How do we, as adoptees, deal with rejection from our birth family members?
I’ve been fortunate in that only siblings have rejected me..not the dreaded mother or father. But it still hurts. A lot. And it’s really not surprising.
Most people don’t understand what it’s like to be despised on such a primal level. Sure, there are a lot of people who fight with their siblings, or who don’t get along with a brother or a sister. But those kinds of things happen in normal families because of conflict- actions or words.
My sister Nicole? She just hates me. Not really because of anything I’ve done to her, or vice versa. But because I exist- and frankly, it just pisses her off.
How do we, as people who have grown up outside of our families of origin, cope when we discover that in reunion, we aren’t as welcome as we would have liked?
I wish I had the answer. After nearly 10 years of conflict…I’ve learned to just live with it. I try to comfort myself with the fact that its not “ME” as a person, but me as an entity. Nicole couldn’t possibly hate me, she doesn’t know me! We were friends as young children, but puberty (and the notion that I wasn’t going away..as she’d hoped) promptly ruined all of that for us.
Now, at a very tender age, she is expecting her first baby. It’s a niece or nephew that I will never know, who will never call me “Auntie A”, who will be deprived of his only aunt just as me and my sister were deprived of each other.
How do we heal? How do we make amends? Apologies don’t work- what are we apologizing for?
“I’m very sorry I exist, Nicole. I’m sorry you aren’t really an only child. Sorry our father loves me too.”
With my particular case, talking doesn’t work. Neither do letters. She insists, as she always has, that she hates me and that she will never love me. She talks to other half- siblings of ours who HAVE done some pretty terrible things to her. Just not to me. I am her only full sister- the only sister with whom she shares a father. She hates me because she is jealous that I too have a connection with him.
Um…..my bad.
How do we move on, my adoptee friends? How do we just “accept” that sometimes our own families will probably never love us, simply because we exist? Luckily- the problem most commonly lies within the other person. Most people cannot imagine hating or being hated by someone they don’t even know. Let alone someone they don’t know who is also their brother, or sister, or daughter.
I find my only salvation is to wait. Maybe one day Nicole will change her mind, maybe one day she will understand. She is very young. We still have time.
Do I hold my breath? I do not. Do I wish her well? … I try to.
But mostly I just accept it for what it is. I add it to my list of unique situations that being relinquished for adoption puts me in. Another unfortunate thing that I have no control over, but that will affect me for the rest of my life.
How do you all deal? Did your families welcome you back into the fold? If not, what helps you?
