förbi Maars, taken from the Philippines to Canada. You can follow Maars @BlackSheepMaars
I have been researching my roots for the last 3.5 years. When I first started this journey, I had nothing but scribbled memories of moments that provided places and names. Mostly by things I’ve overheard growing up when my family would speak about me and my joining of their family. There were a lot of pieces of unconfirmed information, and most are assumptions and even made up.
I sat on the couch and wrote every bit of memory in my brain of what’s been said, what’s been mentioned, what’s been gossiped, what’s been screamed at me.
I had no real information to begin this journey, and even when I pleaded for information and called around asking questions. No-one was particularly keen on saying anything. It felt like a secret I wasn’t meant to discover. But I went ahead anyway, and the first year took a lot out of me, even mistaking a woman in America for my birth mother.
I had no real tangible expectation, direction, or any idea where this journey would end up. However, after finding my birth mother, I had but one goal. To piece together our little family, to heal my birth mother’s broken heart of having had to relinquish her first two children.
I wanted to find my biological full-brother, so that at the very least she can heal her guilt and her shame before leaving this lifetime. But I couldn’t do it. I was too late, I didn’t find him until 5 months after she passed.
Growing up as an only child, growing up feeling alone in the world, an alien to my own kind, my roots, my heritage, my ancestral tradition – everything I am made of, I would have but one person left on this planet, that shares the same wounds as me because of adoption. And yet, the trauma of adoption in our lives would eventually lead us to separate again, for the second time.
THERE’S SO MUCH LOSS IN ADOPTION!
I still try to work through my paternal side, hoping for anything, clues, but the inevitable is searching for someone/something you never even knew existed, is a feat to explore.
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