BFF# 129 The Road Not Taken

I am the epitome of “The Road Not Taken” as I’ve experienced three very significant moments of choice that greatly changed the course of my life. “Why?” The answer...adoption does that to you.

I have been thinking about this more and more lately. The saying, “I have often wondered what my life would be like if I had taken a different road” is really and truly an understatement, not an exaggeration. Seriously, my life is nothing but “roads not taken”; and ultimately, it’s leading me to a huge question that I will pose at the end of all this.

In my mind, it starts with my birth. What if my biological mother had decided to not have me? I would not be here. It’s that simple. I am grateful for her choice to give birth to me and provide me with the first of many “roads not taken” moments in my life. To give me away, however, must have been a painful decision for her. I can’t help but wonder if she felt it was the right choice, but in the end, her decision to not keep me and place me up for adoption was my second road not taken.

As a young adult, thoughts of what my life would have been like if my adoptive parents did not turn out to be “The Ones”. Naturally, this brings me to one of my favorite movies, Baby Boom, starring Diane Keaton. One of the most profound scenes in that movie for me was when JC and Elizabeth meet Steven at the train station. JC says, “I just couldn’t hand her over to a woman her calls her husband sir. It gave me the chills. Her whole life flashed before me and suddenly I saw her in frosted lip stick and wearing a Dairy Queen uniform.” (Watch the first 38 seconds of the clip below for this scene.) Did my birth mother's boyfriend look like Steven did when he got off the train? What about her parents?



This single act of handing me over to my adoptive parents was and is to this day, the third, and most profound “road not taken” moment in my life. I ask myself almost every day, what would my life have been if I was handed over to someone else? The road not taken just multiplied exponentially and I feel a serious anxiety attack about to happen. My life would not be the same. I would not be sitting here tonight and writing this, or would I?

These three choices were not mine to make; but everything since then has been. I have been down many roads and some have turned out to be wonderful choices. As for the others, well…I am not ashamed to say that there were some moments where I went down a road part way and then turned around and went back to take the other road.

But now, I have come to another one of those "roads not taken" moments, surely to be even more profound than that third one of my life. My adoptive parents are getting older and I know I don’t have much time left with them. When they are gone, I will be alone, save for one brother, who is also adopted but I rarely talked to, and my husband who is much older than I.

I don’t want to come to the end of my life not knowing if there was something I could have done to find out who this mysterious woman was who decided not to take a few roads for me. But, I don’t want to hurt anyone in the process, least of all myself. So here I sit with a heavy heart, at the crossroads looking at two very different paths and wondering which to choose. I hold my head in my hands and whisper…

“Do I go look for her?”



***I have written this piece for a group on Facebook that I have joined, BFF Blogging For Fun. Interested in more...click on the picture below to take you there. Don't forget to check out my friends at One Stop Blog World, a collective of all the great blog sites of which I am a member!