Self Expression

I've been intending to make a new blog but mostly just caught up in the exciting world of the AAAC forum.

This here is my own little creation. My story telling place. I love to be heard, to express myself. Blogging is valuable because it allows me to say exactly what I think I want to say. Even if it's only for me. But sending my words out to the internet, the public eye is a sweet challenge too. It's such a freeing feeling to choose to say exactly what I want to say to people I don't know; so they can read me, respond to me, judge me. So I can see how this works. How do my words affect others? Do I make a difference to anyone? Is it good? Is it hurtful? I want to know.



I do it mostly because it's valuable for me. The process of expressing instead of holding/withholding is very expansive, like breaking bonds and restrictions on my breathing and on my awareness. If you want to read more of my stories you can find them at http://jmomma.wordpress.com/

APs

this just seemed really appropriate right now

http://harlowmonkey.typepad.com/harlows_monkey/2007/05/first_person_pl.html

It brought to the surface more complications in my story --

She says more than I can.

Shedding

I actually wrote this 2 weeks ago but I couldn't make blogger work then...

Today I feel like a snake, shedding skin.

*Not a cold and unfeeling reptile. I actually rather like the sinuous feeling of handling live snakes – ehh—ok*

But expanding and quite vulnerable. Eying life anew.

Discarding another layer that is no longer necessary, a skin that once protected me and allowed me to move forward has outlived it’s usefulness.

I’ve been challenged again by my gorgeous human daughter.

Every relationship I have is colored by my sense of myself, which is colored by adoption.

So many judgments. I read and sort and forgive and grow and repeat.

So many layers of judgment.

So many attempts to disguise myself.

Oh, I’m really ok.

Really.

And slither off under a rock.

And shed.
And look at life with fresh eyes.

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.

Helter Skelter

Will you, won't you tell me the answer?

No. I have to figure it out myself.

Asking is something I'm learning. From my father I learned to ask challenging and direct questions. At 22 my best friend asked "Why are you always trying to prove yourself?"
I learned from my dad that I better be able to defend anything I had to say or not say it. When push came to shove I tended to leave or challenge. He abhorred "just getting along".

For years I wrestled with the question: "What kind of person gives her child up for adoption?" Last year I awakened in blogland to the twist, "What kind of person takes another mother's baby?"

It's evolved to, "What kind of person makes their desire for a baby more important than that baby's desire for it's mother?"

But, IRL I don't bring up these questions that roll around in my head. They are challenging. They are rude. I don't want to expose my vulnerability of being the mother that lost her baby in that context.

They point out a habit of being ornery, of asking questions that put others on the defensive. Questing for answers, proof.

REquesting, asking for information, inquiring is a habit I would like to cultivate. Can my interest and caring go beyond self protection?

That is what I am asking the universe for right now. Please help me to trust myself enough to ask without defense. To remember that we are all doing the best we can with what we know right now.

"Right and wrong
Right and wrong
Never helped us get along"
-Tenderness by Paul Simon