Tag: Origins

Unconscious Grief

I have felt guilty about the unhealed wound I carry,
but the emptiness is real.
The sense that I am alone,
that death is inevitable,
that I feel insecure in my mothering,
that I still search for her
in so many ways and faces –
these tell me the loss is real.

I have reflected on the loss of my mother
and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief
by trying to gauge its effect on my life
as objectively as possible.
This is effective when I am in my conscious self,
but like most of us, I spend a good deal of my time
in unconscious thought and choice,
and there the grieving child reigns.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

I think my mom knew she had a good life.  Yet, deep inside her there was this grief.  This feeling that she wasn’t where she should be, that she really wasn’t like these people who she inhabited a house with.

And she tried to reach her mom but by that time, her mother had already died.  This was devastating for her.

I don’t know how conscious her grieving actually was but it came up between us more than once, as her oldest daughter I guess she felt I was the best one to share such unacceptable feelings with.

She tried to justify them to me more than once –

“As a mother, I would just want to know what happened to my child” or “I needed an explanation for this mystifying problem I was having with my health” (that later one is often what adoptees indicate as a reason for their search).

It is interesting that she was less moved to search for the aunts and uncles on her mother’s side, or half-siblings on her father’s side.

I guess having been shut down and shut out in her initial attempt, she just gave up and accepted that the grief could not be relieved in her lifetime.

I do believe she did reunite with her mother after death and that everything was known between them at that point.

Becoming Whole

I feel a sense of accomplishment today.  Not only did I complete my mom’s unfinished quest (to know her origins) but also my dad’s (who acted as though he either didn’t care or was afraid of what he might find – my bets are on the later).

I have sent a limited (only a few that are direct family will receive this) first edition that tells our family’s once lost story.  Now we are found.

Along the way, I learned about more than simply who my original grandparents were but about the issues had may have been a cause of what happened and that have most likely passed down through my family as inherited trauma.

If I died today, at least what I have now learned won’t be lost and indeed it is multiplied and put into a format that it may endure passing down to future generations.

But I am not totally satisfied with what I have created.  I now see two books there – how I found them is one.  The other – the saga of loss and redemption as it has played out within my family.  I am hard at work on what I hope will be a better next edition.  I would love to see it in print in bookstores someday.