So what's normal now?
For adoptees, normal doesn't come naturally. We make it up as we go along. Placed into families that have no relation to our own biological roots, we adjust to our environment. Our adoptive parents' nationalities become our own along with their family heritage, their traits. It's what society has designed for adoption - just go along as if it's normal. So, we pretend to be something we're not. We do it for so long, we get so used to it, we forget that it's not normal.
Seeking reunion with my birthfamilies, I've reconnected to those roots, but it's splintered. Neither quite fits. So, my relationship with my birthfamilies, but especially with my birthmother and birthfather has had to develop it's own normal.
When I met Kate twenty-five years ago I never imagined her as part of my life. I didn't imagine I would travel across country and live with her in her apartment for a summer when I was 22. I didn't picture buying a house just a couple miles from hers eight years later. I didn't expect to find my birthfather on the liner notes of a CD. But, somehow, that's become part of our normal.
Normal now is that my husband has at least three mother-in-laws. My kids have multiple sets of grandparents (they don't complain). Holidays are complicated. Family reunions are emotional time bombs (okay, at least those last two are probably normal for most people : )
But what also is normal for me is knowing the whole of all the parts that make up the sum of who I am. I have more people in my life, more people who are family. That means how I define family has had to be reworked a bit. How I define myself had to be reworked too.
Normal now is having people in my life who seemed imaginary at first. It's being someone a lot more complicated than who I started out as. And it's being comfortable in not being normal.
Seeking reunion with my birthfamilies, I've reconnected to those roots, but it's splintered. Neither quite fits. So, my relationship with my birthfamilies, but especially with my birthmother and birthfather has had to develop it's own normal.
When I met Kate twenty-five years ago I never imagined her as part of my life. I didn't imagine I would travel across country and live with her in her apartment for a summer when I was 22. I didn't picture buying a house just a couple miles from hers eight years later. I didn't expect to find my birthfather on the liner notes of a CD. But, somehow, that's become part of our normal.
Normal now is that my husband has at least three mother-in-laws. My kids have multiple sets of grandparents (they don't complain). Holidays are complicated. Family reunions are emotional time bombs (okay, at least those last two are probably normal for most people : )
But what also is normal for me is knowing the whole of all the parts that make up the sum of who I am. I have more people in my life, more people who are family. That means how I define family has had to be reworked a bit. How I define myself had to be reworked too.
Normal now is having people in my life who seemed imaginary at first. It's being someone a lot more complicated than who I started out as. And it's being comfortable in not being normal.
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to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone
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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?
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