A Place in which I cannot return

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside of me might start healing
Out here it's like I'm someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself

The House That Built Me ~ Miranda Lambert

All of my life I have been searching for a place in which I cannot return. A yearning for the tender and lost places of my heart. Nothing about this "place" was tangible, but I swore if I could just reach out and grab a part of it, maybe just maybe it would reach back.

I thought reunion would fix that brokenness inside of me and I'd start healing. I thought maybe I would find myself.

I cannot get through this song ever without completely coming undone

Since I was a little girl I imagined what it would have felt like if my first family had not rejected me. I imagined what it would feel like to be a family and know who and where I came from. I've had forty years of making up the stories in my head because the truth was never intended to be mine. You might be thinking adoption has changed in the last forty years and with open adoption an adoptee never has to wonder where they belong. I will imagine there would still be that burning place in their heart that wonders " if only I could touch this place and feel it."
Now that I have been reunited with my biological family it is the most ineffable feeling to see family trees, family stories, and family photos without you in them. I look at the photos of my first family and notice every detail. My siblings living the life I never had a chance to live with them. None of the evidence presented to me paints a picture of they needed to give me s "better life." I didn't escape poverty, abuse or drug addicted parents. They were every bit a normal, middle-upper class, Christian family.

Looking at this photo of my mother holding her son's daughter I find a lump in my throat and a swelling in my heart. She never got to hold my babies this way. My children will never have the same relationship as this sweet child has with her Mimi. 

I will never know what it could have been....should have been.
We'll never have shared memories of my childhood with my mother.
We'll never NOT know the tragedy of it all. All that was lost.
We can't go back "home".
I'll always be homesick for a place I've never been.

If I could just come in I swear I'll leave
wont take nothing but a memory
from the house that {didn't} build me. ~ The House That built Me