Yes, yes, this is another solo blog post. My fishing lines are still out there, waiting for my SO CALLED FRIENDS TO WRITE. Hahahaha, I’m kidding. This blog is whatever-the-fuck I do with it, so here we are. But perhaps I need to put out a few more fishing lines. WHO WANTS TO WRITE WITH ME?
See Millie’s new haircut? I gave it to her. Why? Because we’ve been ghosted twice by our mobile dog groomer. And you know that good ole COVID-pandemic-puppy-palooza? Well, all of the new puppies of Sammamish have overwhelmed our local grooming spots. There is literally not a grooming spot to be found anywhere for Millie besides my couch.
So I pulled out the sheers and negotiated with the furry terrorist to trim her. It has taken two days to get it to a point where she doesn’t look… hacked. And damn if I didn’t find 5 matted knots that had to be trimmed down to her skin. She’s looking a bit like a shorn sheep now, and that’s that.
Who Is Vulnerable Now?
Speaking of vulnerable-looking shorn sheep, this post is actually about something else. Something a bit deeper that has ME raw and vulnerable. Putting this out for the general public to read is painful but dang it if I need to process it somewhere, so this is it.
What happened? With the help of ancestry.com and some tenacious investigation (seriously, I think my SIL should consider a new career as a detective), I am 99.9% certain we found my birth mother/grandmother. If you didn’t know that I’m adopted, welp, you do now. The DNA and marriage certificates and obituaries led us to the Facebook page of a woman who we think is my biological grandmother.
And then we found her phone number.
And I called it, with the encouragement of my cheering squad.
This is where shit got real. My biological (birth) grandmother is 85 years old. She’s lucid, for sure, but probably skeptical of random phone calls from just about anyone. I spoke with her, and gave her my story, and then – at her request – sent her copies of my adoption paperwork and pictures. I laid it all out there, open, holding my beating heart in my hand for her to do with what she pleased.
She listened, and was shocked, and then said she needed to speak with her sister about what to do next.
People, I was elated. I told some friends that I felt buzzy and excited. I was THISCLOSE to finding my birth mother. To be clear, I didn’t/don’t necessarily want a relationship with her, but I did want a picture. It is the dream of every adopted kid who came from a closed adoption to find a picture, something, anything that gives you a sense of where you came from.
A few hours passed by and this woman called me back. She said she’d spoken with my birth mother, and that she had found out the following: 1) my birth mother HAD given birth to a baby but was saying she’d birthed a boy, and 2) that the baby was a product of rape. And that was that. Case closed.
What? What the what? The DNA doesn’t think so. The adoption paperwork flat-out disagrees. This… was not what I expected.
And holy fuck. I feel shame just typing that word. Rape. RAPE. I wanted to take that word, that idea, and stomp all over it and then bury it in the backyard. I wanted to hide it and never tell anyone about it. But I knew I couldn’t hide it.
So not only did my birth mother deny my existence, she claimed I was a product of, yeah.
I… well. I can’t say I have ever felt a pain as painful as this. It’s strange, because my adoptive mother died last year and THAT has been the thing dominating my therapy sessions. But this? This pain made it difficult to breathe. This pain is raw. You know the grief curve? I find myself hoping to hit the anger part of the curve more quickly so I can find my inner fighter again.
Logically I know that 1) Whatever circumstances under which I was conceived were not my fault; 2) Her inability to acknowledge that she even birthed me is ALSO not my fault; 3) She is probably full of her own trauma and her mental state may not be awesome; and 4) She clearly didn’t want to be found, and I found her, so this was always a possible outcome.
I have more to say on this topic (#motherwounds, #humanssuck, #imeanreally), but I think that will need to be another blog post. For now, I’m trying to recover from this unexpected twist. I didn’t know how much I would care until that door slammed shut, and then hot damn I cared.
That is all. XOXO – me.