do anything for my beautiful mom.

I didn't go to the cemetery after the funeral. I just couldn't do it. Everybody telling me how sorry they are, people I didn't know, didn't remember, or who I knew and had never heard jack shit from my entire life, yeah, they're sorry, well this was the second mom I had lost, and I just couldn't stand another second of it. Not one more second. But it wasn't really me they were sorry for, no, it was my brother. My poor, blind, brain-damaged brother, because everyone knew that HE wasn't adopted, HE was the one who lost his REAL mother, HE lost SO MUCH that day. Even to this day, people ask about poor M...he lost his mom and dad, how is he doing, yet they don't stop to think that I did too. The bastard adopted freak child lost something, too.

Because I did love my a-parents, I love them still. I am sitting here typing this in the very room where my amom drew her last breath. Outside my picture window is where my adad's heart stopped beating on that sunny Thursday in July. This is where I grew up, this is home, this is where my memories lie.

Yet part of me sometimes feels like a big, fat, adoptee traitor. And I know that's silly...but sometimes when I'm out there, fighting the fight, blogging and message-boarding about adoptee rights and about adoption pain, I feel like a traitor in two senses...one, a traitor to my a-parents, and the other, a traitor to the adoptees.

I have learned to separate my loathing for adoption from my love for my adoptive family. I know that it is the separation from my family, and not them, that has caused my pain...and it is my struggles with reunion and my n-mom's issues that cause me pain, not them or anything they ever did.

But on the same note, I feel that I should somehow not love my adoptive family if I am to be any sort of champion for adoptee rights. That having this "good" adoptive family, and these fond memories, somehow makes me traitorous or not worthy to take up the torch for my fellow adoptees. I feel like a poser, like I don't measure up, like I don't belong here.

And I don't know how to tell my n-mom anything about my a-parents without feeling like I am hurting her or making her feel bad in any way...because truth be told, as much as I love my adoptive family, I just would rather have never been adopted. But how could I ever say that without hurting THEM?

This shit is so hard.

So, so incredibly hard. And it makes me feel like an asshole no matter which way I look at it.

Maybe life would be easier if I were back in the fog.