Were you adopted in a closed adoption?

[Bit]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

I know no one gives a shit about my pain really (or anyone else's). I totally get that.

Two words: STOP THAT! {{{{{{{{{{{{{{Jen}}}}}}}}}}}}}} What you really know--and know from experience--is that people DO care about you, about your pain, about your life.

Hon, when a person is hurting like all hell every little thing makes it worse, and it's so easy to believe that people are telling one to just go away... but then, maybe that's an echo of the first "go away"?

I think it would probably be impossible to believe that a birth parent had one's best interests at heart if the adoptive parents turn out to be abusive. I know it seems like the world's biggest injustice. I know that a prom seems totally insignificant compared to a lifetime of torture...

...and I remember the 1960s....when a man owned--literally, like a car or a house--a man owned his daughter and her body in the US. Permission to go to the prom might have been a reward for your mother's compliance, Jen, but you would have been given up no matter what, because your mother had no legal rights whatever and would have had none no matter what age she might have been. A woman was her father's legal property, or that of his male heir, until she married and became her husband's legal property.

Your mother had no choice, Jen, even though it sounded to you like she did. She had no choice. It was a completely different world. She might today mention the prom casually as if it were important, but back then girls knew when they did and didn't have a choice. The prom was a sop, something to pacify her so he didn't have to endure her grief and pain.

(The strength of the Women's Libbers to endure society's rage in the 1960s just blows me away... I don't know that I could have been that strong. I do know that they wouldn't recognize this world which is our legacy from them, except as it lived in their hearts: that no woman should be the property of anyone but herself. Goddess, how the world has changed!)

So Jen, I understand that you have been doubly betrayed--but I believe it was your grandfather who betrayed you the first time, not your mother.

For what it's worth, darlin, I understand about your father's death finally letting you be free enough to deal with this buried pain. I'm sure it caught you completely off guard--things coming up after someone dies have caught me off guard too *wry smile*--and I think you'll be able to deal with it and process it in your own time, but oy! doesn't it make life uncomfortable in the meantime?!

There's this book I am once AGAIN trying to read, called [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Heart-Spiritual-Advantage-Childhood/dp/0671797840"]Legacy of the Heart[/ame] by Wayne Muller. He's a minister who spent years working with people who survived abusive childhoods. I usually have to stop partway through it because it brings up such ferocious anger in me, and that interferes with my relationship with my mother. But this last time when I started it, I realized that each time I come back to it, I've made a lot of progress in dealing with my childhood pain and anger.

If you can handle the fact that the book is written by a minister, I highly recommend it. He periodically quotes from several faiths, mostly Christian and Buddhist but sometimes others, but he doesn't seem to need to preach the necessity of belief at anyone---tis more like offering reassurance to those who need spiritual backup---and he seems to really understand what it does to people to have lived through such difficult lives, to have suffered so enormously as children.