“I’ll bet you made that appointment with your therapist right after I left and felt like you could cancel it after I got back,” my partner Margie challenged after returning from a recent trip.  I used to beg my ex husband in our early years together not to travel; but I didn’t want to go with him.  Once pointed out to me (okay, more than once), I could own a clear pattern of behavior: you leave, I get anxious; we leave together, I get anxious; I leave alone, I get anxious; you threaten to leave for good, I go ballistic.

The researcher and therapist in Margie compelled her to google search separation anxiety/abandonment issues.  You can guess the word that began appearing with these search terms: adoptee.  The next day at work she sent me this article, which launched a reading marathon. Separation anxiety is but one of a constellation of ‘traits’ that are common among adoptees and others who are separated from birth mother (separation anxiety and the many means of numbing it).  And then there’s plain old garden variety anxiety, also common.

It is the mother’s role to prevent the occurrence of traumatic events that might hinder normal psychological development.  Inadvertently the birth mother may set the stage for her child’s future inability to integrate with success events related to separation and loss.  And since few adoptive parents know their baby is experiencing loss, they can’t be expected to minister to it.

It’s a good thing I’m a fan of paradox.   For the other side of the coin which commonly manifests in adoptees relates to the development of a premature ego survival mechanism, stemming from the adopted child’s experience that the caregiver may disappear at any time.  As they can’t count on anyone, self-sufficiency is a must.  Paradoxically, I am nothing if not-self sufficient!

A little over fifty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus.  Not long afterward the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation on interstate trains and buses.  A half century ago there were only solitary voices suggesting there was something special that transpired between a mother and her baby that cannot be learned or acquired by even the best of substitute mothers.

Why here, why now?  Certainly not to place blame on biological or adoptive parents.  One week ago I was none the wiser about the roots of my “quirks”, a characterization I borrow from an “incubator baby” I chatted with while getting a hair cut yesterday.  This is an odyssey of self discovery fueled by a sense that with some openness and education, we can do better than we did fifty years ago.