Shadows

​Hello everyone and welcome back to Blogville. I am sipping a berry blend tea today hoping to brighten a dull weather day. This morning I had a lazy start and was scrolling through pictures on my phone. It inspired me to write about shadows for some reason. Naively, I thought ‘casting a shadow’ meant to highlight or cover, therefore protecting what it covered, like a cool shade in the summer heat. Apparently I was mistaken.


My web search of the phrase, ‘casting a shadow’, revealed that it actually means to cause something to be less enjoyable. I guess it might be like when someone’s ex-partner arrives unexpectedly at an event, therefore making the event less enjoyable, so that the ex-partner would be ‘casting a shadow’. I mean this only applies if the relationship ended badly of course, some ex-partners have wonderful relationships with each other. But I digress.


I was looking at a photo that I had taken while on a walk in a Canadian East Coast Province that my husband and I visited this past summer. We had hiked a beautiful, though rather steep, trail behind our hotel. It was a beautiful summer day, warm and sunny. It was actually the first time I had ever seen caution signs warning about steepness of a trailside. As we left the treed portion of the trail behind us I was captivated by how our shadows looked on the trail ahead of us, so I took a photo. I also took a photo of our shadows at another point in our journey as we walked down one of Halifax’s steep hills. Somehow, I think that, to me, these pictures mean ‘we were there’ without the distraction of how we looked.


Looking at these photos reminded me how I think that sometimes I can feel my birth mother’s shadow. Not her actual shadow of course but her influence on me and how being relinquished for adoption impacted on my life. Sometimes her shadow even caused some things to be less enjoyable. Things like the anniversary of my birth each year, no amount of candles could extinguish the shadow of hers and my separation on the day I was born. When I would go to the doctor and the topic of family medical history came up, her shadow was cast on the door as it closed behind my mom and the doctor while my mom frantically whispered that I was adopted and she had no birth family history to give him. As a young adult, both of my birth parents’ shadows were there when I was asked about medical histories and hereditary conditions. In fact, I clearly remember my first mammogram after I had met my birth father and all of my birth siblings, I was so proud to say ‘no’ instead of ‘I don’t know’ when asked if there was a family history of breast cancer. I know that does not seem like much but I had lived my entire life until then answering medical questions with “I was adopted, I do not have any birth family medical history information.” Finally getting birth family medical history information through the reunion process was a ray of sunshine on a lifelong medical history shadow.


When my birth mother was offered the chance to meet the adult me, she declined. You can imagine the shadow that cast on my heart. She did provide medical history information and a photograph of herself from about the age she was when I was born (at the request of the social worker). To have had someone give birth to me and leave me to an uncertain future cast a shadow on my existence that I had mostly learned to live with. But for her to later have been offered the opportunity to get to know me as a person and decline it, cast a very different kind of shadow. I will never fully know why she made that decision but I will always believe it was my fault somehow, something I had done in utero, or even during my birth that had ‘cast a shadow’ on our future and our ability to become a reunited birth mother and birth child. 


I used to feel my birth father’s shadow too but it had a more subliminal feel to it than hers did. Did he know I existed? His role, or lack of one, cast a shadow on something I was not sure he even knew existed. The information I had been given from my file indicated that my birth father did not know he had left me behind; the unintended  product of a romantic tryst. There is a shadow of irresponsibility to that as he moved on to live his life, presumably never looking back. Yet there I was, existing in the shadow of their brief relationship. Once I had met my birth father, I felt his shadow less. Perhaps because he had taken shape and became real; I could see and hear him. He became less of a shadow and more a ray of light, though my heart still held him accountable for abandoning my birth mother and leaving her with the responsibility of deciding what to do about me. At the same time, he could shed light on where I came from, who my paternal ancestors are, and yes, provide me with some medical history information. Even after he passed I can still feel his energy, his light as opposed to his shadow I suppose, maybe because he let me get to know him. Maybe because he accepted me as his birth child, he was able to fill in his chapter of the book of my existence. 


Growing up adopted involved many unanswered questions as you might guess. These are often the shadows that darken the lives of adopted people. These shadows cover school activities such as learning about genetics and not being able to fill in any of those blanks. These shadows cover the fact that you began life as ‘illegitimate’, a child born to unmarried parents. By today’s standards, this is no longer an issue, however, in my generation it was fodder for teasing, shame and embarrassment. It is hard to build self-esteem when you actually should not have existed; when your very existence was an accident, a mistake. This shadow still lives in me, even into my 60s. 


Today the term used for these shadows is typically referred to as ‘adoption trauma’ and is acknowledged as a side effect of being adopted. Our ‘shadow’ finally has a name. Now I know why I suffered such low self-esteem for so much of my life. Though I never met my birth mother, I have gotten to know who she was through her children and grandchildren. Meeting my birth father made me feel acknowledged, that once he knew I existed, I mattered. Meeting and maintaining some level of contact with his children and grandchildren is inexplicably gratifying. These are my maternal and paternal ‘blood’ sisters and brother, but more importantly, they accept me as their sister, even as an aunt to their children.


As you may or may not know, from previous blogs, I have a maternal birth half-sister who was also placed for adoption. The greatest cloud over this relationship was the Ontario Government’s denial of my right to connect with her at the time I learned she existed. I had grown up knowing that there was a half-sibling out there and subsequently fought for the right to gain access to them once I was an adult. Eventually, I won a battle, that happily no one should have to fight today thanks to legislative changes, and I was eventually able to meet my birth sister. We were robbed of the opportunity to have grown up together in an adoptive home under the shadow of an agency’s practice of satisfying more adoptive parents’ needs over the meeting the needs of siblings by placing them together in the same adoptive family. Under the shadow of the provincial adoption disclosure laws, we were further robbed of the opportunity to know each other for the first thirty years of our lives. The government’s actions clearly ‘casting shadows’ on our lives, and the lives of generations of adopted persons.


As always, thank you for stopping by. I look forward to reading your comments here, or via email at [email protected]! See you next time in Blogville!