Time is quickly approaching and I’m scared. My fear is based on the loss I experienced at a very young age. It is real. It is heavy. It is sad.
Whether adoptees want to, can, or should believe it, there is this primal wound we all experience. But the primal wound does not just effect the babies bonding with the mothers for 9 months, it affects the mother bonding with the baby for 9 months.
I’m pregnant; in my 8th month and Y is big. He is kicking up a storm. When he is upset, he lets me know by kicking my bladder, forcing me to react in a “time to go to the toilet” way. I take it seat on Jonny and it is during this time that I can reflect and think through my next step. He wants me to relax. He wants me to stop moving so much.
When he is happy, I usually get a kick to the top. I talk to him in the morning, at midday after lunch, and at bedtime. And guess what? He responds every time. He is alert. Hears my voice, responds to my questions.
He is connected.
He is breathing.
He is a live.
And I cry on the inside and on the outside because I have never been so close to someone in my entire life. This proximity, creation of a life, interpretation of what is to come next…it fills my heart with joy.
But also sometimes fear.
This fear often paralyzes me and it is not fair to Y. It is not fair that he has connected to someone so close but will have a kind of fear in his DNA.
Maybe he too will feel abandoned like my mother felt by God and those creating an existence for me that was not real.
My fear has been passed down to me by his grandmother’s fear; a woman he will never get to meet and yet, Y was in her collection long before we even knew.
I remember crying as a young child and no one could console me. No one knew or understood how I felt or where my emotions were coming from.
No one really cared to ask. They just created what they thought were the solutions; adopt more kids.
I promise you, that is not the answer. It was not the answer because no one asked the question.
Just like with infertile women adopting, I need you to know that adopting a child will not replace what you are truly searching for. Maybe you are not asking the right question.
But where was my mom when I cried? Where will I be when Y cries? Where will Y be when and if his child cries?
Crying too.
My mother never left me nor did she abandon me. Like so many adoptees, stories are told, lies are created, papers are fabricated in the name of a “better” life….but did we ask the right questions?
Better for whom?
My mother cried while I cried and sometimes she cried more. She cried more because my brain was molding and becoming someone she no longer knew and I never truly understand.
As I grew older, I cried differently. The primal wound was evident in everything I did. The disconnect allowed for vulnerability, anxiety, hate, fear, and that…..not asking the right questions.
In humanity, we like to think we have all the answers. We teach kids from a young age that adults know best.
We forget the questions though…we skip them. Then our solutions are wrong.
Unlike a complex math problem, the word problem can often have information that is not necessary. If you don’t pay close attention to the actual question, the problem will take you longer to solve.
But in adoption, the question is rarely in the problem (which is why many adoptive parents skip that part). In adoption, all of the information is necessary in order to even begin to dissect the notion of an answer to the question even being possible to stomach. The right question is rarely asked because adoptive parents rarely look at all the pieces as a complex puzzle. It takes too much time.
Energy.
Thought.
It takes too much heart to really communicate.
Most adoptive parents never adopted to connect with the heart. They try so hard to reverse the primal wound that in turn, ends up creating a new wound.
Now, instead of 1 main wound, the adoptee has to grapple with their adoptive parents pretending that they too are suffering from a primal wound that was never even there.
It’s all pretend.
A connection that was never there.
A relationship that was never there.
It was NOT meant to be but it became.
There was no bonding for 9 months but there was a disconnect for life.
When I cry, she cries. Now that she is dead, I cry louder so she can hear me better.
Lifting Taboos 
The amazing awareness of babies
Once we understand fully the tie between a woman and her child, we will begin to understand the beauty, meaning and strength of this life, we will understand also what it means to have real feelings for someone, we will than get on our knees and hope we never participated to separate a woman from it’s child.
So, as I said already, since no one seems to care about how a baby feels when you take him away from it’s mother at birth I thought of adding this to explain that newborns are not just a piece of flesh that suddenly appear on earth…
From the book, The Adopted Child – Understanding the Primitive Wound, by Nancy Newton Verrier:
“The truth is that most of what we have
traditionally believed about babies is wrong.
We have misunderstood and underestimated their capabilities.
They are not simple beings, but complex and
ageless – little creatures with thoughts
as vast as they are unexpected. ”
In his book Babies Remember Their Birth, Dr. Chamberlain goes so far as to say:
“Babies know more than they should. A few minutes after birth, a child can recognize the face of his mother among a series of photos – which he has never seen… The recently discovered truth is that newborns have all their senses and can use them just like all of us. The tears of suffering are genuine. Babies are not insensitive; we are. ”
If babies remember when they were born, then they also remember what happened right after they were born, that is, their mother, the person they were bonded with and who was supposed to welcome them into the world. , suddenly disappeared.
How might this experience affect the emotions and senses of a newborn baby? We can no longer think that babies perceive nothing and feel nothing. Too much evidence to the contrary, says Dr Chamberlain: “They smell, both physically and emotionally. And too often neither obstetric practices nor adoption procedures take this new light into account. ”
The injury
Too often in our approach to the newborn,
we behave with him as if he were
exactly that – “brand new”.
We overlook the fact that the newborn
is actually the culmination of an astonishing
experience that lasted forty weeks …
Looking at the newborn baby as if he had
“Sprang completely finished from the brain of Zeus we lose the information that history from the newborn as a fetus can provide us.
T.B. Brazelton.
“This story to which Brazelton refers refers to the formation of an in utero bond between mother and child. Many physicians and psychologists now understand that the link does not begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological and spiritual events that started in utero and will continue throughout the postnatal period. If this is interrupted by a separation from the birth mother, the resulting experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted on the unconscious minds of these children and results in what the author calls “the primary injury. ”
“Find the child in yourself”
John bradshaw
“As the visceral brain is able to learn and memorize, but almost unable to forget,
any trauma forms a permanent imprint which dominates it after the event. In the end, all to what
the child survives during the first years of his life – a period of extreme vulnerability – is recorded
in his brain for the benefit of his survival. “
Thank you for sharing.