The AdopTwins

The holidays are hard for many people. There are plenty of reasons to not be happy during the holidays. I for one as an adoptee and a single mom really struggle. As an adoptee I’ve known loss my entire life. Some people handle it well and others do not. It took me a long time to get to where I am now, and I wouldn’t say I necessarily handle the holidays well. I never felt like I fit in in my adoptive family and for that reason and I always felt the loss of my birth family more during the holiday season, even if I didn’t understand that feeling as a child. As I got older and looked back upon those memories I understand why I felt an unease within me. I always wanted to be a Mother with a family of my own because I thought that then I’d feel like I belonged somewhere during the holidays and I could make traditions of my own with my little family. There was nothing I wanted more in life.

To have lived my whole life without knowing a blood relative. To finally have a blood connection, a blood relative, someone who looks like me, and acts like me, and is my own flesh and blood that I carried within me for 9 months, something about finally meeting that first blood relative that makes the loss of him so hard. Without him I am again alone.

The only other thing I wanted in life was to act and when posed with the choice of having to choose between the two, I chose family. Besides acting, I never wanted to work outside the home. I always just wanted to stay home and raise my children. I wanted to make sure that they had the values, the morals, and the ideas that I found to be important to build good character. There is no more important job than to raise the next generation well.

Life however, had a different parenthood path in mind for me and I am parenting as a single parent in a co-parenting relationship. When you are a single parent, it is hard to be able to stay home with your child, and thus I have been working and not raising my child as I would like. I was laid off during the pandemic and since then have taken quite a pay cut so that I could be home with my child as much as possible.

I know co-parenting can be hard for many families, but for me, someone who has an ongoing sense of loss in my life, it is extremely difficult. When I hand my child off to his father I feel a profound sense of loss. I know he will be back, God willing, but it doesn’t change how extremely distressing it is to have to part with him. Something inside me breaks, each and every time. And each time, it is less put back together than the time before it. I’m not sure when it will be shattered into something without the possibility of ever being put together again.

As hard as it is to part with him, during the holidays it somehow has the capacity to become even harder. As previously mentioned, the holidays were always hard. But I thought once I had my own family they wouldn’t be so hard, and perhaps they could even be really enjoyable. But every other holiday he is away and that sense of loneliness that I had had throughout my life gets to a point that words cannot describe during those holidays he is gone. To finally have the blood connection to someone and to have him taken away during such a pivotal time is unfathomable, yet I live through it over and over again. Granted most people want to spend their holidays with their children, but if they aren’t with their children do they find themselves in the deepest depths of loneliness and despair instead?

Because of this loss I sometimes wonder if I actually made the right choice with making the decision to be a mother. I suppose if things had gone according to my grand idea I would not be in this situation and he would be with me every holiday. But, when i really sit and try to think about a life without any blood relatives I still think even through this brokenness that I feel within me it just might have been worth it to have those moments with him where I can see myself in him. (Even the not so good parts of me)