Dear Mom

(Originally posted on Wordpress on 12/3/07)

You say you feel guilt. You're afraid to let me get to know you. Well I have some feelings too, feelings I have been putting on hold and shoving down deep because I want to try to help you, but you know I just can't do this any more.
I am hurting. I have been hurt my entire life. Do you know how it feels, to have your own mother leave you and walk away? You left me, you gave me away and you left me, not once, but twice, you turned your back on me, your own daughter, you just left me all alone. Adoption is not wonderful. Adoption is not the loving choice. It is the most horrible, painful, lonely experience anyone can ever inflict on a child, separating her from her mother like that, leaving her bewildered and cold, then expecting her to be grateful for it. You know I have missed you every single day of my life. I have thought about you every single day of my life. I have wondered about you, wondered if you think of me, wondered if you care, if you are somewhere out there, if you love me too. I hate this, I hate it, and the worst part of it is, even reunion couldn't bring any healing, I guess adoption just damages all of us too much. Maybe it would have been better if I had never been born.

I didn't ask for this, any of it. I didn't have a choice, as a baby, you, M, everyone else made the decision for me, you chose this life for me, nobody thought that just maybe I didn't want to lose my mother, my family, who I was meant to be. I never would have chosen this, EVER. I don't care if we would have lived in a cardboard box under a bridge, I never wanted this. I lost you, I lost everything, I was a fish out of water my entire life, unable to breathe, a square peg without any hole, filled with the most incredible pain imaginable because my own mother didn't want me, she gave me away to strangers.

To STRANGERS.

And my whole life, even now, my birth has been cloaked in secrecy, it's just one big shameful secret, I am a walking, shameful abomination who's past must be kept a secret, I don't have a right to possess anything that belongs to me concerning the day of my own birth, oh good heavens no. I was special and chosen and a gift yet they need to protect you from me, I might stalk and harrass and murder, I have the potential to cause great harm. I am suspect. The mixed messages in adoption are crazy making, one day we are blessings, the next we are freaks, every day we are sub-human, nobody gives a rat's ass unless there's a buck to be made.

And I STILL choose none of it, except to try to build something with you, but you continue to play this game of hide-and-seek, you just keep leaving me. And it's killing me.

All I ever wanted, even when I was that 4 pound newborn, was you; I just want my MOTHER. I don't care who you are or what you've done, I just need my mother to finally, finally take her baby daughter in her arms and tell her, mommy's going to make everything all right. She's still in here, that 4 pound newborn, she's still inside me, looking for you, wondering where you went, she still needs you so much, she's still waiting for you to come back for her.

Maybe it's too late for you to raise me. Maybe it's too late to change my diapers and fix my boo boo's and to watch me grow up.

But it's not too late for you to love me.