I realize that it's ironic. Dichotomous. Odd, at the very least. That a die-hard Christmas addict would feel so incongruously bereft at the holidays.
Millions of people suffer from depression over the holidays, due to family conflict, loss, unrealized hopes & expectations. Mine? Its my damn birthday.
As a kid, my mom always made an enormous deal of Christmas and Birthdays. In our family, these were capital-H HOLIDAYS. My birthday falls just after Christmas, and while my party was often held in November or January, the day of my birthday there would be a candle in my waffle and a special gift and "Happy Birthday" sung. My mother has always made me feel like I am special, even more so on my birthday. I have so many good memories tied around this, and its one of the many reason I adore my mother. She treats my brother and I as if we are the most precious, important people in the world.
The other side of birthdays and Christmas, the side that I feel kind of guilty sometimes for even thinking about or mentioning (because, you know, I should be grateful), is my orphan status, my bastardy, the other side of my existence.
I realize I am not unique in this. I share ambiguous origins with approximately 6% of the population. There are even some of us who are really famous:
OK, well we know who HIS dad was...
When I was a child, the sense of loss was something I didn't even know there were words for. It was a simple sense of not being made the same way as other children, a sense of failure for somehow not being good enough to be kept. A sense of being second best to my parents (as opposed to the lost biological babies, who were, of course, first choice). For a long time the feeling of being celebrated helped keep those feelings small and quiet. As I got older, questioned and wondered, the feelings took on a life of their own. the more I understood about the complexity of human relationships, the more I understood that my birthday was also the anniversary of a tremendous loss. The day I was not wanted.
I thought that finding my birth family would heal these feelings. I searched and found, well over a decade ago now. It took a few years for everything to shake out from that particular Life-quake, but over time things have a way of settling into patterns of understanding. When I first met "S", my birth mother, I was overwhelmed by her. Who wouldn't be? Here was the woman from whose loins I sprung (sprang?). She baked me and served me up to the world to be eaten alive. I look like her (without the extra 150 pounds), I have her hair, eyes, bad hips, knees, other genetic propensities I don't care to mention, flair for drama (yeah, I know. Bite me.) Since she either can't or won't tell me who my birth father is (the jury is still out on that one), she is all I have as a reference point. As God is my witness, this is NOT a good spot fo the starting push pin on the map of ones' life.
At some point, after years of conversations, arguments, questions and investigation, at some point I understood that my relinquishment wasn't a case of noble or pure motivations. It wasn't as if she was coerced or forced to give away a child she really wanted. The real reason, the level of state authority, was more along the lines of "We're not increasing your welfare check. Sorry."
It was a hell of a lot better than the alternative, just ask my birth siblings. The Kept Ones. The Unlucky. S raised the other five of us, if you can call a lifetime of abuse "raising." Oh, I know just how fortunate I am. But there's the other side, the darker side. If any of the stories that have passed S's lips are true, I'm either a child of rape, the result of a drunken one-night-er or a relationship so brief that the guys' name is lost to memory and/or drunkenness. Regardless, I didn't matter enough for her to even gift me with a name. "Baby Girl M_____" is what's written on the birth certificate, and even the last name has been crossed out and "O____" handwritten above it. Whether she meant for me to have the last name of her imprisoned husband is moot, since without a first name a last means little. And if I ask her what really happened I can guarantee you there will be no straight answer.
So each year as my birthday approaches, I try to find the right state of mind to navigate the dark twisted miasma as my favorite holiday, my childhood memories and the truth and lies about my origins morph into one big ugly motherfucker. I'm so lucky to have had a reasonably sane, healthy family. Yeah, no silver spoon there, but better than the alternative.
I mourn the loss of the dream of the kind of person I had imagined my birth mother to be. I seek meaning in my origins, and hope someday to have enough peace about the entire sordid mess that I can finally forgive the woman who brought me into the world. Or maybe she doesn't need forgiving. Maybe my expectation that she somehow live up to my fantasies is unrealistic.
