A Stranger to My Daughter's

To me there has been no greater loss or sadness in my life than when I made the fateful decision to approve the adoption of my daughter's.  When you are young it is difficult to conceptualize the long term repercussions of your current decisions. You convince yourself you are doing the right thing and what is best for all.  But as you grow and mature the loss you feel grows ever wider.  The time between holding the laughing bubbling little girls in my arms has slipped through my fingers like so much sand in the wind.  They are teens now and although I knew them but yesterday it has been a span of years.  They do not know me, to them I am a stranger.

I have been a lucky father though, my daughter's found my wife and I quite randomly online and contacted us.  One has no desire and no question while the other is full of love and curiosity about us. The hole in our hearts is much smaller but not quite gone,  We have two daughter's and without the other that hole will forever remain.  But they are young and there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

Adoption had been such a positive and uplifting experience for so many.  While I am grateful that I was adopted and had the opportunity to grow up in a home wanting for nothing I could never shake the feeling there was something missing.  When I was much younger I had no real desire to know my family but as I aged I began to realize the missing piece of the puzzle was my biological family and I began to experience an insatiable longing to know them.  I pray one day my own daughter will feel the same.

In one conversation I had quite recently with the daughter who does want to know us she compared me to a stranger.  This upset me greatly but I did not let on that I was bothered.  I understood her feelings having experienced them myself at one point.  But her words got me thinking.  Am I just a stranger?  Or is there a deeper bond that transcends time and separation?  Can we truly ever have the relationship with one another that each of us desires?  It is a frightening thought.  While I have spent these many years with them never far from my thoughts in my mind they are still children, just little girls I once held in my arms.  Now they are young ladies with experiences that were never shared with us but some other parents.  Are they also strangers to me?  Is there a familial bond that will inevitably show itself?  Can we build a serious relationship without the constant reminder of what we lost?

I sometimes feel I am a fool to hope for these things, but I have to say it is hope that has sustained me these long years and motivated my writing.  In their absence I have made them the main characters in so many of my stories in an attempt to feel closer to them.  But is it the memory of what we had or the hope of things to come?