My meds have been really helping me take a step back and see the bigger picture. Since getting pregnant, I have taken a lower dose. I want to be able to feel everything as the baby grows and connects to me.

But lately it’s been harder to ignore the truth that is literally right in front of me. I was in my mother’s belly. For months. But who knows how many months….did I complete the 9-10 month term safely? Did she take a prenatal vitamin each day to make sure I would get everything I needed?

I venture to say she did not take any vitamins but probably ate liver etc. which should be enough. Plenty of women who are poor and living out in the country deliver perfectly healthy babies. So why should my delivery be any different?

When I think about the word delivery, I think about freedom. But freedom can be scary. A baby who has bonded with it’s mother for 9 months is safe in their womb (hopefully) and then one day, they are forced out of their safety. They are delivered. They are free. And yet, so fragile, they can barely hold up their heads, only communicate through cries, and are fully dependent on their mother or caregiver. This freedom does not feel so free for a baby now does it?

In infant adoption, there is so much trauma that is not talked about. The trauma often translates into addiction, anger, frustration or all of the above.

I was not adopted. I was trafficked.

This realization hit me when I was walking my dog to our favorite rock. I was not trafficked by recruiters who promised my mother that I would have a “better” life. Or that I would go to a boarding school and return at 18. My mother was not approached or coerced. I was not kidnapped.

The people I grew up with calling “mom” and “dad” are actually the same people who paid someone to traffic me. I think this is why it is so hard to forgive this situation.

If you read up on adoption and the illegality of it, you often see families who were not aware the child they are raising was trafficked. But this was not my case. My Adoptive parents were FULLY aware of what they were doing.

This makes forgiving nearly impossible.

This makes loving them difficult.

This makes accepting them a far-off concept.

When you knowingly lie to your child so that you can get or have what you want, you have created chains around the child and around your heart and soul.

Being delivered is nearly impossible at this point. Freedom is nowhere near.

No pliers can remove these chains.

All you want is to be returned to “sender”.

Rebirth is the only answer to freedom. And I thought I began that process a year or two ago, when I started to talk with my psychiatrist and my online therapist. We really bonded and she showed me ways to cope and manage this very difficult and unfair situation.

Non adoptess will NEVER understand the amount of pressure adoptees have to deal with when it comes to the myriad of questions regarding love.

The assumption is centered around whether the adoptee has love for their adoptive parents while also feeling grief about the massive loss in their life.

Even non adoptees who were in very abusive families; though we may have gone through similar experiences, we lived very different internal lives.

My meds are working. I take them every night with a bite to eat. But the feelings are still there. The anger. The thought that people expect me to forgive this type of horrible thing.

“It frees you” they say….well, then i’m not sure that is really forgiveness now is it? Because when someone tells me they forgive me for something I did, I feel free. And they may feel bound, because they set me free.

When we think about the Jesus story, we look at the sanctioned police who were ordered to kill a person who was just trying to teach the world to love each other. But Jesus’ forgiveness to us essentially cost him his life.

I am not saying that I can’t forgive. I am saying I question forgiveness and what it really means.

What I need to find is peace. And peace does not always come with forgiveness.

In fact, forgiveness and peace are not synonymous and also not mutually exclusive. At least not in the way society has defined them.

But I think i’m ok with being that girl. I am ok with being the angry adoptee when I need to be. I just can’t let it guide my life. But I have a right to feel angry.

My adoptive father passed and his death impacted me more than I would have thought. Maybe because we had already cut ties and I had said my piece to him. I told him how angry I was and at first he tried to blame it on Gladys (the baby seller) but then finally took responsibility. So maybe there was a bit of forgiveness on both our parts….though, he didn’t need to forgive me and vice versa, but it was unspoken.

One of my sisters asked me for my birth certificate and I explained to her that it was all falsified….I was not adopted, I was trafficked.

She attempted to correct me. Silencing me on my experience and the knowledge of what I know about my own existence.

She will never understand but I won’t rest until she understand that no….I was not willing given up, I was forcibly trafficked.

I think the idea that her bio parents would do such a thing is too painful. But that is just a small percent of pain she deals with when I great up scared and unsafe my ENTIRE childhood.

I was trafficked.

I was trafficked.

I was trafficked.

Say it three times so that you don’t forget…..and yes…by your perfect parents.