What's Normal Now?

 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. 

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to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone

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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!

Aging Mothers

My birth-grandmother just turned 90. I know almost nothing about her. 

I didn't have grandparents while I was growing up. As a child of older parents, as a lot of adoptive children are (after all, adoption is the last resort after years of trying, and then the whole ordeal of adoption can take years), my adoptive grandparents were dead by the time I was born. I always envied my friends who had grandparents, imagining they were enjoying getting spoiled rotten and eating fresh-baked cookies that they helped make. 

Reunion gave me the chance to finally have grandparents. After all, I was only 18 when I first met Kate. A few years after that, I had the opportunity to meet Kate's parents, my grandparents. Kate lived in Oregon, I was in Jersey finishing college, so I was on my own for the get together. My grandfather came to pick me up from the train station in New Jersey, I lived with my parents about an hour away. He swooped his car right up next to me, though we hadn't yet met. I asked how he knew it was me, and he said with a smirk, "Oh, I could tell." 

He took me back to his home and I met with him and Kate's mom, my grandmother. We each sat in different corners of the living room, having a conversation about who knows what - I remember none of it. I just remember the odd mix of feeling excitement, kinship, warmth and welcome alongside of the knowledge that they were the main deciders that I would be cast away from their family. So, the friendliness was more than a little awkward. 

And while I have some memories of Kate's dad's humor and personality, her mom was mostly ghost-like to me. She didn't say much and I could feel her keep her distance. 

That was twenty years ago. While my relationship with Kate, my birthfather, my sisters, and my aunts and uncles has twisted, turned, deepened and richened over the years, my relationship with my birth-grandparents has remained frozen, stuck in friendly awkwardness. They don't reach out to me, and I don't to them. We exist in our worlds, known to each other but unknown. 

As my birth-grandmother reaches her 90th year, I wonder if she ever thinks of me. 

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to view my birthmother's blog on the same topic, go to mothertone

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Thoughts? Reflections? Opinions?

Please comment!