The Letter that didn't matter

One year ago I wrote and sent my adopters a letter. I have shared this letter in a post titled "The Letter".

It has been a year. I still have not received any official word that either adopter has read this letter.

It is possible that they have read it, but refuse to acknowledge or say anything about it. I just don't know.

Back in June of 2020, my adoptive mother told me she hasn't read it via text, and that she'd rather we meet face to face and she would read it then. She said she is responsible for the turmoil in my life, and she alone. She even wrote that a filial relationship shouldn't be dependant on the contents of a letter.

Which is interesting considering she thought she could have one based on a lie. Based on never telling me where I truly come from. A relationship entirely based on deceit.

Sometime in August of 2020, I reached out to the adoptive father, I asked if I could call him. I wanted to talk about adoption paperwork. He replied requesting that we just texted for now, because he was worried he might say something he didn't mean in the moment. I said that was fine, and reminded him of the letter that I wrote. Again, he didn't even acknowledge this.

He did provide me with some useful information, to which I thanked him for, and then got no other response.

Every now and then I read through the letter to see where my position stands. I read it again this month and a lot of my views have changed. I can see in my writing where I'm still trying to assuage whatever it is they are feeling. I am still angry for the roots that I've lost. For the lineage and history I know nothing about.

All I wanted was honesty. I no longer view my adopters as parents with any sense of endearment. They are parents simply by a logical definition. They raised me. That's it. 

All I can think of now is that there is more to raising a child than providing shelter and food. Anyone can provide a human with the basic needs to survive. But it takes a lot more to help them live.

I still feel I was never given the courtesy of knowing who these strangers were. They got to prepare themselves to the fact of getting a stranger's child. And I was just dropped into their arms and kept in the dark.

The man that raised me did not want children. He has mentioned it more than once and even reminded me of this when I sat with them in September of 2019 to get my answers (wrote about this in "The Visit"). This knowledge has affected me ever since he first told me. The first time was either late 2007 or early 2008. It explained why I never could bond with him, and certainly made it difficult afterwards. Of course, adding the adoption aspect to it now really amplifies my emotions on this.

The fact is, he is just as guilty of the trauma caused by this late discovery. Even though the whole idea of never telling us came from the adoptive mother, his enabling it is just as bad. For my adoptive mother to demand that all blame should fall on her is just as narcissistic as asking for all the praise.

The truth was always going to come out. I didn't need to be protected from knowing I was adopted, I needed to be prepared for it.

I am now in a place where I do not care if my adopters think I am ungrateful. The harsh reality is that I could have been adopted by anybody. So I can't say with absolute certainty say that my life was better off in the hands of my current adopters.

In my letter, I write about how I dissect every memory of my past. And how a lot of the issues I faced could have changed if I had known the truth that I was adopted. The thing is, quite a number of those problems went away after I moved out.

There's a poem written by Philip Larkin titled "This Be The Verse." Here are a few lines:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

I'm a parent now. I understand that nobody is perfect. A parent or not. But I do my best so that when my children grow up to be adults, they won't have to try to dissect trauma to live.

Which makes it hard to understand why my adoptive parents didn't do things differently. My adoptive father's excuse was always that he didn't know any better for not being the dad I needed because that's how his father was. Never present. As for my adoptive mother, she would tell us of the abuse she experienced as a child from her own mother.

When I had my children, my goal was and still is to be better and do better than how I was raised. And I don't know if that's easy to do on my part because I know how I want to be, or if it's also because I am not the people who raised me.

I recently wrote about Grief . Here is something I wrote in that post regarding how I was raised:

Whatever the case, they did provide shelter and food. They took me all over the globe. But looking back now, a lot of those "amazing" privileges I had growing up seem to also be choices they made in order to keep the secret. To control the narrative. All memories are jaded, and every event in my past seems to have an underlying deceitful guise to it.

Clearly, my adopters had insecurities about telling me I was adopted. I think it was more than just not wanting me to feel different or face any sort of stigmas associated with being adopted.

The fact of the matter is, it's been a whole year. A whole year has passed and I've gotten nowhere in my search for answers and my origins. If I can't get it from my adopters now, while they are still around, then what difference does it make if I just shut the door and move on? And even if I did get something out of them, the toxicity still remains. It was there when the truth was hidden and I believed we were blood, then what's to say there will be any changes now? Because clearly there hasn't been.