I write this about my experience with finding my birth parent(s). I myself, had always held out hope and I guess a fantasy about my birth mother.. I know I have a birth father but my real emotional hang-up was my mother. Perhaps it was because in my adopted family it was my mother who I had the misfortune to spend the most time with outside of school. My father was a relatively gentle man but he worked- and my mother was a SAHM for most of the time I was with them. Perhaps it was her never treating me like her own, and using me to lash out at. I don't remember a single time she told me I WAS pretty. She'd say in front of me,' we have an attractive family', but to pay me as an individual that compliment 1 time, never. I know she did tell her blood daughter she was pretty.
I will state, I am grateful to have no memory of sexual abuse, nor did I grow up in a drug/alcohol addicted family. These 2 things for many adoptees, are a luxury they never got.
Anyway back to my lament- I ALWAYS WANTED MY 'MOMMY'.
In my mind, in spite of giving me up for adoption, she was my unspoken answer of undying love and acceptance. She loved me enough to eventually give me up for better- so she must have loved me.
When I beacame a mother I happened to have a differently abled child. The genetics gave me a reason to search . This need and my own selfish motives of being taken back and loved forever. I was relatively lucky in that it didn't take years- in fact by the time my child was 11 months old I had found and met my mother. Thanks to my birth grandmother(GM) buying her a plane ticket.
The greatest gift my mother did give me, was in fact my birth(GM). Thank God b4 she could think about it, she had told me that there was someone who wanted to talk to me. It was my GM. I got 7 yrs of unconditional conscious love from my GM, I savor every bit of it.
Sadly, my mother for what is is worth was a total bummer. I found her to be an ungrateful, self absorbed,(oh woe is me) emotionally immature human being that after 50+ years, still blamed my GM for everything that happened to her- even after she was of age. All her hurts, fuck ups and choices- she couldn't see were her own after she turned of age. Worse yet, she still insisted on punishing this woman for it, every time she talked to her.
Now,1 would think as a casual observer, who always expected the worst but hoped for the best- and feeling like I was on the outside looking in,(me) that she would have been able to separate the issues of her life. It was not be, she was still a wounded woman/child blaming another person who had issue of her own.
My Grammy had left home at 14 to marry a man 20+yrs her senior to escape the abuses of her own family,(her mother used to say-I cold kill you and tell God you died) She was a virgin and was basically raped by her new husband and was saddled with 3 kids by the time she was 18 yrs old. How could she know how to be a a good mother if this was her plight at such a young age? Never mind that the father rejected the last child born as not his for being born darker (exhibiting the Native American blood from GMs side- not the German/Dutch of his) and had stolen the 2 older kids included was my B.mother thus forcing my GM to have to work, to support herself and her rejected boy.
I found it much easier to get along with my GM, we could converse like 2 adults and with a natural affinity we got along famously. I know this irked my B.M. she is so immature that she felt jealous. How dare I love this woman was her feelings. I felt like in my BM's case she was unable to even tell me the truth very well since she was so immersed in her own world. She sadly had no idea who my B.Father was. My GM was willing to visit her past even if it brought up old wounds- but not my BM. My GM was really a balm for me, while I tried to maintain a civil communication with my BM that she couldn't handle.
I too was a balm for my GM, as she could look at me and see her daughter, (I happened to look nearly identical) so she could enjoy seeing her daughter and having a relationship with a grown child of hers.
After about a year, I quit trying to talk to my BM, I would be in tears over her ignorance, and unwillingness to forgive- now even me since she viewed my relationship with my daughters father a sin and called us 'devil worshipers'. (I had my daughter out of wedlock, though I foolishly married him at the time she was 4) She in her twisted world was a religious zealot, amongst other things.
The let down over my 'mommy issue' took me about 2 years to get over. I had not verbalized it to myself even, and to feel the rejection of a mother all over again, was painful. Not crippling but certainly it smarted. I found working through it- I was quite OK with the fact that I had had 'bad parents' who adopted me rather than being raised by her for any longer than she did. I feel I dodged a spiritual bullet.
I did what I could to find out my bloodlines and any 'maladies' and have placed this experience in it's own place in my heart. There was no knowledge of Albinism in my search, but I have thus found out that often children born this way were often abandoned in the Native American cultures, and as far as the Pennsylvanian Dutch/Germans they often killed them or locked them away refusing to acknowledge their existence or birth. So it's no wonder that my GM or BM had no idea of these recessive genetics. W/out my BFathers side of the genetics and no abilities to find him, this will forever be a mystery,
I won't be having any more kids as far as I know or expect, as I have chosen this for myself out of a sense of guilt for not personally raising my child, and how it might feel to her, if I did. I was a very good mother in spite of her fathers abuses, and I want to be there for her when she comes to that total realization and not be saddled with the needs of another, or be any more heartbroken if things don't go as expected.
I've forgiven my BM in my heart and spirit, for she is a pitiful lost soul. I didn't get the happy reunion with her that I had wanted, but I did find that I got just what I needed.