understandably, she is afraid to meet me. she has been told that i am “evil and such a terrible person that [she] shouldn’t want to talk to [me]“. i’m not surprised, because i’m sure in their mindset, i was. but, i noticed long ago that my adoptive parents continually lacked the courtesy, let alone the basic human understanding, that people change, grow, and mature. and sadly, her mother apparently chose to wrap herself in a mindset that as young adults we both knew was psychologically debilitating.
i suppose that means her mother has matured in her own way. for my part, i never assumed she wouldn’t. in fact, due to the circumstances, she became a parent of teenagers long before i did, so i’ve always understood that her mother’s understanding of the world we live in and life in general would naturally be more adept than mine.
of course, as a soccer referee, i have since come to understand that many parents of teenagers are less well-equipped to guide their children than one could hope to imagine.
imagine being four and having your name changed, and never being told why.
imagine being a freshman in high school and learning you have a natural brother by finding the adoption papers in a desk drawer.
imagine being seventeen and finding a letter from your grandmother (on the wrong side of the family, of course) hidden as well. well, i suppose hidden is better than destroyed.
she was raised by her natural mother and step father. and yet she says, “But after being told all of my life that nobody wanted me, it is kind of hard to change that mind set.” i’m still trying to wrap my head around that. i was adopted, and basically told the same thing, not living with the woman who brought me into the world. and when you consider the circumstances of her birth, which some of you know, the irony meter blows out the top. i wanted her more than anything, but was literally in a circumstance that wouldn’t allow it—at least not at the level of comfort her mother required.
when she writes my mother, she almost never mentions her parents, and when she does so, it’s in the context of what they haven’t told her, or what they did. in her exchanges with my mother over the past year, she hasn’t mentioned her half-brothers (the ones she grew up with) at all. i can only assume how familial her family must be. mine was the same way, but i wasn’t even related to them. i know that through these retransmitted one-sided perspectives, it would be impossible for me to really understand what she feels, but i don’t think she feels very good about things.
when her mother and i parted ways, i thought i was doing the right thing. and actually, i know i was, but it felt wrong, and it’s impossible now not to view it as wrong. i worried deeply about how things would be for her, but also recognized that with a military contract still over me and a military specialty that the Army had invested a lot of money into, my choices for the future were not the best for her. when i was asked to give up my rights to her when she was four, the Spouse-Unit and i contemplated suing for custody. but we declined to do so, because we felt that trying to take her out of her home at such an age would have been damaging.
it turns out the right thing was the wrong one there, too.
today’s number is fifteen. it’s supposed to be celebratory. but fifteen is also six (it’s a numerological thing), which is the union of opposites. would that there were fewer opposites in my personal history.
would that i had been stronger back then. would that i be strong enough to take her fears away. but it’s not about strength, it’s about patience. that tempered impatience that only comes with knowing it’s been out of my hands for far too long to try to make up for now.
all i get are little windows into her life. i yearn for more, but i already see more than i want to as consequence for those “right things” that i’ve done.