[Katey_Lee]

Wow, I have so many heartfelt things come into play reading this thread. This is my first time on this forum, and adoption is a HUGE part of my life though it is something rarely spoken of. I met my biological mother when I was 18 and pregnant with my daughter. Initially she was very interested in knowing me, but it was short lived and a year later, our contact became a once every few years phone call when I have taken the time to look her up.
I grew up knowing that I was adopted, and as it were, the woman that my bio-mother stayed with during the last few months of her pregnancy, was very close friends with the woman who was my grandmother in my adopted family. My grandfather (adopted family) was an OB/GYN and had delivered me, his wife placed babies as part of an open door adoption program in Idaho. I grew up with tidbits of news and the knowledge that there was a small compilation of letters and pictures, wedding invitations etc. that would be given to me one day if I wanted to know her. I grew up seeing my grandmother pull out notebooks of records that she had kept on adoptive mothers and names of families where babies had been placed when she received phone calls of a parent or child searching for their counterpart. Today she is 89 years old and still gets those calls from time to time. My biological connections were more of a “what can be someday…” in addition to the a “where I came from before this.”
My adopted family had several children, my siblings, after adopting me as their first child. I have to be honest that while my family claimed that I was loved equally, there were differences and they were inadvertently pointed out from time to time and felt. The solution was to tell me the story about how I was special because they had chosen me. This perhaps was the best response they could have given, but set a habit in me to turn my thoughts to the adoption when I felt inadequate. I did idolize the family that that was unseen. I knew by atleast 8 years of age that she had married a few years after I had been born and had 3 children. Whenever things felt unfair at home, I remember feeling that I hurt that she had children that she loved enough to keep, and I hurt that I was not “really” the child of my adoptive parents. These two ideas did leave me feeling quite lost when I was an adolescent.
I believe that all teenagers tend to have a sense of not really belonging when they are soul searching to find themselves and their own place in the world. I am now the mother of a 15 year old girl who feels lost at times as well. It is natural. As adopted children, I think it is easy to decide we have a valid reason for this sense of not belonging, and have to process that with the feelings before we can really move on. What would my life have been without you, if this one choice had not been made by this stranger who was my mother? (remember, it is not easy to give up your child, and life for your child probably would not have been what they have fantasized, or the decision would not have been made) It is not really about love, but about standing up as an adult, showing all the people who made our life decisions for us that they did ok, and that we are strong and independent and capable. It is about making sure that everyone knows that our decisions from now on are our own.
I suppose the idea of this, and our maturity is more readily acceptable to the parents who have not known us as children. They haven’t watched us make mistakes, haven’t seen us in pain and humbled by our actions as we were learning. They love us as the baby they had, and have already let us go and given up the right and let go of the need to influence our decisions. They are hungry to be our friends with a parental title. That is a wonderful draw when searching for independence, but when life presents itself again, and we grow up enough to recognize that we may need help and someone to lean on and be the stronghold in our lives that our parents were when growing up, it is the people who raised us that we cling to and need. No matter how angry or lonely or hurt or lost, they are the ones who have always been a part of life and its struggles. They are the people that we have grown to count on and rely on.

Believe then when they say they still love you. Chances are that it is true.