It was my birthday on Sunday - Happy Birthday to me. And it was wonderful, a great day with my husband and children. I felt very honored and loved. But birthdays always have this bittersweet edge for me. My sister calls. My brother puts up long lost photos of 5 year old me celebrating a birthday at Storyland. My parents serenade me with a duet of Happy Birthday over the phone. And still there is always, in the back of my mind, an ominous absence.Unmistakably, the first people I knew - the people who made me - are missing from the equation of my day. That has been the case pretty much all my life with maybe the exception of the year I was in contact with my birth father by email. I am sure there was some exchange there on my birthday that year.
I wonder every year if they remember me on that day the way I remember them. I don't think my birth father could forget the day. He has two natural children whose birthdays both fall within days of mine. And while I have never really had contact with my birth mother I would think the trauma alone of birth and adoption would sear the date into your psyche permanently.
The real question then is what do they think about on that day? Do they wonder where I am? If I am okay? If I am happy? Do they wish they could pick up a phone and find out the way I wish I could? Maybe they feel as trapped in this strange set of circumstances as I do. Dancing around boundaries that I don't understand. Boundaries created by circumstances I had no control or say so in. Maybe they feel the same. Maybe they feel, as I do, that the boundaries were set by the circumstances and they have no control either.I sit wishing I knew how to change them or get around them or break through them. Hoping that if I do someday figure it out that I will be pleasantly surprised by what lives on the other side, not hurt and horrified and regretful that I pushed my way through.
I read somewhere tonight a persons proclamation on the internet that they loved the fear of the unknown and the excitement it created. I have never felt that. Maybe I love the hope of the unknown but I find the fear of the unknown paralyzing, not exciting. It certainly has paralyzed me where my birth parents are concerned. Can't you see it, year after year, birthday after birthday I let the boundaries as defined by them sit undisturbed. Willing to be satisfied with the hope of the unknown, not wanting to replace it with the reality of whatever would happen if I were to change it.
Fear wins, it controls me, at least this year it does.
