Rejection Issues–Healing–Part I
Collage of photos gathered for my party 2014
Healing is a process. My healing has come in stages. As I go along, I’ll tell my story, in some detail, but not all. I believe I have received personal revelation from God Himself about myself before I was born.
Healing comes in different ways. My healing came first from God, then people. When in prayer some years ago, I believe God told me about what happened while in utero, so to speak. There are two kinds of people who are adopted: those who are affected by rejection, and those who aren’t. My brother wasn’t affected by adoption, and he had much more reason than I to be affected with APD/rejection syndrome.
To begin, our parents were married in 1942, and after the war, they tried to conceive, and had tests done. Mom told me once the doctor said, “If you two were married to any other people besides yourselves, you could probably conceive.” So they adopted a little baby boy through an agency. That was my brother.
Five years went by and they couldn’t get another child from the agency, though I know they tried. Meanwhile, my uncle was a general practitioner in northern Kansas. A young pregnant woman and her mother moved up from Texas. That’s how it was done back then. Young girls moved away for a while until after the baby was born, they got their figure back, then moved home. No one was the wiser. All sorts of excuses were made as to why they moved away in the first place. But they would go back to their life.
I was adopted privately, through an attorney. My uncle delivered me, and as a very talented amateur photographer, took this horrible picture of me. I looked like a scared rabbit. My eyes were wide and dark. My fists were clenched. I was kept in an incubator for days, because I was only five pounds eight ounces at birth. I was finally released from the hospital and went home with my parents at thirteen days. I’m not posting that picture on the Internet, but you can sort of see it in the middle of the collage of photos gathered for my sixtieth birthday party last year.
As a baby, I’ve told I was sick a lot, with all sorts of things. I cried all the time. My poor mother was once found putting dishes behind the couch because she so sleep-deprived. In those days, dads went to work. Moms stayed home. My dad didn’t really help because he needed his sleep in order to work. He was a watch repairman in a jewelry store. It’s close, intense work. Some day on this blog, I’ll tell my dad’s story, It’s quite compelling.
When I was praying a number of years ago about my rejection issues, once I learned I had them, I felt I got this revelation. That in the womb, I felt two rejections–the first was the rejection my birth mother felt from the father. The second was her decision to give me up. Those are adult issues. How can a developing child in the womb deal with such things? The answer is–I didn’t deal with them. How could I? But these two rejections in the womb, merging with many more from children I knew growing up, caused deep wounds and a condition I didn’t even know I had until I was forty-five years old.
from Bet She’an, Israel
That’s the first leg of my story. My first healing came from the love of God, first, when I accepted Him into my heart right before I was sixteen, then when I realized I had actually found someone to marry. Both his love and His love brought about a great measure of healing in me.
Counseling could have probably worked, but it wasn’t ever mentioned or talked about when I was growing up. My mother poured out her love on me and I’m thankful to her…so grateful for the fifty years I had her.
Donna L.H. Smith 