Reunion is pulling the pin out of the grenade

Image credit: James Adams on Unsplash

You've carried this dangerous thing you're whole life - the possibility of truth (which some see as destruction). You spend a lot of time trying to pretend like it's not there. Until you can't anymore. Until moving "as if" starts to feel like it's taking a heavier toll than carrying the thing itself.

So you pull the pin. You pull it, and everything stops. It gets way too quiet.

The space after the pin is out. That heavy holding of your breath that feels like it will never end. The waiting. God, the waiting.

It's a different kind of waiting. Once you know they know you exist.... then it's a waiting that feels even more urgent. Even more of you hangs in the balance than when you may have been living as if they other didn't exist.

It's not that you're waiting to see if it will blow up or not. (It will, in one way or another). First you wait to see if the other person is even alive. Then you wait to see if that person wants anything to do with you. Then you wait to see if they follow through with what they say they will do.

It's the kind of waiting that can kill you. And if the waiting doesn't kill you, the explosion can.

The explosion is one that feels... old. Like it comes from your bones. Maybe even the cells that built your bones. It goes off like it's been waiting for this, but you never knew it was there. It's a terrifying kind of explosion that you can never prepare for. We literally aren't built to brace for the impact of what it is like to find out if we were wanted and loved by our parents. Sometimes it's so intense you want to disappear. Sometimes it's like you are happier than you've ever been in your whole life.

The ripple effects can be catastrophic.

You walk around in a daze for the first day or so. When you can formulate words about your experience and decide to share them with other people, it can come across like you are "satisfied" now. Like the complex experience of joy and fear and and and gets misconstrued as some kind of wrong in your life has been righted. (It hasn't. It can't be).

Many of the people in your life are not prepared for this explosion. Many of them blame you for the effects, or tell you that you shouldn't have this need to know or desire to connect (all the while many of them have these connections themselves, which makes hearing this even more infuriating).

You live in the rubble. You try to figure out what all the pieces mean and if they make up you or if they're just another story someone decided to involve you in. You try to make the pieces mean something cohesive that you couldn't touch before.

You spend years doing that. You hope that the relationships hold. An overwhelming amount of them don't. It's too much. It's too daunting. It's life/earth/family shattering.

There is life before the pin and there is life after. It's a huge turning point. You have to (yet again) figure out living as an adoptee. But you do it. You keep breathing, and you learn to live with waiting, or you learn to live without waiting. Either way, you have lived through a war you weren't meant to fight.

Note: A huge shoutout to the fellow adoptees in my writing group with Anne Heffron, wherein we discussed "the waiting" and how hard it is. I am forever grateful for your community and your brilliance.

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