I do not remember explicit fantasies as a child about who my birth parents were. I do remember, after my second adoption at age nine, feeling so estranged from the human race that I sometimes wondered whether I was from another planet, that maybe this was all some grand experiment to see how I would respond as an alien creature among humans. Or was everyone else alien and I the only human? Couldn’t be sure! 

One of the challenges I face as a double-adoptee is that I live inside two ghost kingdoms, that is, two families – my biological family and the family of my first adopters – with whom I could have had a very different life than the one I know. So many what ifs to play with, and so little consistency or stability.

Who am I? Where and with whom do I belong? I think the fantasy I created from all of this had to do with the desire that a mother figure would come and rescue me, establish me on the planet to which I truly belonged, and we’d live happily ever after. This fantasy certainly crept into some of my adult relationships, with predictably painful outcomes. For instance, I developed an uncanny knack for attaching myself to women who would surely abandon me or remain unavailable to me in some form, seemingly affirming the implicit second clause to my fantasy: “I hope a mother figure will save me, but she’ll surely just fuck me over again instead, just like the others!” 

This fantasy came to a head two years ago when I made contact with my first mother at long last. My hopes soared to the stars with her first affectionate messages to me, then plummeted painfully back to earth as I got to know her limitations better. I quickly understood that she was not capable of being emotionally available to me in the ways that I needed her to be. Because of the utter relational chaos I endured throughout my childhood, I sought a fantasy mother to affirm a sense of identity and give me a coherent story that I shared with her, a story that told me that I wasn’t so alone and estranged in the world after all. Facing disappointment with my actual first mother finally deflated the fantasy, and the pain of that deflation drove me to connect with the adoptee community, and most significantly, with an adoptee therapist. 

The loss of the fantasy-hope of a mother-savior shattered something close to my heart, like an underwater explosion. Now, my therapist and I thresh through the flotsam that floats to the surface. In this context, what remains of the fantasy no longer feels like a fantasy but the actual fragments of a childhood that was close to a state of constant psychological warfare. In therapy, these disconnected shards of buried longing, pain, terror, rage, and grief finally have a relational home, and no longer feel as if they are drifting aimlessly through the universe, unwitnessed and unseen. I am beginning to feel relationally bounded, coherent even as I open to the chaos of the life I actually lived. I am learning to receive company, warmth, compassion, and understanding amidst the wreckage of a catastrophe that has already happened. I am slowly learning to taste the beauty of life beyond the fantasy, a beauty that embraces and includes, rather than rescues, me from the pain.