Hi there....
Your post struck a cord in my heart. I was not given up for adoption but my mother remarried when I was very young and I was adopted by my step father. I was so young I didn't know the difference and it was never discussed and I wasn't told....except that I had vivid dreams of going to another man's house that I seemed to know was my dad and I just couldn't understand it. I have a half sister that is 3 1/2 years younger than me and she was treated so differently than I was by my stepfather...and that I couldn't understand either. I was never told that I was NOT his daughter until I was in the 6th grade and he started abusing me physically.
I can imagine that you all might think...what is the connection??....It is the feeling of total abandonment and rejection. How could my OWN mother allow these things to happen to her child. I still don't have a true answer but what I finally had to do is turn the world around in my head (of course this only happened as an adult!) and realize that she did the best she could with the life SHE was given. She had her own story....and not always pleasant, that of course I didn't know as a child and only learned in bits and pieces as an adult. I had to sort of force myself to "be the adult" and look at it from her point of "life". I later knew that my stepfather also abused her. Her father was a hard and unloving man who was out of her life for the majority of her life (her parents divorced in the mid 1930's) and treated all the girls as "lesser" than their only brother.
So many things I know NOW that really made sense as to her behavior when I was a child. Now I don't say that I am not "screwed up" in my own way but thank God that I had many angels come into my life that have helped to create the person that I am today.
I now can understand....maybe not forgive....the reason that she was not a demonstatively loving mother. Yes she loved me...but it was safer for her to not love and hug EITHER of us so as to not be accused of playing favorites. She was so closed up on herself that there was no ability to share the love, warmth and caring that you would usually connect to a "mom". Of course I blamed my stepfather for YEARS for all my problems but I had to make myself turn the same "out of the situation" eye on him too. I am not sure I can truly say I ever forgave him but what I had to do is learn to pity him for the lonely, hateful, hurtful person that "his" mother influenced. I knew somewhere in my soul that he would someday die a lonely, sad death with no understanding that it COULD have been different. And he did.
I hope that this makes some sense to you....even tho your mother is a health professional it does not mean that she is not just as "broken" as you or anyone else. Maybe she is not "able" to be the person YOU need her to be. My relationship with my mother is much better than it was even 5 years ago...and I am 52! I had to learn that she processes things differently than I do. She is much more rigid. I know that there are things that we will NEVER agree on. I know that she is NOT a little kid person. I know that she and my sister ARE the same type of person and that is WHY they seem so close. It is not an intentional thought of "excluding" me...they just think the same. I have to remember that by understanding HER I have to realize what a "foreign duck"
I am to her. When we talk now or she asks my opinion I can realize that "I" open another whole world to her that she has never experienced and that is totally foreign to her. As an example....I believe family is made of love....not necessarily out of "blood". My husband was adopted...(with his own set of "strange adoptive parental influences!
" And we tended to "adopt" new family that we "LOVED" but weren't exactly "related" to us. My kids grew up with lots of cousins and aunts and uncles that were no relation at all. I had foster kids and my kids had a lot of friends that were sort of "parentless" so it was not unusual to get up in the morning and find 6 or 8 various kids sleeping on my living room floor. My last "unofficial" foster daughter (who had been a friend of my daughters since the 4th grade) came to us from her adoptive family in Texas. She was 17 and pregnant and no where near being able to be a mother. We adopted her son and are blessed with the most wonderful boy in the world. But through all these years my mother STILL does not understand our connection to these people or this wonderful little boy who is now 8 yrs old. She is connected to my other grandchildren but has difficulty connecting to him.
OK now I am rambling but I hope that somewhere in this you see a ray of hope and a kernel of insight that might help you start your path to the "other side" of your life. Keep our chin up...love your wife and children the way YOU would have liked to be loved and just keep taking a step each day. Good Luck!