The Purpose of My Book, Lost and Found

In the morning after fifteen minutes of consciously connected breathing followed by a short meditation, I generally pick up my journal and let whatever is on my mind spill out. A few days ago, I started writing about the purpose of my "memoir," which I have been calling Lost and Found. On one level it's all about healing my inner child, but when it's completed I hope that it has enough substance to help others. Every adopted person I know goes through a period of intense acting out and numbing out. Why wouldn't we? Our very first experience--that of being safe and protected in our mother's womb--is (at least for most adoptees) unreliable. We are not safe. We are not protected. We are perceived as a problem, a predicament, and our fate is to be relinquished. As a result, to protect themselves from incredible anguish and pain, our birth mothers perform a type of energetic exorcism and shortly after our birth we are handed over to complete strangers. Some of us, most of us, never recover from this initial shock or the grief that goes along with it. In fact, we don't even realize what is going on with us. We have an invisible disability and even when we act out, our behavior is seldom recognized as the result of pain and grief we suffered from the circumstances surrounding our conception and birth. Our adoptive parents are confused by our behavior and some even blame themselves in spite of feeling powerless to do anything about it. It is my contention that we are seeking our adoptive mother's hear beat. We are wanting her unconditional love and acceptance--something we might never get.

I didn't read any books about adoption until after I searched for my birth mother. For the first forty-two years of my life, adoption was merely an adjective describing the circumstances surrounding my birth. The subject was taboo. I didn't have a clue as to why my life was filled with endless dramas where I played the lead role as a victim. The scenes changed, but the plot was always the same. Until I read about it, I didn't understand that my feelings were not unique, that in spite of noble intentions by birth mothers, babies like me who were abandoned at birth or shortly afterward, were trapped in a cycle of energetically repeating the emotional circumstances or feelings surrounding our birth. For anyone who hasn't done any therapeutic work involving the healing of their inner child, this might seem unlikely, but I know this to be a fact. Showing how this played out in my life is an important part of my book. The repetition of loss in my life became so painful, I finally sought out therapy. I complained and blamed to numerous therapists, but I didn't get better, I didn't heal until I took responsibility for my feelings and faced the challenge of healing my own inner child.

I began this inner healing work around 1994, shortly after I completed the search for my birth mother. I was in a support group for wives of combat veterans and I was (to use Michael Brown's language) filled with fear, anger, and grief. My marriage had reached the tipping point and I was blaming everyone except my self for my life's circumstances until the therapist of the group explained the concept of energetic connection. Energetically and emotionally, my inner child was as damaged as that of my husband, who had served as a radio operator in Vietnam. Finally, I had a picture for the excruciatingly painful emotional wound I tried desperately to ignore. No matter what I did to numb the pain, it would surface in the form of reactive behavior that kept me as far away from my authentic self as I could get. Every relationship I had reflected my inner pain. I was a glutton for punishment and trapped in an endless cycle. I was certain that searching for my birth mother would heal the wound, but initially, it only made me more aware of my condition. I had spent my life in an unconscious, repetitive trance, and there was only one way out: Feel it to heal it.

In 1994, after I searched, I told my story to everyone who would listen. The reaction was always the same. "You should write a book! Be on Oprah!" I must admit that my ego relished in the thought. Like any good mystery, reunion stories, as they are referred to among adoption circles, are always compelling, and mine had some unusual twists and turns. My search is definitely an intriguing part of the book, but the story I want to tell is about my feelings, about recovery.

My first attempt at writing about my search took the form of fiction. Up until then, I had written only nonfiction, so I attended a local fiction writing workshop where I was asked to answer the question, "What's at stake?" Why does the main character decide to search? Is she suffering from a genetic disease? Does she need a donor for an organ transplant? Is her husband threatening to divorce her? At the end of eight weeks, I had written a couple of chapters, but the writing didn't move me and it ended up in the back of the lowest drawer in my file cabinet. About a year ago, the desire to write the story resurfaced. This time, I knew it had to be written in the form of a memoir. It had to be my truth and it had to be about healing, but I liked the idea of writing it like fiction. I took another fiction writing workshop and the scenes from my life as an adoptee began to appear. "Chronology is your friend," I was told, and so this is how I organized my "shitty first draft."

Somewhere in the middle of my writing, I picked up The Presence Process by Michael Brown (2005 Namaste Publishing), a book that had been recommended to me when my daughter was ill. I had read the book before, but this time I actually did the process, which for me has entailed completing the inner work I began several years before. I have read my fair share of self help books, but none has enabled me to accomplish as much. This brings me to the third aspect of my book, which is seeing the scenes as unintegrated aspects of my child self and rewriting them from the eyes of a nuturing, loving parent.

I have a lot of work to do and writing is the easiest part of it.