[Janeytwo]

Hey all,

It has been almost one year now since a little metal clock sent me on a search; a search leading to this sacred place and the beginning of my journey down the adoption road.

Some would say that journey actually started 31 years ago but not really....not really. Three decades back, I picked up a pen and signed my name. Then for all intents and purposes my life entered a state of suspended amination; even the hands on that little clock stopped going around. All the decisions I would make in the years since; all the fear, mistrust and pain I would silently bear culiminated in two one-hour periods inside of a courthouse. Everything after those dismal hours....everything until I entered this place a year ago.......all of it was me living breath to breath, my time strung out on a wire, the points seemingly unconnected to what I had lost.

Now in this short year, I have learned a thing or two.

Some of that learning has been good.

I have come to understand - if only a little - what it is to be an adoptee. I had no idea - not an incling - not a clue of what they wrestle with day in, day out. I believed the lie you see. The "they will be fine and wonderful and they'll never need to know you". It disturbs me to realize how easily I believed that. It was almost as if I clung to those words like a man hanging on the side of a building, clutching for dear life at the bricks in order not to fall. I can tell you it is a powerful moment to admit how desparately we can believe anything in order to live with ourselves.

I have learned that it is all right to be human and that, really, I had no other choice anyway. I am human and so it is that I will have my share of grief. But this time....this time....instead of traveling alone on a City bus to nowhere, this time I have people who are riding the bus with me. People from 3 sides of a very strange triangle that moves and bends with the day and with the feelings, hopes and fears of those it encompasses.

I have watched the sad journey of others inside this pointed geometry, listened to their words of frustration and pain, borne witness to their struggles to understand themselves and those around them. And I have been humbled by that.



Some of what I've learned though, some of it has not been so great.

I was shocked to come up from the basement only to discover that a war of sorts was raging. That battle lines had been drawn over something called Open Adoption. I had never heard of such a thing and I found myself ignorant and without ammo by way of informed argument. Still, I felt myself being pushed and tugged to choose a side in a fight I had no business being in in the first place, and one for which I had no answers outside of empathy for both parties. I am from a time of "forget and move on" and have felt aged and voiceless in this war. I will be honest in that I wasn't prepared for the bitterness I'd experience after finally opening the door only to walk into a room of souls deaf from their own shouting and unable to hear. It has been defeating on a number of levels.

I was upset to come up from my basement and learn that women like me have become a symbol to some; a symbol of abusive parents who lose their children through the State. Nothing could've prepared me for that. Absolutely nothing.

Yes, I've been labeled; whore, tramp..... you name it .... I've heard it all before and I've learned to live with it. Sometimes people simply cannot comprehend either because they haven't been there or because they dont' want to go. That's all right. I've done my share of judging.

Still, I cannot fathom how a person who makes a conscious and considered decision to relinquish can be compared with someone who starves or beats their child. I have tried to come to terms with this problem, meditated on it, spoken with other women here from all points on the line, but I cannot find a way to understand. Because, for me, there isn't a way and so I cannot make peace with it. I suppose that is where it will have to lie.


But here, as I sit at my desk, typing my thoughts out to other souls in cyberland? I can say with deep sorrow that I'm unsure if anything I've experienced in this year is important. Because the one thing I haven't learned is what my children's names are now. What became of them. Whom they've loved. Whom they've lost. Where the road has taken them.

Perhaps it is that I will never know and that is another truth I must accept.