I lead a blessed life. My family is healthy. We have a roof over our heads, and we are free from hunger. Having known times with my adoptive family when this was not the case, I appreciate everything. I am content and feel pretty darn accomplished…until I call my first mother.
Twenty-five years after the reunion, conversations with her turn me back into the given away infant in the photo I keep on my desk to remind myself how far I’ve come. 
I know this is my wound (Primal, I guess), and an issue I really should have worked through by now. I do use the brilliant coping exercises in the book Adoption Healing by Joe Soll, which gave me the background chant I use when first mother contact spirals me into an infantile turmoil.
“It’s not happening now. She is not leaving me. That was a long time ago.”
I can hear readers of this blog (especially those who are still in search) clucking their tongues at my daring to deflate the bliss of knowing who bore me. I get it. I am sharing this as a warning, a guidepost to help you understand the feelings of woe that often surface long after the honeymoon of reunion ends. (To be fair I must mention that there is nothing she can say or do to change this. She is kind to me, and giving.)
Despite the effectiveness of Joe Sol’s Adoption Healing exercises, I still wallow after our conversations in a strange limbo of being an alien in her made-up world. I belong to my first mother by blood, but unlike her other children (the kept ones) I cannot experience the true/unconditional state of her motherhood. Unconditional love is a feeling I understand and define by my adopted mother.
If you ask me what makes conversations with my first mother so debilitating, I would say it is that she reacts to the kept siblings in a manner consistent with shared experience. While I have shared two adult decades with my first mother, the essential bond of being present in my formative years is missing.
We have all witnessed the ribbing, joking and comfortable behavior of family units. Most have a relaxed, informal way of acting around each other. This family interplay is a representation of years spent living together, agreeing, disagreeing, and seeing the world through shared experience. They are a unit.
As an adoptee, I can never be an ordinary member of my first family. No matter what is said or shared, she raised my siblings. She acts differently around me, less comfortable, more formal, guarded. For years, I thought I imagined her awkwardness when we visited, and the opening blossom of her real self with my half-siblings. Only a close family friend’s comment assured my that it was the truth when he said, “she acts so differently around you.”
I am a grown ass woman and a long-reunited adoptee. Still, the ripples of my relinquishment tear at my heart in ways I was sure reunion would settle. Bonds stolen at the moment of separation can be yearned for, but never fully repaired. I am still happy that I searched, but hate the awful truths that adoption has cast on my life.
Blessings for reunion and healing,
V.L.
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V.L. Brunskill 
Very well said. The trauma is in every cell of our body and will never be forgotten. Joe’s book and advice is what gets me through as well.
His book gave me the only tool I’ve ever found useful. It seems as I get older the issues multiply. Of course, I am writing a memoir on my abusive adoptive father who turned out to be transgender. So some of the issues I am experiencing come from feeling abandoned into abuse. Thanks so much for the comment and for reading.
I’m a year and a half in reunion. Birthmom passed last December, never met her until she was “out of it” at hospice. I have three half siblings. I don’t know them. Everyone is so cordial, With my husband and kids, we banter back and forth, and are smart alecs. I still talk to siblings politely and am afraid to “tease” and act normal. I haven’t been around them long enough and don’t know how to act. Anxiety is always high. I get what you’re saying!
Thanks for the comment Mary. It is the oddest of circumstances. One that non-adoptees can not fathom.