I am healing so quickly that it's hard to believe. That is a relief.
On the other hand, tears are falling more often and more quickly. Perhaps it's a positive sign that I am once again allowing myself to plumb the depths of many sorrows. I had been on autopilot for several years; I had little choice, or felt that way.
Nalini told me that this is the time, now, to do my emotional work: my journey to find my parents is finished.
I was rejected quite brutally by my mother several times; one doesn't quickly forget being told "I wish I had aborted you!" in a first conversation. We met several years later. I know we both tried. But apparently some differences are too troublesome to discuss. I accept that we are all on our own timelines for our own journeys, but this pattern of being ignored roundly after airing concerns, after being lied to again, is stale. I apologized, and explained why I had to take some space after being told that my name, as pronounced, was for someone of a different race. Don't ask. But it takes two to have a relationship, and it would seem I am on my own again. As in there is me, calling into a void. I am turning away now.
Some broken things cannot be put together again, and I refuse to be pointed at or ridiculed, and this last part about my father, whether it was hurtful or not, was a house of cards of lies that defies explanation. I don't know how many revisions or backtracks there can be, really. I say, "Take responsibility, and just tell the bloody truth." Be done with it. The truth does set you free. I am not even angry anymore. I feel sad for someone who has to imagine that such lies are necessary and sustainable in the first place. Oh yes, it goes back to what my aunt said, nearly two years ago: "C, you gave up the wrong kid." This one doesn't stop.
When I did find my father against enormously grim odds, I encountered a new family, new concerns, and another set of difficulties, including mourning a parent I never knew. I did know, or I had been told anyway, that he didn't know about me. It would appear that was among the truths that were told; apparently there were other contretemps that marred whatever did happen between my parents. One parent is deceased, and the other isn't speaking. I must make do with other sources. My father was a handsome man with lots of girlfriends, never was serious with my mother, and swanned off to Hawaii when my mother was about 8-10 weeks pregnant with me. But he loved kids. It's a tragedy he never knew his own though, and knew he was a father.
I was thinking about this particular opacity after reading a controversial post about healing over at Adoption Voices, and then Deanna Shrodes' follow up post at Adoptee Restoration. I agree that all humans, ALL of us, are responsible of taking care of our wounds so that we don't continue to hurt others. I know the past five years have been brutal on my young sons. I know my depression and anxiety take a huge toll on them. Enough already. I have to do some work.
In that spirit, I was preparing for my first session with Dr. Yalom by reading his enormously insightful The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients. He is warm and flawed. And clearly brilliant. In the first several pages, he referred to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which I just happened to have been reading. I showed Mark, who laughed at the serendipity of it all. He said, "Yes, this man will understand you." I found myself agreeing with Dr. Yalom over and over as I turned the pages eagerly: work on yourself, repeatedly at different life stages, so that your relationships do not suffer. If there is a dysfunctional pattern, he will help you find it and give you the tools to cope or reframe your point of view. It's about finding your blind spots, but his incisiveness seems to go beyond that. He is a proponent of existential therapy, and there were thus requisite references to Sartre, including one of my favorites: "All introspection is retrospection," which is doomed to emptiness. Nostalgia will bring no fruit. It will trap you. It's worthwhile as a means to an end, but we must live, not dream life away. I am stuck. I need someone to help me see the signposts out of that illusory place. We shall see what Dr. Yalom thinks about adoption, although he did say he was supportive of a patient's New Age-y requests. I am hopeful that he will see it as a trauma and not pooh-pooh my anxieties.
With his help, I plan to study these cards in my hand, reshuffle them, perhaps learn to value some friendships that I haven't, and see what I *can* change so that my sensitivities/anxieties may be put to an active use that makes me proud, a use that leverages my full potential. I am beginning to see that I can be loved, despite so many rejections, so many lies: people leave me, hurt me, and always because "You are so much different." I am loved, but not enough: six months later, years later people pop by to say they think I am wonderful, but they're not there when I need them. Maybe I need them too much, or I am asking the wrong people to be with me in the trenches. I do know I push some people away while being very demanding of others, and it depends very strongly on how connected I feel to them at the level of the heart. Odd, I know. It's immediate: either I know we will be friends for life, or I won't ever let them in. And if those friends I trust screw me over, I feel almost physically wounded and will try to mend things far past the mending stage. Past the point of their abusing me. It's better, but not all there, yet...
I am hoping that Dr. Yalom will help me unpack the notion, repeatedly thrown at me, in vulgar and less vulgar ways, that I am intimidating. If you hang out with my college friends, if you went through my experiences, you'd see that I am actually quite pedestrian on some counts. Try spending a day in lectures at Cambridge University, and you'll see I'm not that special. And if I *am* exceptional, so what? Maybe Dr. Yalom can help me write that book that I've started and stopped fifty times.
But yes, responsibility is the name of the day. Every day. I am living, knowing that I have to try.
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