The Paradox of Loving a Mother/a Child Who is Both Yours and Not Yours

It occurred to me just now as I was doing some yoga that one reason my mom’s death hit me so hard was because what also died was the possibility of us ever truly being ourselves with each other.

 The story was that she was my mom. The real story was that she adopted me when I was ten weeks old, and some paperwork, social worker visits, and money made her my mom. So she was both my mom and not my mom and I lived consciously with this paradox while it seemed like she didn’t even know one existed. 

When she died, I thought I was going to lose my mind. I felt broken, confused, griefstricken. More so even after the first-year anniversary of her death. It has been more than four years now (I just googled it and her obit is from 2011—so, uh, yeah—more than four years.) and I haven’t cried daily in a couple of years now. (I rarely cry out of sadness anymore—and by rarely I mean not every day or every week.)

I hate that she was so visibly uncomfortable talking about my adoption with me. She was fine reading the grey adoption book that came with me when she had my dad got me, but that was a story that ended with them being my parents and with no final mention of the people who created me.  

I hate that she could not let me be me. It was like I was a caterpillar and she held me in her hand all my life so I was not able to cocoon, metamorphose, and fly away. But she was not the only player here. I also clung to her, refusing to metamorphose and fly away. 

So I hate that I could not let me be me.

I wish we could have talked about this. Instead I got an eating disorder. Instead I struggled in school. Instead I stole, lied, ate tons of sugar. 

I looked at my mother with such longing and hatred. I both wanted her all to myself and I wanted to kill her. I wanted her to leave my father and my brothers and to be mine, and I wanted her to get in a car crash and die. 

When I was in college, I wrote a story where a character chopped her parents up with an ax and put the pieces in garbage bags. It felt as if someone else had written it. I was not a violent person. What was I doing writing a story about a person chopping up their parents? I dind’t know what to do with the fact that I carried these thoughts in my head. This was a part of me that made me feel sick and full of self-hatred. My dear mother and father! An ax?! What kind of awful person was I? How could I be trusted to be roaming around in the world when I sort of wished the person I loved most would die?

Who even was I? 

More than anything I wanted her to love me. (I talk more about my mom than my dad here because I was always a mama’s girl, not a daddy’s girl.) 

What would have helped was if we’d made a contract back when I was a kid. Maybe my mom could have told me that sometimes adopted kids have internal struggles and that they lie and cheat and steal and skip school and whatever else (I’m sure there’s a better way to word this, but that is why you go to an adoption-competent therapist), and that no matter what I did, she and my dad would love me (I love you and will never leave), but that there would be consequences. 

And she would spell the consequences out, not in a threatening, gross way, but in a together we are going to make the scared baby feel safe way (okay, that might have also felt really gross to me so we are back to the therapist bit). Some of my troubles would have been proactively acknowledged and I maybe I would have been less likely to keep pressing at the boundaries of bad behavior to find out exactly when the love bond would snap.  (Go ahead and say that maybe I would not have thought of doing these things if they weren’t put in my head, but I would disagree and argue that you are being avoidant, that hoping your adopted kid doesn’t have unexpressed trauma is like hoping that your feet don’t have soles.) 

Mostly I’m trying to start conversation with that above paragraph. I’m not a therapist and I don’t understand kid’s brains even though I had one of each—a kid’s brain and a kid. What I want to tell you is that my eating disorder and sugar addiction and dropping out of college(s) were cries for help and that while the behaviors were addressed, the cry beneath them was not.

I needed to know I would be loved no matter what.

 And I did not know that. Partly this was because I did not love anyone no matter what. When my mother did something that made me furious, I could internally seethe and fantasize about the day I would leave her and go back to my “real mom” (the one who refused to talk to me).

 Now that my mother is dead, I wish I could have asked her, “Mom, will you love me no matter what I do? No matter how heavy I get? No matter how lazy I look to you?” Now that my mother is dead, I wish I could have her back. I wish I could shake her and scream at her how much I love her and how much I hurt because she never asked if I wanted her help to look for my first mother. I wish we could have gone on that journey together.

I wish my mom had loved her own body more. Her own shortcomings. Her own aging body. 

 I would have loved to share that with all those things with her. 

Open-heartedly.