 By Dr. Liz DeBetta February is my birth month. It's also the month when Valentine's Day is celebrated, which also happens to be the birthday of my oldest niece. It is a month dedicated to the language of love alongside the language of loss. It is a month that asks me, as an adoptee, to hold multiple truths simultaneously and reminds me of the duality of my experience. My life began with a loss that my first mother said, in her first letter to me, was born out of tremendous love for me. And my life has been built on the internal confusion that love must always equal loss. It has taken me years to separate the two. In my early years I was surrounded by love from all sides, and I was still afraid that it would end if I did or said the wrong thing. I had internalized the message, as so many adoptees do, that my first mother loved me so much she gave me away. And so many years later when I found her and began a relationship with her, I learned that she too had internalized the same message—that she “chose" to give me away because she loved me with her entire being. This doesn't negate her love, it points out the flawed cultural narrative that dominates the way adoption is intentionally positioned in the mainstream—as a loving sacrifice. The problem with this narrative is that it lacks nuance and dilutes the truth of the harm that comes from telling first mothers that if they love their babies they should give them a better life; it dilutes the truth of the lifelong confusion that adoptees live with, which is that love equals pain because of this first, traumatic loss.
You think - how can a body withstand this? the separation the disruption the detachment after months safe inside inside inside knowing nothing feeling everything how can a body withstand this? the pain the solitude the significance of loss loss that echoes through her bones belying her ability to be free loss that settles over her like a blanket blanketing her in sadness blanketing her in doubt blanketing her in fear Fear is the only thing I know my bones, like hers, reverberate with the significance of loss I lose myself because I do not know her cannot know her I only know that I feel I feel I feel For me, the quiet message that I was loved and given away meant that love was conditional, something to be earned and held on to at any cost. This showed up in relationships, especially romantic ones, as me losing myself in order to be the person I thought I should be to keep their attention, me taking all of the emotional responsibility, me sacrificing my own needs. What I didn't know then was that these were all trauma responses and that I was completely insecure and needed to feel that I was loved by being owned by another person or controlled by the relationship. And every time a relationship ended, either because I pushed people away with my intense need or chose to walk away because I was so afraid of actual love and care, I felt like my world was ending. I spiraled into a dark pit of despair that lasted for weeks and interrupted every part of my life. What I didn't understand, yet, was that these losses were hitting my highly dysregulated nervous system at hurricane speed and bringing me right back to the original moment of loss because of love at the very beginning of my life. The preverbal language that love equals loss is in my DNA. My body remembers the shiver of separation the moment of release from anything and everything I ever knew My body remembers the renunciation the retraction the ricochet of loss pain is an echo of that loss that thunders through my skull screaming forcing me to remember what my body refuses to forget The language of loss has long been expressed through poetry for me. Even before I understood that that’s what I was doing. I have used poetic language to give shape to the truth that has echoed in my bones for decades, a truth that has shaped the way I not only inhabit my body but the way I have inhabited my life. I spent many years ignoring the truth that my body was expressing. I stayed busy to avoid feeling so much all of the time, still unaware that it was the trauma of unacknowledged loss screaming to be heard. Eventually, I have learned to listen to myself, to sit with the grief, the pain, the confusion, the doubt, the fear, the overwhelm, and hear what it is trying to tell me. This is the language of self-love. The love that I have cultivated for the scared little girl who learned to abandon herself because she didn’t feel worthy. The love I have cultivated for the scared teenager who sacrificed her self-worth at the expense of being chosen. The love I have cultivated for the scared young woman who built walls to ensure that no one could ever get close enough to know how terrified she was of being rejected. The love I have cultivated for the adult woman who was brave enough to deconstruct those walls and replace them with boundaries that allow for genuine connection. The adult woman who has loved and valued herself enough to stay in constant dialogue with the little girl, the scared teenager, and the young woman to remind them that they are, and always have been, worthy of love, care, and connection. Connecting the parts of myself and my story has not only been an act of self-love, it has been an act of refusing to succumb to the singular story that love must always equal pain. In listening to the language of loss as it has appeared over many years, I have charted a path forward that is grounded in love, care, and accountability. I now have new language to explain why I made the choices I made and can forgive the versions of me that were doing the best that they could to survive because that’s what confusing love with loss does—it creates conditions for survival. But survival is not living and it is exhausting. Moving from survival to living has meant developing new language that honors the both/and of my experience and allows me to hold space for grief when it shows up, like on Valentine’s Day in 1993 when, as a sophomore in High School, my name was called in homeroom when they were handing out “secret” Valentine’s flowers. I had never gotten one before and I thought, finally, someone had seen me and chosen to send me one! When I opened the note stapled around the stem and read that it was for my brother, who was absent that day, instead of me, I was crushed and burst into tears. I did not have the language then, but I do now. I know that my overreaction was not silly or ridiculous; it was the hurt and confused part of me saying, “Why did she leave me?” I now know that my years of abandoning myself to chase the wrong relationships was because I thought I needed someone else to do the choosing to feel validated. I can now say that I do not need anyone to choose me when I choose myself. I have rewritten what my bones know. AKA invites you to hear from members of the extended family of adoption and the surrounding community. While we take great care in curating the content, please know
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Back to Main BlogNewsletter ArchivesBlog Archive
March 2026
Categories |
RSS Feed