...reclamation declaration...

Well, here we are...at the actual eleventh hour...
Tomorrow is my birthday.
And today has been...challenging.

Birthdays as an adoptee are...weird.

No other word will do.

It's part "Hey, let's annually remind you of the day your very existence was someone else's biggest problem or dirty little secret."
With a sprinkling of "Happy reminder of how your own mother didn't want you."
Mixed with a rehashing of the very trauma of adoption and being reared by people who, in order to get the happy-ever-after,2.5 kids-and-a-white-picket-fence that they think they are owed by life, contractually purchased a human being and then proceeded to erase its very identity in order to imprint themselves onto as empty a vessel as possible.

Birthdays as an adoptee are weird.

They aren't the invocation of oft rekindled memory...of how a family grew...of miraculous first breath...first coo...first cry.
They aren't founded on a mutual memory at all.
They are...in fact...the anniversary of 'what came before'.
What came before the bond was forever broken.
What came before the spirit was forever wounded.
What came before the child was forever traumatized.

Birthdays...my birthdays...

They are the mocking calendar notation that reminds me of how inconvenient and undesirable I have always been.
They are the remembrance of abandonment and the ever-present fear of being rejected.

Birthdays wake up the voice I've always known...that lives down deep inside and never misses an opportunity to tell me I am nothing but someone else's discarded trash.

Birthdays are rife with expectations of others.

The expected cheer.

The reminiscing.

The ghastly simpering over the false narrative of an existence that was artificially constructed on the ashes of who one was at birth.

Birthdays are supposed to be...happy. 

But what of those of us for whom a birthday is triggering?

What of us?

What should be done about those of us who inwardly cringe at the greetings or gifts?

I know the answer.

I've lived it all these years.

We're to tamp it all down and plaster smiles on our faces for the comfort of others.

We're to ooh and ah appropriately.

We're to fill our empty shells with the personification of a rooted, whole, fully realized child-come-adult and pretend that the family stories are ours to claim.

I'm supposed to feign happiness.

Fake it till I make it.

I'm not supposed to think of her.

That...creature...

That...problem...

I'm not supposed to pull on the thread of my very being that leads back to my maker.

I'm not supposed to acknowledge that there was ever a 'before'.

I'm supposed to only begin when I became theirs.

But here's this date...on the calendar.

A date that came from 'before'.

A date that holds...depth...weight...a figurative black hole of substantial 'before'.

A date that holds my very dna...my very construct.

A date that belongs:

 to the person 'before'...not to me, but to her...and to it.

To it.

The shame of my existence.

The shame of my conception.

The shame of reality.

To it.

She who shall not be named.

She who the meeting of, nearly broke me.

She who the manipulation by, did break me.

To it.

The dumpster fire.

Birthdays as an adoptee are weird.

~~~

So I'm not having any more of them

~~~

Tomorrow, I'm turning one.  

Tomorrow, I'm celebrating my first birthday.

Because...

I created myself.

I gave life to who I am and to what I have built.

I'm turning one because this is my year to heal.

This is me healing.

Choosing to start from where I start.

Choosing to claim myself.

Choosing to celebrate the person I reared myself into becoming.

Choosing to reclaim this date.

Choosing to dig deep and plant my roots...the ones I had to slice deep in order to propagate.

Tomorrow, I'm celebrating...for the first time.

It's my first.

My first to wake with anticipation.

My first to genuinely delight in the notifications and messages and calls.

My first to make a real wish and believe it can come true as I blow out the candle.

It's my first.

And it's moments away...a tick tock of the clock as the midnight hour chimes...

My first birthday.

I'm happy.