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    I've been thinking about my mother (birthmother) a lot recently. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is because I will be leaving the country in less than three weeks, and I'll be living abroad for at least the next year. As I prepare to start a new chapter in my life, perhaps it is inevitable that I think of her. She would love where I'm going- the 800 year old  buildings arching high above the olive groves and cobblestone streets, the beautiful language, the passion and the sensuality of the ancient city that I'll call home.


   Both of my mothers have taught me to appreciate and treasure beautiful things- to find truth and loveliness in their most simple forms, to love passionately and to feel deeply. And it is with this in mind that I try and remember the beautiful things about my birthmother- her sense of fantasy, her spiritual profoundity, her love of animals and music. I struggle, sometimes, with anger towards her. I feel unloved by her, resentful (perhaps foolishly) that she was unable to overcome her addictions and be my mother. But within the past few months I have been trying to live compassionately, to foster only feelings of compassion and love for the mother who, I know, would have given anything to have raised me.


She lived in a sort of alternative universe. When I would spend time with her, or speak to her by phone, she rarely asked me about my adoptive parents, or my life within my family. To her, time had not passed- I was still her baby, her sweet infant who needed and relied on her. She would do most of the talking. She never discussed the past, or my other siblings. She would tell me only about the beautiful things in her life- the stray kitten she found and nursed back to health, the nice man she met at mass, the beautiful flowers that grew outside of her apartment building. She would tell me what a beautiful baby I was, how my skin and hair were as white as frost.  I rarely asked questions about the past. I knew that she didn't like talking about it, I knew that she could not bear to face the consequences of the choices she made.  The  last time I spoke to her,however, she came close to telling me about my relinquishment and adoption. She began the story- described the last time we were together as mother and daughter.She described the blanket she gave me, and the small stuffed cat.


"After you left," she said "I stood by the door for hours. I knew that you were miles away, on  the way to your new life.  But I couldn't bear to leave the door. I didn't want to see you go. I just didn't want to see you go."


My mother lived in a world of her own creation. One where we were still mother and daughter, one without drugs or prison or sadness or separation. She often talked to me about her dreams for our future- about how one day we would be together as a family. One day she and my birthfather, together with me and my siblings,  would all be together- living together as the family we were meant to be. "One day," she told me, " I hope you will come home."


So as I prepare to leave the country of my birth, as I prepare to begin a new chapter of my life in a new city, I cannot help but feel that I am leaving her behind. I cannot help but miss her, as I continue  to live my life without her.  One of the last times I saw her, my birth mother gave me a small porcelain angel. It is creamy white, roughly the size of my palm- a small cherub on his knees praying. There are a few glue marks where the porcelain has been roughly glued together, due to a few falls. But despite how delicate it is, I know I will bring it with me to Italy. I bring it everywhere I go. It will sit on my nightstand, as it always does, reminding me  every evening to stay mindful, to notice the beauty around me.  I never told my mother that I would not be coming home to her. I couldn't bring myself to tell her, even though somehow I have a feeling she already knew. But I'll bring the little cherub with me, as a reminder of the many gifts she gave me.  I'll bring it so that, in some small way, she's always with me- present not only within my bones and my skin and the iris of my eyes, but within the air around me. In some small way, she'll always be with me- home together.

Loss.

It took a long time for me to admit that being adopted had caused me to lose something. It took me years- and even to this day, 10 years into reunion, its something that people just don’t want to hear about.

“But you have a family who loves you now,” they tell me. And that’s true.
“But you are better of with the family who adopted you” people say. And there is definitely some validity to that statement.

But in general, I am able to brush off these comments. What could people who aren’t in my situation possibly understand about how it has affected me? But recently, a conversation with my birth sister, Pippi, struck me. She too was placed for adoption, a few years before I was. We share a birthmother but not a birthfather. She is very strongly against adoptee rights, claiming that birthparents should be entitled to absolute privacy, should they choose to request it. If the birthparents don’t want to be found, she says, then adoptees should have no right to seek them out. We often debate this, as my own viewpoints are radically different. But in these conversations, it always comes down to one crucial concept: Loss.

Pippi simply does not believe she has lost anything by being placed for adoption, and thus has no invested interest in knowing our birthparents. After all, she explains, she has parents. She does not feel that her birthparents have anything to offer. She’s happy to be alive, grateful that our birthmother made the courageous choice to have us, and also happy that she made the right choice by placing us for adoption.

I find a lot of aspects of her point of view hard to swallow. Grateful? Courageous choice? She sees our birthmother, for all intensive purposes, as a vessel- the courageous but ill prepared woman who brought her into this world so she could be raised by her *real* parents.

I love Pippi, and though I do not agree, I respectfully agree to disagree. But her words really have me thinking- how can this loss that I feel so deeply completely not affect her? She sees meeting our birthparents as something to do out of mere curiosity, something that can be done without emotional consequence. Whereas I have devoted years of my life trying to fit my birthparents into my world, trying to heal what has been broken. Its not that Pippi likes her adoptive parents and I do not. We both have close, fulfilling families. It’s not that Pippi fits in better with her family than I do with mine. In fact, its probably the opposite! So what is it. What makes this loss so real to me and so foreign to her?

Adoption has given me many great things. But in order to have a family who wanted and could provide for me, I had to lose a great deal.  I feel it in BOTH of my families. When my nephews were born and my whole family marveled about who they look like, and I was absent from the conversation. When my family talks about ancestral heritage, of coming from Sicily and Ireland to Brooklyn- and I realize that one some level I am not a part of that history. I feel it when I speak to my birth family, when they talk about times past- dinners tables that I didn’t sit at, love and a sense of belonging that I wasn’t around to experience. I feel the loss when my birthfather recounts the story of my birth, when I read the letters my birthmother wrote to me when I was a baby but never sent, when I see photos of them holding my baby sister- born only a few years after I- loved, cherished, kept. I feel this loss. I feel it everyday. I even feel it when I am with Pippi, and we laugh about some shared joke, or marvel over some shared feature, and I think:

“We could have lived our lives together as sisters. What has happened to our family that we grew up 1,000 miles apart?”

I don’t wish that I hadn’t been adopted. It would be simpler if I could say that I do, but it just isn’t so. And that’s what makes this loss so strange, so difficult to articulate. Because it’s not one that I would change, or do-over. And maybe that’s what Pippi doesn’t feel, maybe that’s what she can’t see. Maybe she doesn't understand that we can love each other, that we can feel sadness without taking away from our joy and our love of our adoptive families.

Maybe I’m just fanciful, or overly sensitive. Maybe I should be a little more like Pippi- able to overlook the bad and focus on the good. But when I am with her, and I look into her face- I see a reflection of myself. I feel happy that we have found each other, overjoyed that we have lived good lives, that we are happy, that we are loved. But I also feel a twinge of sadness- because I spent the first 20 years of my life without her -this spunky, sassy, strong woman who is my sister- and a part of me feels that we should have known each other all along. I look into her eyes, and I feel the loss of “what could have been”, and it makes me a little sad to know that she does not feel the same thing when she gazes into mine.