Integration

Danger -- Construction zone. Enter at your own risk.

Hey did you see I have a link?!! to my firstborn, Joy.

Every little bit of integrating her into my life brings more of me into my picture. I have three children. The youngest was born 14 1/2 years after the first. They are sisters, though they hardly know each other.

My beginnings in motherhood were tragic. A year before I became pregnant with Joy, I miscarried. I didn't even know the word miscarriage before then. The OB/GYN congratulated me on escaping a tragic pregnancy. I grieved my loss, despite being 16 with no idea how I could have prevailed with a baby.

Later, losing my baby to adoption was the greatest pain I've ever known. Abortion wasn't an option for me, even if it had been legal. I've never been anti abortion. I just couldn't imagine it personally at that time. Looking back, it seems like motherhood was aborted.

And then I got married and had two lovely children. Having a "lost" child was my separate reality.

I couldn't speak of it. I couldn't accept it, integrate it into my happy family. It would have been tragic, but acceptable to have lost a child through death. Everyone knows that.

Something connected to all the praise and approval I got for my two lovely children and my happy family shifted the pain of adoption loss i guilt anto guilt and shame. It was too gruesome to explain.

I had two separate motherhoods. One was tragic and aborted. The second was nourishing and growing.

Reunion. For a long time it just meant reunion with my daughter. Getting to know each other. Getting to know myself. Gradually learning to accept, own, claim ourselves as family. Reaching out to other family members, going more public, inch by inch.

I'm beginning to know the richness of reunion inside me, of knowing I have three children. No, it didn't start out that way, inside me. But my two motherhoods are uniting, through Joy's and my reunion. It's becoming one, integrated within me.

Accepting that though I wanted to be her mother, to raise her--I didn't get to; She has other family  has been confusing to me too. How, what, where do we fit together? How do we accept our own and each others' disappointment, most especially Joy's loss as an abandoned baby?

Though I loved her every day of her life; physcially I wasn't there. Her life connection into this physical world was lost. She had to make it on her own through the maze of adoptive family rites.

My dream of her happy family didn't make a lovely happy easy life for her.

My aborted motherhood was a tragedy we both had to survive as well.

What this post is really about is that we are surviving it all. We are integrating ourselves in each others lives and expanding and growing independently and together. Bit by bit.

feelings

Just now I want to reach out and be able to touch her. I want her closer. I want it to be simple and common to reach her. I want her to see me, her mother. I want to be there.

I want to have strength, to stand in my heart no matter what comes my way. I want to watch my feelings, to own them, learn from them but not be ruled by them.

I want to take every thing that comes my way as a blessing, of learning, expansion and growth.

Recovery

Asking, listening, receiving and expressing. Those four steps are my method of learning and growing. Communicating with myself, with God, with you.

I remember holding thoughts and feelings inside, afraid to share them, thinking they were mine, thinking I could be crucified for making an error in consciousness if I let them out where you could see them. I was stuck in self protection.

I've discovered expressing these things allows me to see them more objectively and I experience myself expand, move, change. It makes more room inside. The kaleidoscope of my awareness expands.

An imaginary banner posted on the side of my imaginary bus reads,

"Whatever you think It's more than that, more than that"

--from Job's tears by Robin Williamson.

This is all prelude to revealing what I learned from my last post, the part about rude questions.

The "What kind of person..." was all wrong.

We're all the same kind of person.

We're all
Humans.
Humiliating
Humble
Humming

I want connections, inside and outside. We're all in this together whether we know it or not.

I want to ask "What's going on when a person makes their desire for a baby more important than the baby's desire for it's mother?" What are we doing?

Lets go for a drive.