The Picture in the Mirror

It’s easy to critique a picture…

We throw stones. Big ones. Don’t we? We hurl them as hard and as far as we can! And it usually feels good! We look for validation of our own actions, our own humanity hidden among the defects, the secrets, and the faults of others. It is easy to look closely at a picture and do just this. We find those things we want to see, those things we need to see.

Can you do the same with a mirror?

As the year comes to an end, we hear people talking about the future and the past. We hear about New Year’s resolutions and reflections from the past year. When we reflect on the last year we take a look into the proverbial mirror of our own life. Sometimes we are our own worst critic and sometimes we stand so close to the mirror we are unable or unwilling to see our own shortcomings. We can use these reflections to change our lives.

An old adage says that people resist change but there is an equally as popular one that says we embrace tradition. The changing of the calendar offers us a chance to shake our personal Etch A Sketch, erase the past, and make a conscious decision to do something, anything, differently this year.

Look in the mirror and find yourself. I did.

One Year To The Day...

On December 19, 2007 I sat down and tearfully explained - to a woman I had never met, knew little about, yet longed for quite terribly – why I was reaching out to her after all these years. I mark that date as the true beginning and the start of the last of my many searches for my birthmother. On that cold wintry Wednesday evening by myself, I embarked on a short journey of a trip I had waited my entire life to take.

I have spent very little time with other adoptees. I have felt alone in my own personal battles up until I found a book called Adoption Healing by Joe Scoll. Great read and highly recommended for anyone involved in adoption or even in a relationship with someone who is involved in adoption. It really opens your eyes to just how fucked up we are; but I digress. My personal experiences with other adoptees have been limited to a few conversations with my search specialist, one adoptee, and the aforementioned book. Always looking for social normalcy and confirmation of my own life, I yearned for more of these encounters.

Over the summer I had the opportunity to meet a girl named Tara. It was far from love at first sight. We didn’t even hit it off that well. Few words were exchanged that night and I knew not who she was or her story. Through a random encounter with a friend of hers at a sandwich shop some time later, we exchanged information and agreed to a get-together of some sort - at some time, and left it at that. Months later it was on. We had agreed to a time and place and the three of us, plus a few others, were going to go have some drinks and call it a night on the town. Through random conversation over wine that night, I quickly realized how this person sitting at the table next to me had endured and faced such a similar life. It was on the table: she was adopted. And like me, she had searched and found her birth mother this past year. Due of the dynamics of the evening it was challenging to continue the conversation I couldn’t let go. The evening ended even though the story had not.

Faced with family, schedules, and responsibilities it was some time before we would be able to meet again. Through complete random chance, on December 19, 2008 I found myself sitting alone with the one person who could understand better than anyone what the last year of my life had entailed. Tara and I shared our respective stories and I found solace in her familiar fears, her experiences, her joys, all along knowing that our parallel paths had converged on that once distant horizon of our respective lives.

Here is to December 19th and all of my brothers and sisters through adoption!