Well, it was a lot of things

skeleton intact

Oof. And phew. And wow.

So, the good—I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out, I didn’t experience too much physical disorientation.

That exoskeleton served me well. I was able to hold myself together—to be held together—well enough to hold other things that mattered. Like the connection my kids had with their cousins, all the playfulness that comes with four teenagers. I wasn’t consumed by my own barely-holding-on.

Maybe, as my beloved KH just said to me, my endoskeleton is also strong. I’m feeling more and more that this is possible.

As those close to me know, so much of my confusion and neediness is, to put it bluntly, the result of how my mom trained me to feel. (Or not.) (I could—and should—write a thousand words about that two word sentence.)

It is nearly intolerable to be near the person who made the decision about how I was created yet gives me no room to have any feelings about any of this.

I have so much to say about this—as my wisest MC and LB know, the biggest and most obvious and hardest-to-reckon-with thing here has to do with my mom.

My feelings about my dad are simpler and our relationship has never been very complicated. I also sympathize with him for a myriad of reasons, because of my own fertility challenges and because of how our family was arranged—beyond the physical circumstances of how the children were created.

Writing about this part is hard. It’s where sharing publicly, if anonymously, gets tricky and feels scary. I am thinking about doing some subscriber-only posts (free, still) so I can have some control over who reads them—any new adds would have to make it through my do-not-fly list.

I don’t think anyone in the family-I-grew-up-with (or my donor family) would guess I’m writing about my life or their part in it or would stumble across this Substack. But it would give me a greater sense of freedom to have another layer of privacy. And being truthful about this feels really important right now. I’m coming up on a year of finding out and I hope to move toward feeling more ownership of this experience.

If/when I do this, I’ll post information on how to subscribe.

And the donor still hasn’t written back. I am trying to be okay with this. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he—quite reasonably—wants his part in my creation to remain what it was intended to be.

The emails where it seems like there is more there, that he wants more and that I will meet him—I can’t stand the idea that those weren’t real or that he never meant what I thought at times he did. Yeah, the flashbacks to pre-married-life. Ugh. The uncertainty. As MC quite reasonably said—do I really want my sense of myself to be dependent on him, or anyone? No, I don’t. Of course not. But I want to meet him so badly. My brother, too.

Someone asked if this longing was related to my changed relationship with my mom. I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that. I know I feel extra vulnerable when I feel rejected by them, as I wrote in my last post. I hope to untangle these feelings from each other, if possible. Or maybe I need to accept that it’s impossible to separate connections within a family, especially one that gets ever more complex.