Like a band of gypsies they go down the highway...

T-minus 13 days until live reunion. I've scheduled my time off at work. I've rented a car. I've made reservations for my brother's flight.

Two weeks from now, I will no longer be an only child. I will be in a room with both my brothers, and my grandmother, and the entire extended family - with the sole exception of my father, who is the compass point of the entire meeting but missing. He will be far away, dealing with his life, which is sinking faster than a lead cannonball. I forgive him, though, because I am a misogynist and he is broken, and his flight from reality has very little to do with me.

I'm beginning to feel something that might be guilt as regards her.  I know that she will be a short fifteen minute drive from where we are going. I know where she lives, what she looks like, who she's married to, what she does in her spare time, and something of her relationship with her remaining child. The thing is, though, that she doesn't know I know. She doesn't know that I'm meeting my brother there, who she also gave away. She doesn't know that she's a grandmother, or that her grandson will go the places she went when she carried us in the space beneath her lungs. She knows nothing except that she had children - a lot of children - and abandoned them.

I did romanticize her. I read reunion stories of mothers who waited for thirty, or forty, or fifty years for their lost child to come back. I read about how they ached. But to paraphrase Lady Bracknell, "To lose one [child], Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose [a whole frigging lot of them] looks like carelessness." I think I could process this better if I were one of several children of varying ages who were removed from her care after she'd done something - but we weren't abused, or turned over to foster care, or kept past the one-week Healthy White Baby sell-by date. We were individually packaged for Domestic Infant Adoption, and only to be sold separately.

Rambling, rambling. But should I contact her, or no? Is this guilt, or am I looking for an excuse to break down a few barriers when I know I'm angry with her, and not able to give selflessly?

She should know all about giving, right? She's the original professional.