Triad. Triangle. Trinity. Three points, connected by three lines. Three angles. A mother, another mother, and a baby. This is how we define adoption. This is how we lose sight of the reality of it.
I don't mean to diminish the importance of motherhood, or the damage that the cycle of infertility, shame, and loss that creates an adoption scenario inflicts on the three main protagonists. It's not simple, or easy. But to talk about a triad is to mitigate damages that actually stretch much further, and pierce much deeper, than the triad language suggests.
I didn't just lose my parents. I lost brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins. But I didn't just lose them. So did my son. So did my husband. And so did my grandchildren.
And I am reunited. I am no longer just a truncheon. I know which tree I was cut from. There are millions of adoptees who don't know, who may never know, and their children - and so on. L'dor v'dor. From generation to generation. And as Malthus taught us, reproduction is geometric.
Yes, there is a triad at the epicenter. And I'm sure the force diminishes as distance increases. I will feel this more than my son does, and he will feel it more than his children do.
I love my brothers and sister, and I mourn what I lost with them most of all. We cannot regain what we have lost. There is only a forward motion, a linear progression, and we fumble along as best we can.
If we saw the entire family tree rather than three sticks pasted together to form a triangle - if we viewed adoption holistically - if we thought of a family tree as a living, breathing entity rather than a metaphor...would it still be legal and moral to take a chainsaw to it?
Somehow, I think not.
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