EPILOGUE
"Not having a sense of biological roots makes it all too easy to overestimate one's adaptive capacity. People view the adoptee as free to become whatever he or she desires - and responsible for it as well. With an excessive sense of adaptability, not carrying on a family tradition, and following in no one's footsteps, the adoptee resembles a pioneer. From this position it becomes easy to try too hard - or to give up altogether. To carry on adoptive family traditions is often easier said than done; biology does not always cooperate. If one predicates an identification with the adoptive parents on disavowing one's natural parents, the resulting identification will lack substance and durability. The adoptee shares an identity with two families and cannot substitute one for the other. And two identities are, of course, harder to manage than one. While I do not know my actual heritage, I know it determines my options. Adoptees are not as adaptable as people expect." 1
"After having begun the search, thoughts of my adoption rarely leave my mind. They color everything." 2
"Perhaps it is better to live with a dream than to seek reality and be plunged to earth." 3
"Maturity comes when we can accept the complexities and ambiguities of our situation and make them work for us, rather than against us - and go on. It comes when we can enjoy the positive side of being adopted - not being entrapped by roots as others are. When we realize that our sense of not belonging has given us the freedom to move easily from one world to another, rather than being 'nailed down to a life without escape.'" 4
You cannot go back and talk your parents into giving you some- thing that they couldn't give you when you were a child. You cannot go back and talk your biological mother into receiving you. It's too late. You've already been given up for adoption. You've already been raised and conditioned in a certain way. So simply accept those feelings, those memories, and allow yourself to feel them when you feel them. And then recognize that is only a small part of your history as a conscious living being moving through many lifetimes and dimensions. And that here and now, even in this body, you have so much more to you than those aspects. That your self-worth and self- esteem are based on the fact that you are.
Because you're adopted there is a greater sense of freedom here for you to be whatever you want and to choose whatever you want to choose. Consider it a blessing. And what you don't know gives you that much more space to discover what you would like to know or think you'd like to know. When you think you know who you are, then you don't, you see, because you begin to limit yourself. All knowledge is a form of limitation.
Mitra, Psychic Reading, 1983
My life still remains a mystery to which a solution will never be found, but that aspect is balanced with the fact that I have been blessed with a supportive and loving partner and a daughter who understands the depth of my tragedy. And my life goes on …