Grief in Adoption as a Hopeful Realist

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How do you bury someone that you've never met?
How do you bury someone preemptively? Because they may or may not be alive.
How do you bury someone that you don't even know if you'll ever meet?

Somewhere out there are my mother and father. At least one of them knows I exist.
I do care about them. Enough to keep them in my thoughts. Enough that it keeps me up at night.

The more I learn about other Indian adoptees that have tried to find their birth families and failed to do so, the more real it seems that I may never find anything.

I consider myself to be a hopeful realist. I wasn't even sure that was a thing till I thought about it. And then I Googled it.

And it is what I am today. I'm hopeful that I may find my family. I'm hopeful that I'll find answers. But I'm realistic to the fact that it's also a pipe dream. That there are other things in my life today that are more important. I'm realistic to the fact that it doesn’t matter how much time, effort and resources I put into this endeavor, the outcome may never be in my favor. As such, I have to be cautious about it.

I recently posed the following question in a Facebook group that consisted of Indian adoptees:

"I've been thinking about reunion lately. I still have zero paperwork, and am working on it.
I'm trying to get my Certificate of Abandonment that will have information regarding what hospital/agency I was adopted from in India.
Even with this information, I don't know how likely it will be to actually find my birth family.
So my question to the group is, how many of you are in reunion, or have successfully located your birth family in India?"

As of today (10/3/2020), it has been seen by 96 of the 182 members. Not a single one has commented or reached out to let me know of their experience.

That doesn’t give me a lot of hope in this conquest.

There is a small handful of Indian adoptees that have shared their journeys of searching within the social media space. I have reached out to them, and none of them have found their birth families.

It's heartbreaking. In many ways, I'm starting to lose hope. I'm starting to accept the realities of my complicated situation.

I'm listening to Creed right now in what seems like forever. And quite fittingly, the song "Who's got my back?" starts to play. Damn, these lyrics.

Who's got my back now?
When all we have left is deceptive
So disconnected
What is the truth now?

Just going to end this post here. I don't think I'll always have a good way to end a post. No real conclusions. Just like my adoption journey. I don't think there will ever be a proper conclusion to that.

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