Make coffee, eat coffee cake. “Open up a pomegranate,” I say to myself. Allow the bursts of blood-red juice and tartness splash my mind, cleanse it. Lingering ever present behind my thoughts is a life that I shall never know. It is beyond my dreams and reach.

Vacuum the rug, clean and refreshed. Another wave of complete shock and residual emotional wreckage of my very late discovery adoption yanks at my sleeve when I least expect it. I pull back and stop in my tracks. Please leave me alone. Let me be.

Make the bed, neat and tidy. All seems well, but for one large vein in my body that runs up and down, filled with hot and angry briny tears. The blood runs into my reasoned other veins, poisoning my fresh and cool blood. Brackish water, salty and fresh, seeps into my ocean of peace and integration

I look at the moon for comfort and tell it that I am doing my best. As it waxes and wanes each month, so do I. Ups and downs pull me to their polar opposites. Look here, stop looking, try harder, give it up. It is never ending for this late discovery adoptee.

This new version of me must stay here in the present moment alone and confused, but what about the old me, the one who thought she was defective and not lovable to her mother? 

A voice in my head answers:

My early life and my present life have to find a way to truly settle and integrate the adoption information.

While on a walk the other day, I told my story to a woman who questioned my past and family story. “Oh wow,” she said, “You didn’t know until you were almost 30 years old?” 

Yeah, oh wow. My thought exactly.

Recently I was gifted a bottle of Oban Distillers Edition Scotch Whisky, one of my favorite scotches, and if I were able to drink like the Scot that I turned out to be, I would drown my sorrows wishing they would stay submerged under the scent of caked peat, but they will not. They only linger inside my body taking hold, drowning me from the inside out. I resist. I gasp for air and keep moving. It has been too long now since I found out and began to live in survival mode layered with an unrevealed-until-now grief. They adopted me. I am adopted. They adopted me. I am adopted. I repeat this over and over to allow it to sink into my veins and body

Candles lit as I attempt to soothe my soul by listening to the haunting words written long ago by the poet Rumi “In the existence of your love, I have become nonexistent…” 

I too feel haunted and nonexistent. 

Up fly the angels and down fall the sorrows. My angels must get tired of looking down on me. I must be a handful, I think as I gaze upwards and say aloud, “I am sorry to be so much trouble. I am trying so damn hard, but I am just so damn human.”