Cheers to 35 Years

My birth mother posted a photo with a friend – sharing a drink – captioned “Cheers to 35 years ✨✨✨”

The photo was posted the day before my 35th birthday.

I am spiraling.

Is it about me? It has to be, right? Too much coincidence.

Is it not about me? In that unlikely scenario, I certainly commend the fact that you are able to celebrate something at the same time as my 35th birthday. Cheers to you and your ability to push this aside – must be nice.

But I am going with the too much coincidence route and assuming it was about me.

So what exactly is there to cheers? What are you celebrating? The idea of me? That you are strong for moving through this? That 35 years have passed since that horrific day? Is it possible that this day means something totally different to you than it does to me? How is there not some sort of connection or alignment between our feelings on this milestone?

This insanely complex day (at least for me) that is my birthday – the day that you gave birth to a baby in preparation to turn her over to the system within 48 hours. How do you cheers to ANYTHING on that day? And moreso, how do you post it on a social media platform knowing that we are connected and that there is extremely high likelihood that I will see it?

And there’s a part of me that feels selfish for feeling this way – she can post what she wants to post, she’s living her life and sharing it. But I’m still more affected than I’ve ever been by a post.

This has so much more to do with our history than this moment.

My adoption is closed - I was adopted at 4 days old. I found paperwork with my birth mother’s name and some basic information during my adoptive parents’ divorce when I was twelve years old. After some light searching for a few years, I found her when MySpace became mainstream at around fifteen. Being the very lost and rebellious fifteen year old I was, I reached out immediately – no preparation, no conversation with my adoptive parents, just a MySpace message to her and the first person in her Top 8 because why not? That’s a story for another day.

Long story short, we messaged back and forth a bit, spoke on the phone and I ultimately told my adoptive father that I had found her, not because he and I have any real relationship but because I was deathly afraid to tell my adoptive mother. The lovely human that he is decided surprise everyone – including me, my adoptive mother (who I will refer to as “mom” from here) and anyone else in our lives – by flying her in, booking a hotel for a few days and pulling up to my mom’s house with her in the passenger’s seat of his mid-life crises sports car with the top down. He called me to come outside and there she was outside the house, my mom in the kitchen and me looking out the front door completely dumbfounded.

We ended up spending a very awkward couple of days together and saw each other once, maybe twice, across the next five to seven years. Since then, we had texted on holidays and birthdays for a few years but that ended. When I was pregnant with my first son, I wrote a letter offering for her to be a part of our family in whatever way she would like. But ultimately, we have no relationship today other than the connection on social media outlets. We don’t like or comment, just exist in each other’s universes.

She is not very active on social media at all – I’m talking maybe one or two posts a year. But this story celebrating 35 years the day before my 35th birthday made the cut.

So here I am sitting in a spiral of questions.

Is she conflicted and honoring her strength? Is she happy to be free of the burden for 35 years?

Is she totally over me? Does she still think about me the way I think about her more often than I like to admit?

Another day, another layer unlocked.