A Taste of Retreat -- Your Sadness, Dear Mother, Is Not My Legacy

I did a retreat for adopted people this past weekend on the Cape, and I’m still buzzing. Again and again, when I get together with adoptees who are wildly curious about being themselves, I feel so much hope for the future. Maybe there is life beyond the primal wound!

I 100000% believe there is, by the way, mostly because I can feel myself living it.

Here’s a writing exercise we did together that I’d never done before, and the results were powerful. (I got the idea from reading The Power of Attachment by Diane Poole Heller.)

You can do this exercise no matter how many mothers you have, but pick one and start with her and then repeat it (if you feel it’s necessary) for the others.

Imagine your mother as a child. If you know NOTHING about her, make stuff up that feels logical to you, or start with a mother you know a little more about. See her life, the problems she might have had. Imagine people (not you) giving her the support she needed as she grew up, as she was an adult, as she aged and, if this happened, as she died. See her loved and lifted up by those around her. Imagine what that was like for her, how that kind of deep understanding and help changed her as a person.

Then imagine yourself with this changed mother. How would your life had been different if you hadn’t carried the weight of your mother’s unresolved sadnesses, traumas, and secrets?

When I imagined this, I saw myself so light I actually had wings. To not feel my legacy was both of my mothers’ sadnesses!!? I hadn’t realized I’d believed in this legacy and my obligation to bear it until I’d done this exercise—I’d just assumed it was a weight that was part of me, like my arm spine or my liver.

But it isn’t.

And I don’t want it. It’s enough to carry the weight of myself—why burden myself with what is not only not mine but helps no one if I keep it. How does it serve my daughter for me to carry the weight of my mothers’ grief? Imagine! If I get lighter, there is less for my daughter to have to worry about! I can drop the ball so she doesn’t feel obligated to pick it up!

Both of my mothers are dead, and I hope they have found peace and deep comfort if there is that in the afterlife. I hope they feel loved by me, and I hope they see that I left what I was carrying of theirs on a couch in Hyannis. I hope they know that sadness evaporated from my body like a blessing, and that a handful of amazing women and I literally flew out the front door in celebration of understanding just how free we truly are.