I think the short answer to that question is yes. But, this is me, so of course there is a long answer. I don't know where I would be without long answers, probably the horoscope section of the Bucksaver.
I've been homesick before, for places, for people. I've lived in a number of different places over the course of my adult life; three different states and a total of five distinct areas. Where I am now is by far the place I like the least. Even before the reunion with my natural family happened I wanted to leave this place. However, it wasn't a constant feeling, and before the reunion I had started to warm, ever so slightly, to the idea of staying here long term. Primarily that was because I finally had a job I enjoyed almost as much as I enjoyed law enforcement when I was younger. I wasn't sure it was something I wanted to do (stay here), but I was at least willing to consider it.
Then November 30th came and along with it the phone call that changed everything. This feeling started that day, though it was small and unfocused. I didn't yet have a location or any direct contact with anyone. I didn't even have a letter, just some rough information passed along through a third party, but even so it started to form then. As time passed and relationships began to form it got stronger. I learned the place, and it was a place I had some passing knowledge of. A place not so far from where I spent a decade of my life. The feeling got stronger as each day passed.
The feeling was easy enough to identify, I'd felt it before. It was (and is, it is with me constantly) homesickness. I have never had a home with my mom and my siblings but I miss it as keenly as if I had and have since been forced to leave it. There is a constant churning feeling in my stomach, the feeling that something is "wrong". My emotions are always close to the surface, I get angry easily and at things that never would have made me angry in the past. Sadness comes just as easily and often. I expected this feeling to have subsided by now, six months into the reunion, but it has only gotten worse. Evey day that churning in my stomach gets a little stronger, every day I find it a little harder to think about anything else. Every spare moment I have I spend thinking about my newfound family. Then I feel that pull in the pit of my stomach again, the cycle repeats.
I don't know that I have the words to adequately explain this. I feel like I had the weight of 43 years of missed birthdays, holidays, births, deaths, emergencies, and all life's other events are stacked up on my stomach. Every day I spend living 1000 miles away the weight of another day is added to the pile on my stomach. How long it will take that weight to crush me is anyone's guess.
There was a time when I was younger that I would have simply packed all my worldly possessions into my car and, in the wold of one of my favorite authors, "lit out for the territories". I'd have done it months ago in fact. However, being older if not wiser and with a lot more responsibility, I cannot do that. So instead I write this blog and wonder how I will ever make it as long as I have to make it out here, however long that turns out to be.
So, I am homesick for a home I never had and a family I never lived with. They are a family I missed 43 years with and every day I spend here is another day tacked onto my sentence. That sentence was handed down in court back in 1974 in the form of a order of final adoption that sealed my records and forever denied me access to my real identity.
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