Like evil butterflies
The loss comes back.
I got an email from my friend Elizabeth the other day. She’d found a blog from a woman whose brother was given up for adoption when he was a baby. This “birth sister’s” writing went right to my core and, before I knew it, the feeling came back.
It’s mostly centered in my gut, this feeling. And it radiates out from there. It’s like evil butterflies. Like life or death fear. And the death wouldn’t be painless or clean or peaceful.
I felt this way sitting on a picnic table in the park the day I met my very first birthmother (other than myself.) She told me she wanted to search for her lost daughter and asked me if I wanted t search for my son.
Like an earthquake
The butterflies radiate out from the center and the beating of their wings cause a quaking, and it takes energy to keep from full-out shaking.-I mean St. Vitus dance arms and legs akimbo, flailing. The effort it take to not let that happen makes feel like I could sleep for a week. That is, if I could just relax and make the feeling go away. ButI know it won’t. Drinking is the thing that helps. The thing that tamps down the earthquake.
I felt like this every time I told my story to friends and family. And then, even years later, when I started to write about it, the feeling was there. Not that long ago, I told someone it had been only recently that I could re-visit the experience of having given up my son without experiencing that shaking.
But then it came back. It can still come back.
