As an adoptee, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about abandonment. After all, my birthparents abandoned me, didn’t they? People who love me eventually leave me, right? I can’t trust love, can I? Love never lasts, does it? I’m not proud to admit that I spent plenty of years putting the men who love(d) me — men I love(d) — through tests of all kinds. It wasn’t pretty. If I say this or do that will you leave me? If I disagree with you or don’t do what you want me to do, will you bail? What conditions does your love have? If I am just me, with all my passion and rawness and full emotions, will you find I’m too much for you to handle? When I make mistakes, will you find yourself able to forgive me? Prove to me that you won’t leave!
I’d like to apologize publicly to the men I dated up until and including my ex-husband for testing them like that. And I’d like to express my eternal gratitude to him for supporting me to dismantle that pattern in so many ways.
My fears of abandonment were exacerbated by my dad (my adoptive father, that is). He didn’t know how to handle having a strong-willed, independent, precocious daughter like me, and he resorted to threats like, “If you date a black man, I’ll disown you.” “If you live with someone before you get married, I’ll disown you.” As an adoptee, it’s hard to view those comments as idle threats. Even so, I certainly tested the waters, in ways he wasn’t aware of, and even in ways he was. When I was in my late 20‘s, I dated a guy who on paper was absolutely everything my dad wanted for me. I had told my dad about him, and he was excited to meet him. Before I put my boyfriend into the line of fire, I said, “Hey Dad, I want to show you photos of the backpacking and whitewater rafting trip my boyfriend and I just went on,” and handed him a few snapshots. My dad took one look at the photos and the only thing he could manage to say was, “How can you do this to me?” I tried to reason with him and implored him to judge people (if he was intent on judging them) for what they did or said or at least for something they had control over. He couldn’t control the fact that he was black any more than I could control the fact that I was female, I reasoned. My dad stopped speaking to me. And he didn’t speak to me for months after that relationship had run its natural course.
It is easy for me to tell myself stories that support my belief that people have abandoned me. The reality is no matter what belief I hold dear, I can always find evidence to bolster and support that belief. We’re all brilliant in that way. It’s just amazing. Think about it. Whatever you look for, you will find. Whatever you pay attention to, you see. But there are all kinds of things that you filter out because somehow they don’t fit with your paradigm of life or love or work or a particular person or even yourself. And that’s one of the ways you and I both limit ourselves and keep ourselves stuck.
Eventually, I realized that I was tired of feeling abandoned and disconnected. I realized that I wasn’t interested in having any of that in my life any more. And what I decided to do is this: I paid attention to and noticed when those familiar stories arose in me. I watched the emotions the stories brought, and then chose to just let the stories go. I didn’t give any energy to stories that supported the idea that I was being abandoned by anyone. Instead, I opened to other possibilities.
What I’m interested in, what I’m really deeply committed to, is truth and love and aliveness.
I really wanted to understand what I was calling “abandonment”. What does it mean for someone to abandon someone else? Has anyone ever really done that to me? According to the dictionary, to abandon is “to leave completely and finally, to forsake utterly.” I looked back at all the times when I believed I had been abandoned, and looked to see what really happened. I looked for the truth.
In 2002, I wrote a letter to my birthmother. It was the first time I attempted to contact her. I had known since I was 16 that I wanted to reach out to her, someday. When I was in high school and knew girls who got pregnant, I remember thinking that if I had ever gotten pregnant and given my baby up for adoption, I would always wonder if I had done the right thing, if my child was okay. I wrote to her because I felt I needed to tell her that I was fine, that I’ve had an amazing life. I had searched her name on the internet, and had learned that she was married and had children. I didn’t have any expectations of her, and I told her as much. I said in my letter that my intention was not to disrupt her life. I explained that I knew that she was married and had children and I had no idea if any of them knew anything about me. I said I was really open to hearing from her, but told her that if I didn’t, I would understand. In retrospect, I can see that by not having any expectations of her, I was protecting myself from being disappointed if she didn’t respond. She emailed me moments after reading my letter. A few months after she and I first met, I met my birthmother in Santa Cruz so that she could introduce me to my half-brother. We planned to have dinner with him, but arrived a few hours early. So she drove me around town, pointing out where she had lived, the hospital where I was born, etc. As we drove down one street, she pointed and said, “My sister, Jasmin, lives there.” We turned to look at the house, and she saw that her sister had just pulled in the driveway. She asked if I wanted to meet her sister, and when I said, “Sure!” she immediately pulled over and parked, and we met her at her just as she reached her front door. My birthmother greeted her sister, and then said, “Do you remember back in high school? When I got pregnant? Well … this is Carla.” In that moment, I realized that my birthmother hadn’t told her sister that I had gotten in touch with her. The next second, Jasmin turned to me and said, “I was just thinking about you last week!” In that split-second, all the ideas that I had held about my family not caring about me, having forgotten about me, etc. were obliterated. It was amazing.
As I looked for the truth, what I found is that every other story I had told myself about being abandoned by other people disintegrated in similar ways. It was all a fallacy. Except that for me it had been undeniably real. It was real because I had believed it to be real.
There’s another more subtle reason that I had found it challenging to release that story I was telling myself about abandonment — about people who love me leaving me and love never lasting. And this, I didn’t realize until several months ago. Until then, it was as though I knew on one level that abandonment is a fallacy, but I didn’t really get it. The best way I know to describe it is that I knew it intellectually, but that knowingness hadn’t yet permeated my entire being — my body, mind and spirit.
Several months ago, some circumstances in my life gave me an opportunity to look really closely at what happens when I go to that place of feeling abandoned. I paid careful attention to what I was doing, and I saw how I kept thinking about him, wondering what he was feeling and thinking, wondering why he had shut down and shut me out so abruptly. In those moments when I felt abandoned and felt crushed and broken-hearted, ALL my focus was on him. And that left no one to love or take care of or care for or even be interested in me.
Even if there had been someone standing right in front of me, loving me with every fiber of their being, I wouldn’t have been able to take it in, because I wasn’t really present. I wasn’t present to and with myself.
It wasn’t true that he had abandoned me. But even if he had, that wasn’t really the relevant thing anyhow. What caused my pain, my feelings of being abandoned, were the repeated ways in which I left myself. If there was ever anyone who abandoned me, IT … WAS … ME!! That was something I had control over, something I could keep doing, but something I didn’t have to do.
Once I realized that, something else happened too. Something beautiful and tender and powerful and expansive. One of the greatest gifts I have always felt I received from being adopted is the recognition that the people I love may not always be here. I don’t take them for granted, and I always make sure when we part ways for the day or for a period of time that they know unquestionably how much I love them and cherish them, how much they matter to me and how blessed I feel to have them in my life. I love that I have lived my life that way. Appreciating every connection, loving out loud. But that need to tell the people I love how much they mean to me used to come in part from a fear that I may never see them again. I felt at times almost desperate to make sure they got it, and afraid to say goodbye until l felt they did.
As I really deeply understood the ways in which I was leaving myself, I also got in every fiber of my being that I will never lose anyone. It’s not possible. No matter what they choose or what happens to them, anyone I want to have with me will always be with me. I am and always will be free to go on loving them, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.
There is a line in Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s poem “The Dance” that calls us to “risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.” The people I love are always with me, and they always will be. I still tell people I love how much they mean to me and express my love openly, but now I do it purely from a place of joy and tenderness and softness and freedom and fullness. Without the fear, what else is there?
