I’m about halfway through the letter. I’ll finish it and send it off tomorrow.
Cell phone has been ringing a lot today with caller ID blocked. I’m assuming it’s the brothers trying to reach me. Fuck them. They already told me I was dead to them, so I’m dead.
Actually, your first sentence is wrong: you have much to lose by continuing the cycle of anger and harsh words.
I do sympathize with your position, but I think you are hurting yourself far more than you ever could hurt them–and you seem to be intent on taking actions that will prevent any future rconciliation.
I’m sorry.
I know, I know, I know … but still, I think there’s no hope for reconciliation now. I asked “have you given yo on me … yes or no?” No reply, even to fresh e-mail accounts on different domains. Nothing back.
There’s no change of reconciliation. I need to rest. I have to do this.
Elmwood, I don’t blame you at all. She evidently wanted you to be part of her Very Special Made For TV Long Lost Reunion that didn’t actually affect her future life or give her any undue obligations or make her look bad. She felt decades of guilt for the baby she threw away and came crawling back looking for Warm Fuzzies and Good Mommy Points—provided you kept your mouth shut and stayed in the closet with the other skeletons.
If you need to do this to get shut of them, and since it seems you’ve tried other alternatives, well, do it. I don’t know if it would be my solution—I’d probably try to write it into a novel or a song or something—but you do what you feel you must. Short of beheading them all with a sharpened Burger King baguette, that is.
Elmwood, I’ve been following this thread since the beginning, because I really hoped things would get better for you. I didn’t post anything because tomndebb said everything I would have wanted to.
Your birth mother did a horrible, shitty thing. You’re angry and hurt, just like most peole would be in your situation. How is doing a shitty thing in return going to help you? Will you being the most hated man in Syracuse make you feel better about your birth mother not wanting to tell your birth sister about you?
This is one of the saddest threads I’ve ever read on this board. 
Can I borrow that line? Seriously … it describes exactly how I imagine things to be on her end.
As for burning bridges at the cost of a possible reconciliation … no, it’s too far gone. The brothers already disowned me, my sister doesn’t care, and my birth mother is nowhere to be seen. I’d rather be done and over with it than having this nagging feeling the rest of my life that there could possibly be just a little glimmer of hope for a reconciliation a couple of years away. However, I don’t want to remain the family secret, a skeleton in the closet tucked away forever, an invisible line on the family tree. I can’t let that happen.
Am I too late?
Hi, Elmwood. I, too, have been following this thread. I implore you not to send your email. One thing that stands out in this thread is your impatience. You seem crystal clear about the pain you are feeling (and I am so sorry for your pain) but you are not seeing the other sides. They are in pain, too.
By only working with your timeframe, you’re discounting that your bio-family may have a different timeframe than yours. You just contacted your bio-sister in November. Maybe she needs six months to chew on things. Maybe she needs a year. Maybe she needs two years. By wreaking havoc on the family, the only thing you are doing is nailing an otherwise [cracked] open door shut.
I don’t see how anyone reading this thread could not want to slap your bio-family upside the head and give you a hug. Still, what you are doing is completely counter-productive to your cause. Your sentiments are raw and scream of someone who needs to look at this with a different perspective. You are so caught up in venting years of frustration and anger that I truly believe you are unable to see, or care about, anyone’s pain but your own. That’s not a good reason to contact the whole family.
I urge you to sit back and think about this for a year. If you still want to contact everyone, do so, but don’t do it for revenge. That’s just not right.
:::bump::::
**Elmwood ** How are you feeling now? Any more phone calls or contact with the birth family?
As of about two months ago, they’re dead to me.
I contacted my bio-sister. Birth mom gets angry, and deciides to temporarily cut off contact. Relayed through my adoptive/real mom, I told the birth family that I wanted either a relationship with the entire family, my brothers and sister included, where my existence is acknowledged and not seen as an item or shame, or nothing; that they would be dead to me in the Orthodox Jewish sense. (I’m not Jewish, but it’s a big part of my heritage, both in my adoptive and biological families.) I didn’t want to be left hanging; I wanted to know exactly where I stood with bio-mom.
Bio-mom was wishy-washy, so I decided to cut off ontact permanently. That meant no contact whatsoever. If she showed up at my doorstep years later asking for forgiveness, my door would slam in her face. If one of my brothers needed a kidney … too bad, it’s the dialysis machine for you, and I’d sooner die than depend on them for a transplant. If my sister called to let me know about a death in the family … well, it’s not my family, so I don’t give a shit. The whole lot of them can go to hell, for the pain that they put me through.
(((elmwood)))
This thread made me cry. I’m sorry you went through what you did.
Sorry I didn’t see this earlier, elmwood. Of course you may use it, for whatever use there is left to find in your awful situation. I regret that won’t fit on a bumper sticker. I only hope you can be shut of them and not feel the need to use it.
I wish things had worked out better.
…but you’ve brought this all upon yourself. Everyone else has coddled you and told you how sorry and sad your situation is. As I see it, you’ve tried to force yourself completely upon strangers who were trying to see if you could work into their lives. Instead of trusting that your birth mom might have had a good reason for limiting your contact with your sister, you DEMANDED that you be let in right now. You pushed and screamed until they wanted nothing to do with you.
Don’t you think your birth mom might know her daughter a little better than you do? Don’t you think that if you became a part of your mom’s life, you would have eventually have been in your sister’s life? Why the push to get in right now?
I speak as an adopted child who met his birth mom at 35. It’s been fantastic because I allowed my mom to integrate me into her family at her pace. I met my uncles and cousins in due time. Everything was cool, I respected that they were a family who didn’t know me, it took time to work me into the established framework of their lives.
You talk about how wonderful your mom and dad are, why are you looking so hard for an alternative?
I think you’ve screwed the pooch royally here. My best advice would be for you to send emails to your mom, your brothers, yours sister and anyone else involved apologising profusely for your abonimable behavior. Let them accept you into their lives at their pace. You could find a wonderful second family, but based upon your posts here so far, I doubt you will.
We all need an ego. When it runs away from common sense, you get situations like yours. You have fucked up royaly. I hope you can recover, it could be the best thing that’s ever happened to you, if you can just get over yourself.
Let your ego go, and allow your birth family to accept you on their own terms. Please.
Otherwise you’re just another needy asshole.
Weirddave: As I see it, you’ve tried to force yourself completely upon strangers who were trying to see if you could work into their lives.
I don’t see it. While I don’t agree with elmwood’s choice about how to handle the situation, mostly because I agree with tom that it will just make him suffer more in the long run, it really doesn’t seem to me as though he “brought it all upon himself”. ISTM that his birth mother wasn’t so much “trying to integrate him into the family at her own pace” as warning him that the formerly-promised integration was just not going to happen, sorry 'bout that. Consider the quote elmwood gave from her email:
That doesn’t sound to me like a woman trying to integrate a long-lost family member “at her own pace”. That sounds like a woman trying to climb back up onto the diving board when she’s halfway to the water. I can well understand how elmwood felt betrayed and frustrated by this “sorry, I thought it might be different but it can’t” brushoff.
People do make mistakes, and have failures, and try to bite off more than they can chew, and all that, and I think it’s probably less painful in the long run just to accept that than to take the betrayal and frustration out on them. But I don’t see how you can think that elmwood’s birth mom didn’t let him down on this one. She’s not “working him into the framework of their lives”, she’s scurrying for the exit because she can’t handle the consequences of what she set out to do.
Sometimes that happens and you just have to accept it. But IMHO elmwood needn’t blame himself for it. Yes, his behavior gave his birth relatives an excuse to justify abandoning their efforts at reunifying their family, but looks to me as though they had already decided to abandon those efforts well before elmwood kicked up his shitstorm.
I went through something similar with my biological father, and didn’t WANT to be integrated into his life. I knew he was merely curious, and politely declined to meet, although I did meet my half-brothers, once, and with no intention of being their new best friend. I mention this because I want it to be clear I have some idea of what elmwood is going through before I say this.
If elmwood is nearly 40, I don’t quite understand the neediness and demands he’s placed on his adoptive family, but I can’t say I’m surprised at the inevitable outcome: total separation, with both sides hurt and fuming. elmwood, in all candor I think you need counseling of some kind, both for your anger and for your desparate feeling that you’ll be all alone in the world. It seems there are deeply rooted abandonment issues that are spoiling your adult relationships, and may have something to do with your conviction (expressed in the OP) that you will never be married. I don’t mean to be a jerk, it’s just my impression after reading this thread.
Weirddave, I think you’re being a little harsh.
Elmwood, I can totally understand being worried about having no family left when your parents die. I think that’s a legitimate concern.
I also think your birth mother sounds rather immature and she handled this really badly. It would be one thing to give an actual reason for not telling her daughter, or even to say, “There is a reason I can’t tell her that’s intensely private, and I can’t share it with you,” or something. Instead, she gave the impression of wanting you in her family, then started using lame, insulting avoidance techniques instead of addressing whatever the real issue was. I particularly think giving the impression that she considers her child a shameful secret, not a human being, was terrible.
IMHO, there’s no inherent problem with being angry, or with cutting off contact. Anger is a perfectly legitimate emotion, and if it motivates you to end a relationship that is harmful, all the better. However, if you nurse this anger, if this fiasco continues to gnaw at you, then you might indeed want to get some counseling. It’s perfectly normal to need some guidance through such a rocky time.
I hope you can build your own network of people to support you, even after your parents are no longer around. Friends, a spouse, and children, whether biological or adopted (and I believe unmarried folk can adopt older children) are your opportunity to build a family of your own.
I wish you good luck.
After reading thorugh this I have to agree with Weirddave. Elmowwod you came on too strong. You have mentioned that you have no close family except for your adoptive parents and also no marriage prospects. These staements set off alarms in my mind. You came off as being very needy, before you even established a realtionship with your mother and siblings. This may also be affecting your mariage prospects too.
I imagine this has been pure hell for you and the emotions you are feeling and have gone through have blinded you to what your birth mother and siblings may be feeling too. Relationships take a long time to build and even though you say this one is over please reconsider and try to reconcile.
A short note asking for forgiveness for your previous emails is in order. Do not expect replies, do not force acceptance, just let them know you are sorry and are open to any type of relationship that they may care to develop. It may be simply exchanging Christams and birthday cards. You have not known these people for 40 years and you can’t make up that amount of time in six months.
You can not force people into a realtionship, just like you can not make someone love you.
I don’t think even WD has said there’s a problem with being angry or cutting off contact. Elmwood can scream and rant and cry and post on this board all he likes. He can send a letter saying “I understand this is difficult for you; please contact me when you feel ready to include me in the entire family.” But there is a line between “I’m terribly angry and need to express it” and “I’m terribly angry and now I’m going to MAKE EVERYONE SUFFER.” He has quite clearly stated that his recent motivations are to make the entire family- people who had absolutely no involvement in his biomom’s behavior- hurt as much as he does. That is the action of a child, not an adult. Look at the posts at the beginning of this page, where people were saying that the letter was a great idea, but DON’T send it. Thus he deals with his anger, but doesn’t deal with it in a way that is going to cause everything to spontaneously combust.
Biomom may have had all the right intentions in the beginning. We don’t know one way or the other. Who’s to say why she changed her mind? Could be that once faced with the actual meeting and building of a relationship, she realised she wasn’t as ready as she thought. Could be that her sons initially responded poorly to her announcement, and she was terrified about how her daughter would respond. Could be that Elmwood’s increasing demands (obviously he’d been pressuring her to tell his sister, since she gave multiple excuses) scared her. This is her flesh-and-blood child, but she DOESN’T KNOW HIM. How can she know that his motivations are simply to alleviate his fears and pain of rejection? She may think he’s some psycho with poor impulse control. Which turned into a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don’t understand all the posters who are encouraging Elmwood to express his feelings, telling him it’s okay to feel the way he does, but are condemning the biomom for the same thing. Isn’t she a human being too? Isn’t she allowed to have her own feelings, fears, anxieties? Isn’t she allowed to make mistakes? She did the right thing 40 years ago… she gave up her child to a (according to Elmwood himself) better life. And although he is her child, that act has turned the two of them into strangers, with all the requirements that relationship implies. She, in all actuality, OWES HIM NOTHING. Yes, she chose to be on the reunification list, but she has the right, as a human being with all the fucked up shit that that entails, to change her mind. It sucks, but it doesn’t justify Elmwood’s behavior.
I can’t help thinking if we were talking about a biomom whose behaved this way after their child refused her contact with his adoptive family, this would be an entirely different conversation.
I have to agree with Weirddave. I didn’t post anything during your original rant fest, because it really wouldn’t have been appropriate given the tenderness of the ongoing feelings at that time, but since we’re in “it’s over” mode. What the hell were you thinking by doing what you did? I’ve seen more emotional maturity in 5 year olds than you’ve demonstrated in this entire process.
You have a timid, conflicted, somewhat flakey bio-mom who’s trying to deal with re-integrating you into her life, and a group of bio-siblings who are apprehensively girding up to deal with your existence, and you spin off into some insane hysterical rage because bio-mom can’t deal with telling her delicate little princess just yet? At every turn in this process it been all about you, your feelings, your hurt, your issues. Re-integrating is a process and you tried to push it way, way faster than anyone in their right minds should have given the emotional lay of the land and your bio-mom’s emotional capabilities, and now this childish shitstorm has blown back in your face. Your bio-mom may be a weak, flakey, infuriating wuss, but your behavior has been abominable in this situation.
Her daughter is young and pregnant and facing her own difficult choice.
Perhaps she has sworn her mother to secracy, perhaps her brothers are, as yet unaware, perhaps she’s considering an abortion, perhaps her mother wants daqughter to make her own choice, knowing this one detail about her mom’s life just now, would only serve to make a difficult time more so. That would be intensely personal and hard to share with you, a relative stranger, yes?
I’m not saying this is the case, just that I can imagine a circumstance where a mother might well be justified in taking this stand.
Conversely, you certainly had the option to state that until you could be fully integrated into their entire family, you’d prefer to remain unconnected, as you need to feel free of being a secret anything.
I belive that may have been a more mature response than the path you chose. I do think you have some issues you should address before taking anymore steps.
Mostly I wish you peace, my friend.