So Maybe I'm Terrified

So I've been going on and on about my birthmother, trying to get a grip on who she really is and letting go of whatever fantasy version I had conjured up.

I even made a list of her "faults" which include addiction to alcohol and allowing three children in her care to be sexually abused by her husband. Oh. I forgot to include this one: In her seventies, she shacked-up with a drug addict who'd bring back women to their apartment and, in one incident, he drugged my mother and nearly killed her. My mother still wouldn't boot him out and the family had to intervene.

See?

I can't help myself. The "fault list" keeps getting longer.

Why am I doing this? Is it because I'm filled with dread at the prospect of meeting my birthmother? Because that's the way I feel. Terrified at the prospect. My hands get all clammy and I get this boxed-in, claustrophobic, panicky feeling. Like if I meet her, I'm going to get sucked into a big, black scary hole and disappear.

Do I make these lists because I'm scared to meet her and I'm looking for an excuse not to?

And then a really smart adoptee whom I admire posted something on the Chosen Babies forum and just reading it filled me with horror. It had to do with the impact of reunion on adoptees. Here's the quote:

"I ran across something interesting in one of my many notebooks of articles from Jean Paton in 1997. She is the author of Orphan Voyage published in 1968. She is an adoptee and visionary search > activist and presented rationales for search and resulted in a proliferation of search registries after 1975. In a short article she wrote in 1997 she talks about two things that she has long put together in relationship to reunion; "The difficulty of forming relationships, and thus failing to mature to the degree that others do and the way we sob and shake, almost without exception, at the point of reunion. To me this confirms the effects on us of our wounds, that those influences have been laid down in our central nervous systems, and that reunion has the power to send an instant message to that system that all is clear. And that system responds by releasing the wrongly closed interneurons, all throughout the system, and the result is sobbing and shaking. There is no other way for our bodies to release this energy. It boils over until it is somehow reintegreated in the system. And we rejoice in our release. And after the rejoicing comes astonishment that we have lived such a partial experience."

Because if THAT'S what's going to happen, oh my God. I don't like that one bit. Maybe I don't want to lose control. Maybe I'm really, really afraid.

Why?

Then Joy posted something about not being able to process all the emotions she experienced as an abandoned infant. What perfect timing. What if...what if...the clue to that awful sense of dread at the prospect of meeting my birthmother is rooted in the mysterious details of my relinquishment?

My mother says she only allowed herself to see me once because she did not want to get attached. I went back to my non-identifying adoption packet prepared by the public agency. It says she suffered great guilt over the relinquishment, but it also says she was interested in adoption "from the start."

What if...what if...the infant/baby me can somehow "remember" being pushed away or somehow being rejected above and beyond the obvious, ultimate rejection of being given away by your own mother? What if she said to a nurse, "No, no, no, take her away I won't see her again" and she handed me back maybe a bit too roughly. Or something like that? Could she have done something that was forever burned in my psyche? Is that why I feel unsafe when I think of meeting her?

Of course, there's no way to ever know this. I think my mother's memory is understandably hazy after so many years and no doubt, trauma causes its own amnesia.

When I read the thoughts of other adoptees contemplating reunion, the feeling of dread isn't mentioned. Nervous anticipation and major jitters, yes, but not this sort of dig-in-your-heels-reluctance.