To love or not to love?

I’d tell the world that love was ruined for me the day I was separated from my first mother. I’d say that the severance of the first “love” I’ve ever known, even as an infant, rocked me to my core. It’s my deepest wound — the whispering voice in the back of my mind that reminds me I was relinquished for adoption because I am “unlovable.” Only it’s often not a whisper. It screams at me that I am unworthy of love…that I am difficult to love…it makes me think that love is terrifying.

I grew up being told that my biological mother relinquished me to the international adoption system because she loved me SO much that she wanted me to have a better life, one she couldn’t provide for me. My adoption reunion taught me that in actuality, I was relinquished for adoption because I was a painful memory for her. The product of a rape, I am her only child of five that she did not choose to parent. I was not created from love, or even lust, but by violence and greed. How does one reconcile that notion and still believe they are deserving of love?

My parents divorced when I was 14. I continued questioning the permanence of love as a whole. I got pregnant as a teenager and when I decided to parent my child, my mother told me she’d have nothing to do with me ever again. Discarded by two mothers, I KNEW in my soul that if my own mothers couldn’t love me unconditionally, nobody ever would. Adoption counseling could have helped me navigate these feelings, but at the time, I felt completely alone in my struggles.

I gave birth to my first of four children when I was just 18 years old. I held him in my arms with nothing to my name to offer him and as I studied the very first blood relative I had ever met, ironically, I told him, “If all I have to give you is my love, it will be enough.”

The truth about me is I love SO big…SO unconditional…SO deep, making the theory of “love” even more conflicting for me. To love or not to love?!? I cannot be loved but I CAN love?!? I often ask myself, should I give my love away knowing it “can’t” be reciprocated? “If I can love like this, why can’t people love ME like this”?!? An adoption therapist might say that this is a trauma response, but sometimes it just feels like my reality.

And for 30 years, the answer always came back to fit the motive that I was never loveable from the beginning. It sounded true for a while, but I’m beginning to feel a shift in that story. I am erasing a lot of what I was told and rewriting chapters of truth — truths that are hard to digest but ones that lead to the healing I have so badly needed.

Adoption doesn’t happen because of good things, but I am also learning to welcome the hope that love can grow anywhere, even above those of us who have dark roots.

Happy February…here’s to hope and cheers to believing in love.