sources of disconnection

I feel like my life has been a series of events that have imposed disconnection on me.

I was adopted soon after birth. (How long from birth? I don't know, I haven't gotten all the facts straight yet). Ripped away from my mother. I remember my adoptive mother telling me a story about the first night they had me, she came into the room with my crib and woke me up from my sleep because she was so excited. Apparently I cried and cried and would not stop crying for so long that she never did that again. I think back on that story and can't help but think that her fulfillment was at the expense of me being lost.

At the end of third grade, when I was 10, my house burned down. I was the one who found the fire in the garage and alerted my mother and sister to get out of the house. I remember going inside to tell my mother and we stayed inside for a few minutes while she called the fire department. Then we left and went to our neighbor's house. My mother's new Corvette was in the garage and blew up before the fire fighters got there. Most of the house was gone before they could even attempt to save it. I basically watched my house explode, then was taken by police car to my best friend's house where I slept over that night. I distinctly remember falling asleep in her bed and crying into her pillow, feeling totally completely terrified and disconnected from the life I lived in that house. It seemed like that life burned away and there was nothing left. I still feel like that. We were able to save some pictures and old movie film, and one of my favorite pictures from my childhood is one that is an enlarged picture of my mother, my sister and I set on a 70's wooden plaque. The wood is burned and the border of the picture is, too, but the image shows through the center. A few years ago my sister, my dad and I did a project together in which we bought an old film projector off of ebay and watched all the old semi-destroyed movies. I felt like it was a priceless gift to have footage from the inside of the house. Oh my god! I was able to relive what I was forced to only imagine in my mind's eye for so many years. That's what my room looked like--wow, remember the wierd elf cookie jar on the kitchen counter? Look at the wallpaper! I felt like I was going home. I still feel so attached to that house--its like another piece of my life that was taken away from me in which I had no control.

Then, when I was 20, my (adoptive) mother died. She had been sick for basically my whole life. Not like a little sick. SICK. Hospitalized over and over again, year after year. For the last several years of her life, while I was in middle and high school, she almost died several times, and there I was again, powerless over a horrible situation I could not control. Even though it was humanly impossible for her to stay alive at the end, I was stunned when she actually died. I spoke with her the night before; I called her from a payphone from my crazy life on the road with my crazy (first) husband and baby. I told her that my birth mother and I had made arrangements for her to come to the US for us to meet. Then the phone cut out and I actually didn't have any money to call her back. That was the last thing I said to her. She died in the middle of that night.

After my mother's funeral, my grandmother said to me, "Did you even love your mother?" As if losing my mother for the second time wasn't torturous enough.

Needless to say, my identity within (and without) my family is more than confusing.