The Difference a Year Makes

I just took a glance back in time to several online chats I was having one year ago today, Christmas Eve of 2018. Private messages are a great captain’s log for recording events and mental state. The contrast between then and now is striking. Sometimes even I can’t believe how much my life has changed in the months since, and I’m the one living it.

Last Christmas Eve, I had an ominous feeling that it would be the last I’d spend with my husband’s family in Virginia. The premonition was strong, suffocating. I left the festivities early that night and went home to bed, where I cried myself to sleep for reasons I couldn’t adequately define. My husband and I had not lived together for years but we were still close, and while we’d already been discussing a more permanent separation, the thought of losing his entire family as well as the marriage was crippling. It’s so much easier to end relationships when all parties dislike each other. This was as opposite of that as it could be. I loved them all and felt the same love in return. He and I couldn’t cohabitate without committing homicide, but that didn’t mean we didn’t care deeply about each other. The whole situation was just messed up, and it broke my heart.

Little did I know that it was also the last Christmas the family would spend together, period. Several months afterward, Bill Kay died. He was the patriarch of the clan, teaser of children, guitar player, and purveyor of folklore spanning several generations and multiple states. My husband was devastated. He’d been extraordinarily close to his dad and while Bill suffered from emphysema and hadn’t been well for a while, his passing was sudden and unexpected. Hemorrhagic stroke is the cruelest of adversaries, and this time it was a battle that could not be won. I was in Europe at the time and couldn’t get a flight back. Dark, dark days were those, and there was little recourse except to simply keep moving forward.

Another event that happened over the course of the past year was the final and irreconcilable break within my own family--between the parents who raised me, myself, and my two children. I was adopted as a baby and while I advocate the practice overall, I cannot say that adopted children live happily every after in every case. Nature versus nurture? Perhaps both, but the truth is, I was never like those people. They might as well have been raising the progeny of an entirely different species, and as a result I grew up misunderstood and confused, living with the weight of constant judgment and never measuring up to their expectations.

It took nearly half a century for me to put it all together--the fact that my adoptive parents had wanted a baby but not a child, that my mom could have given birth naturally but chose not to--ever--because my dad didn’t want her to. What does that say, exactly? What does it say about “boutique” adoptions--fulfilling the whims of pre-boomer “Silent Generation” households that lacked the communication skills to raise petunias, let alone children? I was in my twenties when I came to terms with the fact that everything my adoptive parents had taught me about surviving in the modern world was wrong, and I was in my forties when when I finally realized that my incompatibility with their impossible standards was enough to make them despise me. Never mind the fact that they’d helped orchestrate a kidnapping of my own two children when they were twelve and eight years old respectively, and that I’d managed to forgive them for destroying my family by separating it physically, defying a judge’s orders, and gaslighting me in the form of false police reports and bribed witnesses they were compiling in case I ever found enough money to hire a competent lawyer. Yes, you heard right--I forgave them for that and tried to rebuild some semblance of a family despite the fact that I was still not permitted to see my own grandchild and had been written out of the will.

It was during the course of this past year that I attempted to visit with my parents and enjoy some peaceful time together. Bad mistake. The fact that I travel with a service animal was a great affront to them and I was “disrespectful” and “selfish” for inflicting that upon them because “they don’t live like that.” I still owed them money, too. What child doesn’t owe a parent money? Is it normally a reason for families to be at war? My dad kept track--it was seven hundred dollars. He apparently believed I was withholding it from him for nefarious reasons, since they are now old and may end up depleting their six-digit bank account for geriatric care. Bad daughter that I am, whose biggest vice was loving animals, who never shamed them publicly with drug or alcohol abuse, or criminal behavior, who was such a disappointment because she tried to go to college rather than work a factory job like a good little Gen Xer...

Enough of that. I know myself well enough to know when I’m starting to rant, and while I’ll let everything I wrote stand, I won’t keep adding to it. However, I no longer feel a need to protect my adoptive parents from exposure. While I will never take an offensive position against them to do them harm, neither will I remain silent about the reasons I “abandoned” my entire family. I can accept that they scapegoat me for their failures, although it hurts to realize that rather than a daughter, I was a convenient (and boutique baby store bought) dumping ground for the emotional baggage my mom and dad lack enough self-awareness to work through on their own. Finally realizing that one has never been truly and unconditionally loved is a blow to the psyche that, thanks to pregnancy hormones that bond a mother and birth child, most human beings (and animals) never have to experience.

Since last Christmas, I’ve come to terms with all of this. It was a rough year. I wish I had a different story to tell. But this story is, at least, mine. I own it. And guess what? It has a happy ending.

I’m not naive enough to place responsibility for my happiness on the shoulders of another human being. Human beings fail, even the best ones. Furthermore, that is an unfair burden to place on anyone. Nobody needs to live with that kind of pressure--of having to be the cornerstone of another person’s existence. It’s just too much, and it’s wrong on so many levels.

However, I don’t think it’s coincidence that just as I reached a point in my life when I was comfortable being on my own, when I no longer equated “alone” with “lonely,” that the healthiest and most positive relationship I've ever had in all of my years came about. I have no doubt that tongues wag about my current situation: traveling around Europe (and possibly Africa, but that’s for a different post) with a person I met in Poland last year. But let the tongues wag. I don’t care. I sleep well at night knowing I did everything humanly possible to reconcile with everyone who hurt me and everyone I hurt trying to muddle through it.

People who hate me will just have to hate me. I’m still angry about a lot of things, but I’m moving on, one sunset at time, high tide by low tide. I spend my days in the company of a person who accepts me exactly as I am, who finds humor in my flaws, who shares exercise goals and mediations with me as often as ice cream binges and chocolate lunches. I have never been so not lonely. I have never had such an equal partnership in life, business, or cohabitation. I’ve never spent this much time with another person in conditions of zero conflict, where every interaction has a positive outcome, where differences are fun instead of frowned upon.

My best friend and I are both only children. We “get” each other in ways that people who grew up with siblings never could. We’re both Libras, but at opposite cusps, which creates an extraordinary dynamic. We giggle a lot. We philosophize. Plan. Budget. Dream. All on the same wavelength, which is something I’ve never experienced before. I wake every morning to the sound of surf crashing several yards away just outside my window. I listen to herring gulls screech in the air above. I walk my dogs on the beach two and sometimes three times every day.

Was it worth it, the strange and painful journey that brought me here? No, because nothing is ever worth that kind of emotional suffering. However, this is a great reward for surviving it, and I will accept it without hesitation. I don’t know what I did to deserve any of this, but I know what I didn’t do, and that was seek to cause anyone harm or heartache equal to that they inflicted on me. It no longer matters that they won’t acknowledge their own failures. What matters is that finally I am no longer paying for them.

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