I emailed Colette Friday, and I regret it.

I am pushy by nature. In my haste, I occasionally find myself thinking back and regretting things I've done, because I wasn't thinking all the way through. It's a bad habit. I am impulsive and brash, even abrasive. But, just as soon as I get out the words that I later regret, I feel bad. I think there are a lot of people who wish they had bigger balls to say the things that they think, but they hold it in for fear of whatever- rejection comes to mind mainly. But I am the opposite, I wish my filter would work more. I wish for it to just kick in on autopilot, and take over control of my mouth sometimes. At any rate, I emailed my birth mother last Friday, in a short-lived (again regretful) fit of impatience. This is what I said:

I apologize for informally emailing, but the thought occurred to me that you might not have received the card I sent you. If you didn’t, I guess you will be wondering who this is.  It doesn’t have to be awkward though. Before you write me off, if that’s your intention, please call Karen G at the CHS in Greensboro. She is very insightful, and helped me to understand a lot and put things in  different perspectives for me. She has been a tremendous help to me. Fridays always pique my interest in you for some reason, and similarly, are the occasional days that I speak with Karen (or email). Being Friday, I thought of you. I have never forgotten you.

I added at the end, Karen's contact info, but for Karen's privacy, I deleted it here. I signed my name, Brooke. And that was that.

I also let Karen know by blind copying her that Colette might be making a voyage call. This was a series of our emails. They are pretty interesting if you ask someone who cares, like myself. Here's the trail:

Hi Brooke –

Just wanted to let you know that I got your blind cc of the email to Colette.  I’m happy to speak with her, if she should call, and I need to let you know that I can’t tell you if she does call me, unless she says it’s okay. 

Do you have any idea what area code she may call from, so that I have little head’s up if she does call?  I’m not in a real office now, and receive calls on a cell, so sometimes I’m out and about when I get a call. 

I understand. I just thought I would let you know. I would think 910. I’m sorry to throw you under the bus like that, but I thought you might add value to the situation and possibly calm her nerves if she is nervous or anxious. You can tell her anything about me.

Not under the bus at all!  Sometimes it helps to have a clearly defined place to lead someone to. 

I never heard anything back. I wonder if she never thought this day would come, that I would be her dirty little secret, that I would live in her shroud forever. I’m trying to stay positive, but email is email. It’s immediate. I know what you’re thinking- that I need to look at it from her perspective. But dang, it’s hard. I’ve been patient, but she’s had 36 years already to prepare. She had to have known. She’s got intuition. We all do. It’s the Holy Spirit.

I wish I had the magic words to make this all work out for both of you.  You’ve put the invitation out there, and done what you could to welcome her.  I just hate it when nobody RSVPs.

Again, we’ve had birth mothers respond two months, six months, a year, two years after being originally contacted.  Shame and guilt are such strong forces.

Keep the faith, Brooke, and not in a wish-upon-a-star way, but in the loving way that brings you both to peace – admittedly, loads harder to practice!  Perhaps you could set the intention to send out the same unconditional loving kindness you need from her.  Maybe making it an active practice – put post-it notes on your computer, set your phone alarm to make a moment, reflect at stop lights.  Sometimes this is hard to do with someone you have conflict with, so it can help to begin to practice with someone or something you feel more positive or neutral about – like a neighbor or a cat – as the focus, and then work toward the target person.  Just an idea, and something active to channel those questions and head-chatter towards.

Hope you have a good day,

Karen

Good ideas. When I really think about it, and not just FEEL about it, I feel deeply concerned for her. I’ve been trying to be led by logic and not emotions in my daily life. It’s hard to remember that all the time. But I think somehow I’m much better off than most when it comes to this particular situation. I have some idea of what she must be feeling- I’m guessing a myriad of emotions are surfacing. Hopefully, she can abandon her feelings of doubt and shame and guilt long enough to see that this can be a good thing, and if not, then I will have to come with grips because I can’t force myself on her.  I would just like to hear something. If even just a “leave me alone”. That way I can start processing the rejection and decide from what I will take from this experience.

Led by logic….led by logic….

You’re awesome still.

Thanks, Karen.

You know, it’s really a sign of grace when I can’t help someone with what they truly want, and that person is still grateful.  Thanks for that.

I feel like you can never get enough feel good stuff in your life. I live for it, and thrive off of it. I hope you do too. Sometimes I get discouraged though, like everyone else does. Hence...

It's Tuesday afternoon. I haven't heard anything yet. I didn't really expect to, which makes me wonder why I even did it. What was I thinking? Did I think i could rush her into a response? I could bully her into responding? I could scare her into submission? Whatever my motivation, whatever it was at 12:01 on Friday 5/18/12 while I was sitting in my cube in the sky, whatever it was that was making my skin crawl when I thought about Colette, caused me again, to feel remorse. 

Time is man-made.  I know it. You know it. And, the amount of time that it takes one person to get over something might be entirely different from the time it takes another to get over the exact same thing. I am thankful for that aspect of time, for the way that God decided it would be a good idea to make us all different as well. It probably helps a lot.

Karen is wonderful. I can't say enough good things about her, and at the end of all the emails that we exchange, mostly when I know it's a last one for a while, I always end by telling her how great she is. Everyone needs to be reminded of their value. Whether it's self-inflicted or otherwise.

 

Day 6- no response, but it's fine.

So, I haven't posted anything since the day I dropped the card on April 11. My boss, Lynn, went with me to do it. She is incredibly freaking awesome, and has been nothing but encouraging to me and supportive. I am blessed to have a boss that actually cares about me on a personal level. (It's all personal in my opinion- everything is.)

There really hasn't been a good reason for my lack of posting, except that I haven't had a lot of time, and I haven't had much to say about it. Everyone keeps asking me if I've heard anything, to which I have replied a monotone, and today a somewhat saddened, "No". It's kind of like when you are not pregnant and someone asks you if you are. You either feel one of two things: you're really pissed at the person for insinuating you are plumper than you thought you were, OR, you are upset because you want to be pregnant, but for some reason, maybe God has another loving plan for your life, you are not. Either way, I am focused on staying positive and trying not to think of it too much, and praying for Colette, when I remember to. I forget to pray too much. It's one of the things I'm working on.

I know it will end up the way God intended it to end up, so knowing that makes it easier. It took me since last August to gain the courage to make the first move, to give up the upper hand, which relinquished me from having all the power in this dynamic situation. Sometimes, that's all God wants from us- for us to set aside our pride, to let go of the upper hand, and let Him do His job. That's not easy for someone like me, and probably most people. But it's something we all must do, so that He can give us our best. So for today, and hopefully for the rest of my life, I will relinquish the control to Him, and let Him be the decider of my fate, and trust Him that it will be what is right and good.

I know I preach a lot, and it might bother a few of you who read my blog, and I'm sorry if you are one of those people, not because I'm possibly offending you, but because I'm sorry you aren't strong enough to let go of your foolish pride that holds you back from believing in our beautiful Author and Creator, the one who beckons at you every day, in many many ways, and wants you back.

The Card

VD is finally gone.

I unassumingly let VD (my humorous declaration of Valentine's day), pass by again, but not first without my sending cutesy cards to people I love first. In theory, I covered my bases, and did what I should have done, except one major thing. I didn't send the letter. It's still sitting in my free Columbia Management black faux leather zippered notebook that managed to end up somewhere in the middle of the heaping pile of junk mail and miscellaneous tax documents on my kitchen counter, amass all of the other random papers that should be filed away neatly in some labeled manila folder in a dusty, black fire-proof file cabinet that looks like it was born in the middle of WWII and sold at a general store somewhere in the back of the store near a bathroom.
I think I may have mentioned that because some pipe in my house has decided to have an upheaval and somehow roused all the other pipes to rebel again the rest of the house with him, my house is a wreck- more than normal. My peaceful chaos is now complete chaos, and the only real room in the house that I can find any peace is the bathroom- which I guess, in truth, is not too far from how it normally is anyway. Come to think of it, I'm not so sure why I've let this pipe and water issue rule my psyche the last few weeks, which is creeping into a month now, to think about it even further.
My toaster has come down off it's high horse atop the fridge, and is now meandering with the lowly appliances, like the broken microwave, and the clock radio. My 15 cookbooks which did nothing for me, but thin out my bank account- they were mostly impulse buys, are now scattered across counter space that normally would be reserved for the paper, and since the paper space is being used for that, the papers have made their way to the kitchen table, so the table, as of recently, has not been used for its original design. This whole thing has thrown off my life as I know it. Just one little angry pipe has caused this total disruption.
Anyone who says that life is not a byproduct of cause and effect is a fool. I think that guy with the crazy haircut and mustache was right when he laid out his theory of relativity. One doesn't have to be a scientist to discover that when one thing is broken it causes other things to be affected.
I'm not going to gripe anymore about this problem. The way I see it, and if I keep telling myself this out loud and online, I think it will finally soak in, and be true. If this is the worst problem that I have to worry about, I should be thankful. Yes, I am thankful that I was able to buy a house at at time when most others could not. I got the house that I wanted at the price that I wanted, and I have poured more money than Trump has in his ankle wallet at any given moment,  into said house to make it home.
I haven't been writing much lately either, but I don't know if that is a byproduct of my current housing disarray or of laziness. I'll choose the ladder to keep it honest.
I thought about mailing a letter to my birth mother as Karen suggested for VD. But it was a fleeting thought, just being honest again. I never put any real and quantitative effort into picking out a card and looking for the handwritten, on a piece of white printer card stock,  letter I wrote, than spans the front and back of the page, partially because I already knew where it was. I guess I can maintain that not all is unraveled through this temporary housing set-back. I might have to write another letter because thinking back now, it might be slightly accusatory, and against the proper rules of engagement as deemed by every adoption agency in the country and probably world. People are people no matter from which continent you find yourself breathing air. We all have hearts. We all have minds. We all hopefully have a heart mind connection and if we don't we should be locked up somewhere and labeled with a reactive attachment disorder diagnosis.
Back to the letter. I might have some free time tonight after I get home from this incredible night that I am lucky enough to embark on later today that involves lifting up teenage moms. I am very excited to learn from these young mothers. I was asked to be a mentor to one of them for the night, and possibly ongoing, I'm hoping anyway. And even though I'm supposed to be the one who is leading this young girl who I am paired up with, I have a strong feeling that I will learn more from her than I might be able to teach her. Just when you think you will be the one sharing with someone else, you find out they are sharing more with you. I have learned that lesson many times over. I am happy to be a part of something wonderful, and like I said a thousand times, and like you probably hate to read it, if you don't have a church that you are involved with and crave to go to, you need to find one. Don't let another day go by. People who love God are happy people, and people who are involved in making others happy, lead happy productive lives. We go back to the theory of relativity. Thank you Einstein for pointing out the obvious but making it more complex than DNA. We go back to my adoption. Ain't life grand?

Writing takes a back seat

I had a fractional hiccup in my day to day routine, if you dare call anything in life routine. It's nothing that prayer and cussing can't heal. I just wanted to let you know that I am still contemplating the actual snail mail drop (of the letter). I am pretty sure that Colette knows about my knowing. The cat has been let out of the bag. I feel certain. She is probably freaking out about now, just like I was when I found out about her. It's taken me a quarter of a year to decide whether or not I even want to involve her in my life. Who's to say that she doesn't have equally amounted hesitation and some initially, I'm imagining, denial.

I need to read more on the topic. So, I just wanted to put it out there, that I am still in cold pursuit, because it's definitely not hot at this point, still in pursuit of finding some people like me in the world, people who resemble me, and are obnoxious like me. Wait, let me think about that one. I don't like obnoxious people. That's funny isn't it. I think I just realized something about myself.

I have an interesting story to divulge. It involves another reunion. For some great reason, I am constantly put in front of people who have stories to tell of reunions. Maybe God wants me to write a book about reunions. Hmmmmm....I will write it later tonight, provided I get my laptop from my house. It's an eye-opener. And who doesn't like those?

private email enclosed...

Last week, on Friday actually, I had this cockamamie idea to send an email to my BM. Not a good idea. I didn't do it. I was just feeling impulsive. And yesterday on WFAE 90.7 there was a show on the Diane Rhem show that my close friend Chad filled me in on. He knows all of the entailment's of my adoption and the whirlwind of emotion that accompany it. Because I only caught the tail end if it, I have been trying to find it since. The discussion was of the fairly newly adopted DNA testing and its prevalence in adoption with regard to finding the unknowns. As a result, I thought my friend over at the CHS, where I was adopted, the former adoption counselor, Karen, would be interested in hearing about it.
So I emailed her again. Although I know she is extremely busy in her new role in family finding, I have a feeling there are lots of adoptees who still make their way back to her inbox frequently. She was a post adoption counselor at the CHS for a number of years that I'm not aware of, but judging by her familiarity with the situational atmosphere which I'm assuming is pretty common amongst all of the adoptee stories, it was probably a good number of years. I think she might be in her late forties, early fifties. I'm guessing here. Whatever her age- I love this woman. She has been a blessing to me and my sanity. She has taken a number of hours to spend talking to me. I know that her workload is sizable, and she probably doesn't have time to talk to me for hours on end, to counsel me. But she does it anyway.
I thought I would share an email she sent to me this morning. Yes, I know this is private, and no I didn't ask her permission to publish it, but I feel that she wouldn't mind. In fact, I'd bet my paycheck that she wouldn't. I won't put her contact info. I have had a few people ask me privately the whole story on how this all got started, and Karen, I feel, is sort of at the center of it all. She works for the Children's Home Society where I, among thousands of other adoptees over the years, was adopted back in the seventies. She was not the original counselor, because I'm imagining she was only a teenager at the time. But she was/is my go-to person. This weekend, I plan on writing out the whole story, and scanning my birth documents. Actually, I might do this right now. Yes, yes I will. Just so you can have an idea of what we had to work with, what little we had to work with.

Hi Karen!

I bet you thought I forgot about you. I hope all is well with you. There is a great show on the Diane Rhem show on WFAE today that will be in the form of podcast later today that everyone over there might be interested in listening to, just in case you weren’t aware. It’s about the entailment's of adoption, and most all viewpoints were recognized. I only heard a sliver of it, but intend to hear the whole show later today or tomorrow.

I haven’t mailed anything yet. But I do have a letter written. I think she knows I’m looking for her because I think her best friend might have told her. She hasn’t responded to any of my texts lately- just after in December she mailed me some Swarovsky crystal earrings she handmade for me. Kind of odd, huh? But, I haven’t felt pressed to inquire further. Guess I’m nervous of what she has to say. Oh well. Tis the day.

I still think you’re great.

Brooke

Hi Brooke –

Good to hear from you.  I didn’t know about the show on Diane Rhem, but I love Diane & will try to catch this on podcast. 

It sounds like your birth mother may indeed have the head’s up about you searching.  I suggest that it’s time to move forward (if you’re ready).  I encourage you to let her friend know you plan to contact your birth mother by letter, and then send the letter.  This will give her support system some notice and ability to respond.  I can’t stress enough how important it is for the letter to be kind and non-blaming, and also clear on what you want from her – health information, a photo, family history information, to have the opportunity to meet one day, whatever it is you would like to have happen.  It’s important for a birth parent to know that their child is okay, and that she had some of the things the birth mother hoped for her baby (good parents, stable family, opportunities) when she made the plan of adoption.  And then be prepared to wait a long time.  It may not be a long time, it may be that you get a reply immediately, but more than likely, she will need time to process this, and it can take as long as it takes.  If you can, keep going to group in the mean time.  Valentine’s day is coming up; this may be a good time to let her know she’s been on your mind and in your heart for many years.

Good luck with this, and please let me know how you decide to proceed and what happens.

Best,

Karen

For those of you thinking about sending a letter, please take into careful consideration what  Karen said. I have, and I think I will take her advice and after I rewrite the letter, because I might have been a little too scaly, I will drop it in the mail, and let her friend know to be on the lookout for Colette's call.