Love makes you real

I'm torn. My whole life, I have been torn. I know for a fact that I was rejected from the moment I was born. Most folks are born and have their mother love them and care for them. My birth-mother gave me to someone else to take care of me.

Now, I have heard all of the propaganda and the things that people say:

• Your birth mother loved you enough to give you to a family who could take care of you.
• You were chosen by your parents – most people don't get to choose.
• You were a love child – isn't that romantic?
• Aren't you glad you weren't aborted?

All of these things may be true, but you know what? They don't help. There is no getting around the fact that, at the root of my lifespan there is a moment of rejection that can't be erased.

Yes, I was a love child, and no, it wasn't romantic. It meant my birth parents probably didn't think much about birth control. That doesn't register as being very intelligent or very considerate, especially in a time when birth control was a lot more available than it had ever been. Am I glad I wasn't aborted? Well, if I had been aborted, how would I have known? I personally believe my life force would've flowed back to the source and would've mixed with the life force available for new life and would've manifested in some other way.

The potentiality of who-I-am-now would not have been known in that timeline – in that timeline I would not exist. Although I hope that the world is made better by my being here, I cannot bring myself to be so egotistical as to think that the world would even notice my absence if I had never been.

Yes, my parents chose me. But now I know that it takes a long time to get a white, male baby in the adoption process, and it's not like you're going to be choosy at the point which you're handed an infant. You're going to bond with the infant. So it wasn't much of a choice.

"Your mother loved you so much…" is crap, frankly. This was not love. This was selfishness, as was the act of my conception. Love doesn't send people away, it makes a way. Love doesn't divide, it multiplies. Love finds a way to make things work. Neither my birth-mother or (if he even knew) my birth-father were unselfish enough to keep me and just make it work out, but not selfish enough to abort me.

Now, I'm not saying that I am unwilling or unable to get around that rejection, to grow and move forward. I am more than my beginning. However, it does inform my life and may go to explain this sense that I have that I am somehow apart, somehow different than other people. Not better. Just different.

My parents (the people who reared me, the only people I have ever called mom and dad) were very good to me in the overall scheme of things. I was lucky in that I never had to worry where food was coming from, or where my shelter was, or whether or not I'd have medical care or shoes or new clothes when I needed them. I can't say that I provided that level of material comfort to my own children.

And you might say that my upbringing is what causes me to be an eternal optimist, because I grew up and felt that sense of pure taken-care-of that I have come to realize is incredibly rare and very difficult to achieve in this day and age.

On the subject of my birth mother, I have felt at turns total ambivalence, a fascination and curiousity, and absolute anger at her for her rejection. Part of me longs to be in her arms even to this day - but accepting that that will probably never happen is part of my struggle to obtain a healthy and lasting peace and clarity in adulthood.

In fact, the one of the biggest reasons I am a loving, caring and expressive person is that I had a mother who mothered me just as much as my birth mother could have.

In many ways, this leads me to the subject of my fascination with the anima, the feminine. It didn't help that I grew up in what amounts to a matriarchy. By the time I was an adult, the power and mystery of the feminine was definitely ingrained in me. It took me a good long time in my life to claim my own, masculine, power and to recognize it as a seperate thing from feminine power: not derived from the female, but an individual source all my own.

But the fascination with the feminine continues, and that's OK. I love women. Had I been born a woman, I'd probably be a lesbian. That doesn't mean I don't love some men, but even the men I care about have strong aspects of the feminine to them. So ultimately, it is the "other", the female, the mystery, that I am drawn to. And that is why I am writing this journal – to explore that sense of being apart, and to share my experiences of living life as an alien.

Understand that I have already forgiven my birth-mother and  my birth-father for what they did, and now I can feel love for them. And love is the only way I can know them, because they are not available to me in my life. Because my love makes them real – and that is all that matters.

But I don't love them the same way I love my real parents, the people who took care of me and changed my diapers and helped me with my math phobia and helped launch me into this life. Those people will always loom large in my personal mythology.

Thank you for reading.