When you fear the abandonment of another, the probability of you abandoning yourself goes up.
Vienna Pharaon
This one resonated. When I found my biological father and we connected, I did everything in my power to be perfect. I was sincere in my efforts at bonding with him and his wife, but I did my best to hide how broken I was in some ways. I did not want him to feel guilty for the pain he had already caused.
He once asked if I was in therapy “because of him.” I was in therapy for a lot of reasons at that time, which included learning that I was donor conceived, but I did not want him to know the extent of what was happening in my life. I did not want to scare him away. But now, yes, I am primarily in therapy because he ended up abandoning me despite my efforts to be non-threatening, despite my efforts to be perfect, despite my efforts to hide how much I needed that connection. That he decided to end his connection with me at the same time my Dad who raised me was dying from cancer complications was a trauma on top of trauma.
Connecting with a biological parent who abandoned you is uniquely difficult. You have already lost them once and you do whatever you can to not lose them again. And I do view my biological father’s previously anonymous “donation” as abandonment. He was paid to never care about his future genetic children. He accepted money to give up the ability to know about our existence, our well being. And now we are viewed as less-than by many in his family who never knew of our potential existence. His previous abandonment under the terms of “anonymous donation” are what give him, and them, what should be a morally unacceptable cover now to simply pretend we do not exist when the truth is incontrovertible.
For anyone struggling right now with connecting, I see you. I hear you. I know.
Tiffany Gardner. Originally published to Instagram on May 12, 2021.
A Donor Conceived Adult 