I’ve been keeping busy on Nespapers.com lately and started researching the Adoptive family’s side.

I learned a lot. I also learned what I already knew about where I grew up. The whole time I lived in Keremeos I felt trapped and that I would never get out. I was ready to head to Vancouver like so many of my friends and just live on the streets. At the time it didn’t matter if I lived or died I just knew that there was no other way out. I seen so many of the kids leave to go to school, and not long after they left they would return with nothing more than debt. No degree in hand.

When I look back at the predicament I was in it seems like I had more on my plate than I knew back then. Adoption Trauma tells your brain you don’t belong and you need to run...run anywhere...run home, wherever that is. To survive in this world as even a kept person, Keremeos is not where you go. Retirement is all you have. There were very few jobs and as a general rule minimum wage, under the table, drug dealing or bootlegging was the only money you could hope for.

I’m glad I got out. I’m glad I didn’t go the Vancouver route, I lost too many friends that way.

I’ve read so many posts from certain adoptees that get right pissed off about people from the outside reading what we write and then turning it around and profiting from it. They complain about individuals within the triad for doing the same thing. How can it ever be wrong to pay someone for educating the world about the triad. Why get pissed off about someone reaching out to spread the word so that the new generation of Adoptee’s are better understood before they need the help that they are going to require.

I have seen Anne Heffron and Pam Karanova viciously attacked by Adoptee’s. How embarrassing to see anyone do this to anyone. It’s one thing to voice your opinion but to rant about your opinion when it is so angry doesn’t actually do anything good for the adoptee community.

Let it go. Anne and Pam aren’t out to get you. They are out on the front line trying their hardest to say what we feel in words that some of us can’t get out with words that the majority of the public will understand and listen to with love.

I know I wouldn’t want my children to see me go after someone for them making any money or status just from my being adopted. I know my children are just like me because they are my genetic mirror. I would hate to see them think that they have to be angry because they are part of me.

Go ahead and include my words in a way that makes sense to the kept. I have no jealousy for anyone that can write or speak better than me. I know I am unable to do what other people can do. I want the kept to be educated, I don’t want to be remembered as an angry adoptee as so many adoptees can be. I want to be remembered as someone who truly cares about the adoptee family.

This post is not directed at any one individual, it is meant to point out that I don’t want to be remembered in a negative way. I was given to a negative, angry adoptive family. I have to live with that forever. I can’t speak back to any family members that are not my genetic family. I know they will bring up the fact that I’m too sensitive and I’m ungrateful for all they have done for me. They saved me from someone who didn’t want me. I will always have to put on my smile and walk away. I’m better than them because I would never talk to them they way they talk to and about people.

This is what adoption feels like to me.

Today was a good day. I contacted two of my sisters to check up on them... and yes I apologized too for checking up on them but at least we had a nice conversation. Adoption takes so much away from people. It’s not just the adoptee that gets screwed over, the brothers and sisters suffer as well. At the time of their childhood they don’t think anything of it except in my case my one sister knew. There is way more nature than society gives credit for. Adoption is like a cruel experiment that Hitler would’ve been apart of.

I missed out on my sisters for 50 years...I have so much to give to them just because they are who they are...they’re part of me.

No matter how adoption is painted...it still puts the adoptee through the trauma of losing their first love...their mother.

This article never mentions what I actually went through. No one ever seems to acknowledge how my hippocampus misfiled my memories and/or lost them. No one mentions my amygdala hijack or how my prefrontal cortex has lost the ability to regulate my emotions effectively like other people.

Maybe the The Province should do a follow up story and republish this story at the same time.

Severance Magazine asked what music we go to for an instant calming effect. For the most part, anything from the Beatles works for me. Although I will sing Yesterday to the babies, always have and it’s weird because it’s actually a sad song. I realised today that it makes perfect sense now...it’s my grieving song. I never got the chance to say goodbye to the only person that I truly and unconditionally loved. I feel like every time I sing it I can release a little of the love I’ve always carried for the first person that rejected me, and every time I can remove a piece of her from my heart it makes space for my babies. They deserve my love more than the woman that relinquished me. I wish it weren’t that way but I was given no other choices on how to deal with my loss of her. I still love her and I know I always will until the day I die. It’s the fantasy of her that I love, I’ve never met her and I never will so it’s a very confusing love.

Laura Corbeth is one of those smart people I like to follow. She shows compassion even though she has carried anger because of her past. She understands that for her to be a better person, she needs to educate the world about the traumas that some of us were subjected to.

#PTSD and #trauma changes our brain. These are 3 areas of the brain that trauma affects.

#CPTSD
#neuroscience
#Education
#Therapy
#EMDR
#Journal

Yes, I am sensitive, most adoptees are. When we were reliquished our brain went into overdrive and we end up feeling everything. It is almost too much to handle when someone points this out. I wish more people were educated about the way the brain is affected and acknowledge the trauma that we endure all of our life. It is a horrible way to live and everyday I strive to think of positive things.