For many of us in the adoption community I know that the holidays, particularly Thanksgiving and Christmas when families gather and share traditions and bonding, come with mixed emotions for us. We struggle….we wonder….we hurt and for many of us we know we will go thru another holiday without feeling that connection we long for or having anyone reach out to us from our biological families even if they know where we are and could do so. Most of us try to push through and find the joy and blessings in the things we can while push away the reality that we feel disconnected and are struggling.
It is a rare person…some would say a non-existent person…..
who can be from outside our community and still understand how we feel and how
important the connection (or lack of) is to each of us.
This time of year also comes with those sudden, take your
breath away, unexpected triggers for many of us and mine was no different. One example was that I decided to go get my
eyebrows waxed and the lady doing it was talking to me and she said something about
my hair. The lady, who had at first assumed
that I had a perm because my hair is so curly says, “Wow, you have such pretty
hair….it’s so curly and you mean it’s not a perm!” My husband then says, “You think her hair is
something, you should see our daughter’s…both of them have the same hair”. The
lady then looks at me and says, “That is so neat….it must be genetic, do you
know where you get it from?” Uggghh! Those of you who have seen photos of my
mother and myself know that I am a spitting image of her so needless to say I
didn’t need that comment on Christmas Eve.
This brings me to why I am writing this blog….because this
week an amazing thing happened and I just want to share it with all of you.
A little background...
Over a year ago, I found my mother and had one phone call with her. She has wanted no further contact. I went into this holiday season knowing that
I would not hear from her or the two biological sisters who also know how to
contact me but I knew would choose not to do so. During that single phone call with my mother though,
I had shared with her that I had 4 children and somehow it came up that both of
my daughters are very musical and between them play a number of instruments. She then tells me that she has played the
violin her whole life. I had always
watched my girls in awe and wondered where they got their musical talent from
because I have never played an instrument and they didn’t get it from their dad
and now I felt like I knew the answer to that question.
In the year and a half since that phone call, I have
pondered (sometimes out loud) about the thoughts in my head and that I wondered
if I had ever tried to play an
instrument if I would have been any good at it since both my mother and my
children play.
Christmas morning arrives and the kids have opened all their
presents when my husband goes back into a bedroom and comes out with a gift for
me. He tells me to close my eyes because
he couldn’t figure out how to wrap it….and then he lays a beautiful guitar in
my lap. Now you may be reading that and thinking how
amazingly sweet that is…and it was. The
idea that he could have given me absolutely anything and he chose to give me a
guitar. The idea that I suddenly, on
Christmas morning, got a connection to my mother …. not from her, but from my
husband who knew how important it was to me and how much it would be missing
from another Christmas. But that is not
the end of this story.
Over the next couple days, I practiced with the guitar…watched
Youtube videos for beginning players…got a blister on my thumb from plucking
the strings, lol…and just sat and stared at the thing sitting in my living room
on it’s stand and feeling this strange sense of connection because of it. But creeping in was this thought that all of
my girls play classical instruments and my mother had said she played the
violin which is also a classical instrument and this was a guitar….and I found
myself thinking, “is my playing the guitar really the same thing?”
Then last night, my husband and kids were watching TV and I
was playing with the guitar while they giggled at me as I tried to play part of
Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman…not very successfully I must admit. Again, the same question silently crept into
my head that perhaps I was just being silly feeling connected to this
instrument when suddenly my 12 year old daughter who plays the violin, but has
never played a guitar in her life walked over and reached out for the
guitar. She turned it around and started
playing….playing without hesitation….playing “Hush Little Baby”. 
