经过 Mila Konomos, adopted from South Korea to the USA. Poet, artist, activist.
I have been processing the Aloneness of #MotherLoss a lot lately.
Intellectually, I know what self-talk to cultivate. I know I am not alone. I know that I have people in my life who care for me and value me.
But this aloneness is deeper than that.
This aloneness is the the aloneness of Mother Loss.
I feel so alone so often because I do not have a Mother.
I lost my First Mother at 5 days old.
I lost my Foster Mother at 6 months old.
I grew up with a Mother who could not see my trauma. Hence, she did not know how to love or comfort me through the loss, pain, and grief of my Adoptedness.
I feel alone because I was always alone in my pain and grief.
I feel alone because I have spent most of my life crying alone.
I feel alone because I have rarely known what it is to not be alone, not only physically but emotionally.
I feel so alone so often, because Mother Loss is a loss that remains for a lifetime.
There is no way to replace a Lost Mother.
No one else on earth can compensate for a Lost Mother.
Only One Mother bore me in her own body. Only One Mother’s heartbeat, breathing, and voice were what I heard for 9 months. Her scent, her face were as though my own.
I watched a documentary recently during which the narrator said, “Babies think they are a part of whomever they are within.”
This is profound in the context of Adoptees severed from our mothers as infants. We must have experienced separation from our mothers almost as though being ripped in two, torn away from ourselves. Split violently apart.
I have to allow myself to grieve this Mother Loss. It is eternal. Even 12 years post-reunion, Mother Loss remains. I can never get back the Mother I lost. I cannot retrieve the over three decades of my life that I was lost, compounded by the loss of language, culture, and geography.
There is a pain and loneliness that is hard to describe when you find what you had been looking for all of your life and yet it still slips through your fingers.
This pain of being so close yet still so far.
As though looking through a window but never actually getting to go in.
For more from Mila, follow her at her website, The Empress Han. Her newest poetry album Shrine is being released in May 2021.
#adoption #transracialadoptee #adoptionreunion #adoptee #adoptionistrauma #adoptionloss #adopteevoices