The Birthday

Today is my daughter’s 14th birthday. She is speeding quickly into the teen years and I know that the next time I blink, she will be an adult. Birthdays are a big deal for kids. What’s not to love? There is undivided attention, gifts, cake, ice cream, and sometimes big parties. For parents, it can be an expensive, over-inflated, exhausting event. But, even for the most exasperated parent, it’s still an amazing wonder to watch your child grow from a baby, to a young child, to a tween, to a teenager, and then to an adult. There is a lot of joy wrapped up in the package of a child’s birthday.

My daughter’s birthday is no exception. It’s hard to believe that she is blooming into her own personhood. The once clingy three-year-old is starting to take the shape of a young woman. Birthdays are a big deal for me. I like to celebrate them with lots of fanfare. In the work that I do, I have witnessed too many lives being cut short and have watched to many loved ones wish that they could have just one more trip around the sun with the person that they lost. To make it to your next birthday is actually quite a big deal. Because I know intimately the fragility of life, I want to celebrate my daughter’s birth with gusto and this year was no exception.

The Celebration

This year we celebrated her birthday over a forty-eight-hour period. My husband was working on her actual birthday and so the day before we kicked off the fun-fest with pizza, cupcakes, and gifts on the back porch. Today, we took a trip to Galveston with her best friend to have lunch at a favorite restaurant and to visit the local aquarium. As I watched her enjoy her presents or the food we were eating, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was thinking about her birth story. I wondered if she was wondering what the day of her birth looked like, what her parents looked like, if she had any siblings, and how she would be celebrating if she were still living with her birth parents. I wondered if she felt any sadness for not knowing her first family. I too try to imagine what they look like and who she resembled more and who she gets her quirky sense of humor from, or her deep spiritual intellect.

This morning as we were getting ready to head down to Galveston, my daughter’s best friend stated that they had determined that the time of her birth was 11:37 AM. That’s the first time I had heard either one of them discuss the possible details of her birth. It peeked my curiosity but it also stung a bit too. I didn’t have the actual details to counter her guess. The 11:37 timeframe was actually much closer to her best friend’s time of birth and I wondered if they unconsciously chose that time. I make up so many stories about the day of her birth. Each year it changes just a bit. I go back to wondering if she also makes up stories about her birth.

Ambiguous Loss

Adoption is a form of ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is defined as a loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief. Whether this grief is faced head-on or not can often determine the depth of healing and acceptance that needs to take place for the adoptee. Unresolved grief can lead to a host of issues which can then destabilize the mental health and wellness of the individual that is struggling with the ambiguous loss. The irony in this is that ambiguous loss is rarely resolved. Unless my daughter searches and finds her birth family, the questions she has will never be answered. The resolution really comes in the acceptance of living with mystery. Resolution can also come by making meaning out of the loss. What do you do with the loss? How can you use it to grow stronger and more resilient? How can you help someone else because of your story? How can you create a legacy?

Finding Meaning

In his book, “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief,” David Kessler, a grief expert who himself needed to find meaning following the sudden death of his 21-year-old son, writes that “meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.” Adoption may or may not involve a physical death, but it does involve the proverbial death of a family, a clear past, a story to pass down to the next generation, and sometimes the death of a whole culture. There may be much to gain in the adoption of an individual, but there is way more loss. That loss can’t be replaced by a shiny, new family. It’s an incredibly difficult loss that will be wrestled with for an entire lifetime. Birthdays become one of the biggest reminders of that loss. And while birthdays are a time for celebration, we also need to hold space for mourning. The two can exist together.

#Adoption #mourning