Home Sweet Home

Note: My friend, Susan (@snippets.of.susan on IG), posted some processing prompts for the month of December. Susan has had an unimaginably hard year, having lost multiple family members while enduring the same rapid collapse of late-stage capitalism we are all living. Susan, if you read this, I want you to know that you are in my thoughts and I am joining you in this sacred reflection space you've created with so much gratitude and love.

Home is a great tapestry that I have been piecing together since birth.

For a long time in my life I resented that. I felt like it made me "less than." Unworthy of love. It was haphazardly stitched, often had holes gnawed open by grief and seams holding on by a single thread. I felt--I knew--that I deserved more than that. There are times I still get consumed by a rage fueled by the failings of the adults around me and the life I built in spite of those failings.

But rage rarely exists on its own.

Almost 7 years ago now, I entered reunion. I was filled with relief to be in this different stage with my adoption: a kind of restoration that might lift some of the deleterious weight of grief. Some part of me knew that I was going to be let down, but I had to do it anyway. There, buried inside myself, was a reaching toward needs that were never met that drew me into both deeper understanding and even harder questions. Before I knew it, I had expectations on reunion that I had't even known were there.

To cut to the heart of it, I thought reunion would take the place of this ramshackle sense of home.

It didn't. But it did impact it greatly. I saw myself through genetic mirrors, facial expressions and behavioral quirks; Echoes of me in the faces and ways of strangers. I gained meaningful connections with people I now cherish. I got access to some medical history, which I recognize as a great privilege. But it probably won't surprise most of you to learn that reunion does not equate to "coming home."

Even if the more cynical parts of me weren't surprised at this truth, all of my parts were angry.

It's easy to forget that anger does more than just lash out. It also creates immense clarity. So does hitting 40.

40 felt like a portal and 41 has felt like I am truly"in it" now, feeling what I'm meant to feel. Those of you who have also experienced the fiery portal of perimenopause know how some things only find you through rage. Surprisingly, one of those things has been gratitude.

Gratitude is an easy thing to resent as an adoptee when the word is so heavy with expectations. "You should be grateful they gave you a life" "Aren't you so grateful your mother loved you so much to give you away?"

Today I am most grateful I no longer carry the weight of other people's expectations about what I should feel.

And because I don't, it's easier for me to see that the gratitude I have for my patchwork home that I have carried with me (added to, worked around, in some cases removed from) get to exist entirely outside of my anger that I had to create it at all.

My project of creating my home is not over, and I don't lock doors behind me in the same ways I used to. I understand that growth can surprise us, that time can sometimes bring the motivation to do the work it takes to repair. But I also value knowing myself, and I know that my purpose in this life cannot be to accept falsehoods as truths and expectations as love. I will not put my life in the hands of people who (in the words of a great instagram post by @blcksmth I saw recently) 'have no fucking idea how to hold me.' Just because they have made due with less from the ones that love them does not mean that I owe them the same, and I certainly won't make my son endure pain that I have some power to spare him from. In the same way I had to learn that reunion is not a solution to my pain, they will have to learn that it is also not going to grant them permission to perpetuate the very same poisonous beliefs that painted my adoption as "God's Will." Abandonment in any of its various forms is not God's will then and it certainly isn't now.

Home is the belief that I deserve relationships with people who can look themselves in the mirror and apologize for the harms they have caused; People that take the necessary steps to make things right and don't hide behind their fear and pride.

Home is not store-bought perfection. Home is messy. Always. And that doesn't taint it in any way. Home is where we get to be loud, wrong, uncertain, and sometimes lost. It holds us anyway, and I am so grateful to be held here.