trying on family = good

Today I was talking to an adopted person and she mentioned that meeting another adult adoptee is like meeting someone from the same town you are from. I totally get it. There's an underlying feeling of familiarity that is based not in personality, nor currently shared interests, but in root circumstance that has lifelong implications.

I see my work in understanding and working through the whole is-ness of being adopted as an essential process in my parenting to my own children. I do feel that my attempts at awareness are for my kids' benefit.

I'm working on actively connecting with people in my new community, and although it doesn't exactly come naturally, it is flowing in some sense. Every once in a while I experience the feeling of being integral to the environment and needed, and that feels good. I suspect that I feel flashes of disloyalty to my old life, my old home upstate that streak through me and make it difficult to just be here and really be myself. The necessity of doing life here with kids forces me, though. I feel like I need to do it for them. I stepped outside my front door tonight and saw the moon--it is so amazing! Its cut in half and has a rainbowy ring of light around it. My first thought was that although it looked so cool, it would be such a different experience seeing it upstate. The air is crisper, clearer, the land is much more open up there and the stars SHINE at night.
But its good here. I'm making this house into our home, and the active doing that is surprisingly making me feel way more grounded.
As thanksgiving approaches, I'm trying to conceptualize family as 'good' and nourishing. I'm trying to reconfigure some of those neural pathways that were burned deeply around family being dangerous and imminently painful. I hope to pass on family=good to my kids. I desperately hope I do.