Today I am in mourning, yet I'm not completely sure what I am mourning for. Loss, certainly. But a loss that is hard to define.
Most of you know that my Mom, Stacie, is not my biological mother. Stacie is the mother of my heart and soul, but another woman gave birth to me. And for the first years of my life, that woman, Judi, was my mother. When I was a child, she left me in the care of my father and my Mom and except for a few and far between appearances, she pretty much abandoned me.
Today as I was Googling around, I stumbled upon an obituary for the woman who bore me. And it has left me dazed and bewildered at the circumstances that brought me to the point where I would only learn of her death months after the fact, and in such a harsh, untempered way.
Now many of you are thinking that I still have my mother, the woman who raised me, who made my homecoming dress, the woman I would sacrifice most anything for, and you would be right. I am fortunate to have her, and our relationship is so wonderful that we formalized it less than ten years ago with a legal adoption. But unlike many adoptees, I not only knew my biological mother, but spent the early 'formative' years of my life with her. Judi was the one in those first years of life who diapered me, fed me, rocked me to sleep, took me to school, taught me to walk, etc. So her loss hits me on more than just the level of unknown egg donor.
Part of this grief I feel is at all the unresolved questions I had for her. Why did she leave me? What did that little girl do to make her care so little for her only daughter, for her first born child? Why? Why? WHY?
That question "Why?" echoes in my head so loudly that I can hardly hear any other thought. Did she ever care about me? Did she ever regret it? Did she ever wonder about what kind of woman I had become? On my birthday every year, did she ever think about me? (Her birthday, September 21st, was just one day before mine, so I thought of her on mine.)
There are a million other questions I have too, but they will also be unanswered. I would like to find her husband and ask him how she died, so that I might at least know if there are health concerns I need to be aware of. She was only 65 when she passed away, which seems too young. And now I am orphaned of biological parents. Yet I am so grateful that I am not alone.
So I mourn for the woman I knew so briefly. But I also mourn for that little girl, who's mother would rock her and sing to her "You are My Sunshine", then left her and the little girl never knew why. And now she never will.
