At 17, I found my birth parents and was so hopeful that the fantasy stories I had created in my daydreams had come true: My birth parents had not abandoned me and had been searching for me my whole life. They were happily married, unlike my adoptive parents, but their lives were not yet complete, as they longed to be reunited with me.

I was trying to break away from a home and a community where I was left unprotected. A childhood where volatile words, silence, and the wrongful touch of grown men created internal scars that were woven around my heart. Just like the weeds I was made to pull for hours in the hot sun every summer of my childhood, they threatened to choke out any seed of love that was once planted there.

With that birth parent fantasy playing on repeat in my head, I invited my birth mother to attend my high school graduation just two weeks after our first phone call. I thought that seeing her face-to-face for the first time would bring closure to all the questions and doubts I had, that she would step out of my Ghost Kingdom (an idea from the late adoptee activist, Betty Jean Lifton, PhD) into my reality.

As with any good fantasy, the plot of my story was not predictable and did not have a neat and tidy ending.

Four years after my high school graduation, I stood in my studio apartment holding the card I had just opened from my birth mother. My heart was beating fast as my shaking hands tried to simultaneously hold her words and pull at the weeds once again threatening my heart. I thought I had pulled them out by the roots, but they were now growing back at the speed of Jack’s beanstalk.

Recently, I had confronted her with my own letter about the damage my heart experienced after her invitation to attend a party in her home. My Ghost Kingdom completely fell to the ground when I realized her friends did not know who I was. In her story, the chapter of me did not exist. I told her I felt like one of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic—a little girl locked away for years until her mother was ready to admit she had a child.

I do not know if she ever read that story, but my words broke a dam in her and she slung words back at me with a fierce anger. I was the one who thought I could just walk back into her life, ask questions, and disrupt her world. It was me, she said. I was to blame and was choosing to be broken instead of living life whole. “You need to get over your privileged self and accept the truth about who is to blame in your life.”

I re-read her hateful words for a third time. I couldn’t believe it. How dare she blame me? And what was with the Georgia O’Keefe skull on the front of the card? How was this the blank card she chose to send to the daughter she denied existed to her friends, but signed, “Love, Your Mother?”

That’s it, I thought. That’s the closure I’ve been longing for. She is so hateful that now I can justify letting the scars around my heart grow thicker, closing the door to a mother’s love that I was never to know.

At 21, after looking for love in all the wrong places and not finding it, I wanted someone to blame. I wanted to understand the one who decided I was not worthy of love, discarding me like a doll initially chosen with joy, but now no longer adored.

She left me. She disappeared. No one could find her. My birth father waited for her return, so sure she would come back. When weeks turned to months, he broke under the pressure. He couldn’t bear another abandonment in his life, so he chose to leave, too.

But how could I blame him? At least he tried. He wanted to keep us, they said. He just couldn’t do it by himself and the manic depression that only flickered in his teen years began to grow deep roots in adulthood. I couldn’t blame him. No one chooses a mental health disorder.

My birth mother, on the other hand, chose drugs and then left the state to focus on getting clean and starting over. Forging a new life for herself. Without us.

How does a parent leave her children and never come back for them? What did she think would happen to us? Who did she think would care for my two-year-old self and my little brother?

To my twenty-something self, closure meant no longer questioning where I came from or wondering who I looked like or feeling a longing to meet my birth parents. Closure also meant locking away feelings that were too painful to take with me through life.

With my mother’s letter, I now had closure. I knew who to blame. I could move on. There wasn’t anything else to talk about. 

I could now choose to love on my own terms. Over the years I learned how to pull out the weeds from around my heart with all the tools I had gathered. To let the light of love shine through and begin to heal my wounded heart.

I found fulfilling work, formed deep and healthy relationships, allowed myself to be loved by a partner who would stay, and embraced becoming a mother to two beautiful girls.

Then why would the pain of abandonment continue to show up when I least expected it? When I thought my heart was completely healed?

Decades after I buried the words from that hate-filled card in a vault in my heart, I would listen to author Pauline Boss describe the myth of closure:

“The myth is that healthy people find closure. The truth is resilient people live well without it.”

Pauline’s words changed the narrative of my story. Closure doesn’t exist. Like the thistles and vines in my flower gardens, I must keep on weeding around my heart. The process changes, but the work of healing is never over. 

It’s okay, Closure. It’s okay, Blame. I don’t need you anymore. I know who I am. I am resilient and I am healing.