The Findlings is a novel, and not a memoir. It is, however, based on this real event: my meeting with my birth mother for the first time is thirty years. The characters and events are fictional. Any resemblance to real life is coincidental.
   I hope you'll read it, and it will add to your life! (It has a happy ending.)
   Pre-order HERE.  

1.  Adoptees are all different.

Obvious statement, right?

You get a hundred adoptees in a room together, and you’ll get a hundred different stories, with a hundred different reactions, a hundred different pains, a hundred different scars. They may share some qualities and wounds, but they are all still different.

For example, my biological brother and I were adopted together at ages 2 and 3. I was the obedient adoptee because I hated this whole thing of being given away. If I could prevent be abandoned, I would give it my all. My brother was not an obedient adoptee. Every day seemed like a new opportunity for him to dare our parents to give us away like our birth mother did.

Two kids. Same mother. Somewhat the same experience. Two very different responses
2.  All adoptees have a wound.

I’m going out on a limb here: every child taken from his mother (and father), either though abandonment, her death, or abduction, will bear a wound. That wound might a sub-dermal irritation that flares up on occasion. Or it could be a gaping tear that needs extensive treatment to heal.

Nature designed all of us to feel wounded at the loss of our mother, our father, and our whole genetic family. It’s not supposed to make us happy to lose our mothers and our family. Nature designed us to stay together.

Alas, the ideal is not always possible.

3.  All adoptees have different wounds.

One of the things that results in adoptees having such varying wounds is their reaction to what has happened. When a mother disappears, her child uses its limited thinking ability to decide what has happened. “She doesn’t love me.” “I’m unlovable.” “I don’t matter.” The list goes on and on.

It doesn’t matter if the child’s decision is true or not. The decision has been made, and it will be a factor in many of the child’s future decisions.

In a way, you could say the child is self-wounding himself. But that’s cruelly unfair. Children, by nature, have limited cognitive skills. They’re always misunderstanding the world. The younger the child, the more apparent this is.

Thus, the wound is a combination of the separation event and the helpless child’s initial decision(s), as well as many his ensuing decisions.

4.  Not all adoptees scar the same.

Now I’m getting to the meat of this post.

Wounds, by their nature, focus on healing. They scab up, new tissue grows, the scabs sloughs off, a scar often remains. Time heals all wounds. Sort of.

A psychological wound follows somewhat the same path. The owner of the wound tries to cope, develops new attitudes, makes new types of decisions, forms a scar over the original wound.  

But there’s all kinds of variables that impact and thicken this scarring over. Maybe the scab gets ripped off before healing can happen. Maybe there’s an infection that affects the child’s whole system. Maybe the wound felt like a bruise at first, but it kept being kicked over and over.

All sorts of life events affect and deepen the scars adoptees carry around. Innocuous things like the Cabbage Patch dolls of the 80s. Riveting events like the children the US Homeland Security Department is taking away from their parents.

5.  Not all pain can be felt.

Adoptees also carry around numb scars, wounds that cannot be felt.

But they can be felt, all right. It just takes an expert to get that feeling felt.

In retrospect, it was the healing of those painless wounds that brought change. How’d they get found? Through a therapist’s question. Because a body worker moved my arm in a new way. Once an intuitive told me something that cracked the thick wall of an experience I’d walled up and dammed away.

6.  There is no right way to heal.

That’s right. There’s no right way. There’s no pure path. No formula.

But there is a right way for you. There is some combination that will work best for you over the long haul. Maybe some therapy here, some journaling there, some body work, and then some therapy with a new professional or the same from before. Maybe some art therapy, or taking a retreat here and there, along with acting and role playing, as well as another kind of body work.  

So how do you get the right way for you?

Synchronicity.

7.  Synchronicity is the adoptee’s helping hand.

Adoptees can create their own synchronicity, in terms of healing. Synchronistic healing is healing that comes to you at the right time on your healing path. In other words, the adoptee simply wants to be healed, states it out loud or in writing, and then stands aside for what’s-next to appear.
 
I know it sounds wacky, but throughout my healing the times I created synchronicity were the times when I healed the easiest.

For example, in the late 80s, I found myself stuck on an issue because I couldn’t feel the pain. There was something I should have felt angry about; instead I felt nothing. To get past it, I wrote on a piece of paper, “I heal from this. I feel this thing I cannot feel.” I put the paper in a little box and let it do its mojo.

Within two weeks two different friends told me about going to a Jin Shin Jitsu practitioner, something I’d never even heard of. I took it as a sign and made an appointment. Long story short, the practitioner simply pressed her thumb into different places in my body and I’d start to cry, or I’d feel angry. Conversations with the practitioner enlightened me about the issue, and I was able to take that knowledge to my therapist and work toward healing.
Creating synchronicity is pretty easy.

Read another example of synchronicity: How I Found My Birth Father.

Within days, I walked into the teachers’ lounge and sat down at the table. Lying before me was an October 1988 edition of American Heritage magazine, which, to me looked like a high end Saturday Evening Post.

Bored, I opened the magazine scanned some pages featuring the portraits of artist Irving R. Wiles, a contemporary of John Singer Sargent. One particular portrait stood out to me, a painting of a young military officer in his whites.

Instead of stopping to read about the painting, I continued skimming through the magazine, noticing its id-west and east-coast focus.

Then I returned to the portrait of the young man.

Something about his eyes. And his ears. And his forehead. He looked oddly like my brother, with whom I’d been adopted. (Jim's picture is up on the header, sitting next to me. See the resemblance?)

Then I read the young man’s name.  

Lt. Col. William Roscoe Jepson.

Roscoe Jepson!

When I’d found my birth mother in ’81, she told me my father’s name was Roscoe Jepson.

Shivers roared through me.

I stole the magazine (I have to this day) and brought it to the copier room, where I ran off two copies. Copiers then aren’t what they are now.

I mailed a copy to my brother Jim in Santa Barbara and one to my sister Cecilia in Lubbock. (Cecilia is my sister I found when I found my birth mother. She is five years younger than I.)

In a couple of days, I was getting answering machine messages: “He looks just like you.” “He looks exactly like Jim.”
When school closed for the summer, I made the trek to Happy, Texas, the town without a frown, to confront my birth mother with the portrait.

Her response?

“Yes, that’s Roscoe.”

And so began a new chapter in my life. And new wounds needing to be healed.

I remember smiling at the thought that my original name almost rhymed with my sister's. Priscilla and Cecilia. And so continued my journey.

I would go on to find meet members of my birth mother's family. The feeling of no longer being alone, dropped from the sky, didn't really evaporate, but it eased significantly.

I cannot express how ground-rattling it was for me to discover that there really were others just like me. My gene code.

You see, I was a liberal person raised in a conservative home. To fend for myself, I hung out with other liberal people because we tended to value similar things.

When I found my birth family, I discovered a whole clan of liberal people. It was like I'd found the nest I'd fallen out of.

I would go on to find my birth father's family. I've only met my brothers, because they thought it best the rest of their family not know what a scamp their very-married dad had been by siring several children out of wedlock.

Alas. The secrets.

Unraveling the secrets is a necessary part of the journey.