mayarix

I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds a while back and saw the rerun of it tonight. It's about a young man who is, of course, criminally insane in a lot of ways... it turns out he's adopted and is fixated on this female writer who he is convinced is his mother who gave him up at the beginning of his life. His adopted parents never said anything until his father was on his death bed. One of the last lines in the show was made by the woman writer who had given up her child (a daughter, she didn't end up being his mother), said that "it's not his fault. He's just lost. He just wants to know who he is." The sniper was going to shoot him while he had her captive in a large lecture hall with a bomb in his hand. She stepped in front of the bullet, obviously moved to action probably wondering about her own child she had given up.

The first time I saw the show, I didn't think too much of it, but the second time (which I saw after I posted this ironically) just made me think a little harder. I've spent so much time in the last years just trying to find out who I am.

I understand that there is a part of me that is very much the product of my adopted family. But there is a part of me that is irreversibly never going to be a part of my adopted family. Maybe I've been working to reconcile the two and find myself in between. Maybe that's what makes me so different from my family.

I, like so many others adopted from a foreign country, have no option of ever finding out who my real parents are. I have often wondered if my mother sang just like I do. I have often wondered if the face that looks out of the mirror is hers. I wonder if the innate desires and predispositions are hers or those of my father.

And the hardest part of finding the self for me is having no grounds from where to start. Finding the things that I am and the things that I like.

This darker side of me is definitely not of my adopted family, and though I care deeply for them, I feel separate in many ways, knowing that they neither understand nor can they comprehend a lot of the "weirdness". It doesn't come from adopted mom or adopted dad, but rather it comes from within. The biologically parents I will never know.

Part of me feels angry. Part of me feels deprived. But, as I turn 33 in a few short weeks, I realize that what I am is me. I am I. Perhaps that has caused a rift between my adopted family and myself. And perhaps it is something they will never comprehend, with the rest of my family being "natural" to each other.

I reconciled the fact that I will never know my real parents many years ago, but every once in a while, I look at the vampire, the crazy hearted woman, the lack of ability to cook, the woman who loves to perform and sing, and I believe that I see my parents... my real ones.

As I come to realize these things with age, I learn to cope and deal with them one day at a time. And I am grateful to find myself.