I’m currently on a huge reading spree inspired by lack of technology last week while camping. I read four books last week and, while unable to keep quite the same pace here, I’m still reading, reading, reading. I’m currently five chapters into The Shack. A sentence near the end of the fourth chapter reached out and choked me.

It is so easy to get sucked into the if-only game, and playing it is a short and slippery slide into despair.

I nodded. Been there, done that. No desire to go back.

I struggle with my current place in my healing journey. Why? I am neither overly joyous nor deeply depressed about the things that have happened with regard to the Munchkin’s birth, placement and the continuous contact we have had over the years. Again, as I have talked about quite frequently as of late, I am in a place of peace.

Don’t misunderstand peace for joy or an overabundance of positive feelings. Peace is trickier than that, I believe. I cannot change what has happend; I accept that. I have little control over the future; I accept that. Right now, things are good; I accept that. Things in the past, in various situations, were not always good; I accept that. Things in the future may be good or they may be bad; I accept that. For me, peace is that acceptance, that acknowledgment that what will be, will be.

I don’t often play the what-if or the if-only game anymore. I don’t have time, quite frankly, to dwell on the past. I barely have time to live in the here and now, drowning as I am in ten days worth of camp laundry, the laundry that formed at home while I was gone and, you know, the making of meals and the bathing of children. And cake baking for no particular reason other than I like to do things with my kids. But there are other reasons that I don’t jump into questions like, “What if I had parented,” or, “What if I hadn’t gotten caught up with an unethical agency?”

It does no good.

True, if I had parented, my life would be vastly different. But I don’t like to entertain that train of thought. It does no good to begin to doubt that decision which, in essence, brings up a string of doubt regarding each and every subsequent decision I have made since the time I placed her in another family’s arms and walked out of the hospital. I try to be a confident (but humble) wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend. I can’t be confident if I am constantly thinking, “Well, if I would have done this or if I wouldn’t have done this, then this, that and the other thing may or may not be in my life.” The constant doubt brought about by the what-if game is a blow to my confidence and my ability to be the best that I can be in my various roles.

Furthermore, and more importantly, I just can’t change anything. My decisions are my decisions, whether they were pushed by other people or not. I signed papers. I walked out doors. I continued to keep my promise that I would always be available. I have parented other children. I have continued to live a life, however broken some pieces of that life remain.

I don’t have time and energy for the anger that others seem to want me to have anymore. I held onto that anger, clutching it as tightly as I could, far so very long. The only inkling of anger that remains is toward the unethical agency as they are still doing to other mothers what was done to me. And, still, even that anger is only fanned on occasion. I don’t think of them unless they show up in discussion or I’m writing a post of this nature. I can’t change it.

I won’t apologize for the way I feel about everything that has happened. I will continue to support adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents interested in reform. I will continue to support adoptees in their fight for their original birth certificates. I will continue to offer help when asked, though I’ll admit that I don’t always have the answers. But I refuse to be poked and prodded for not feeling the same way as Birth Mom A or Adoptee B or Adoptive Parent C. I refuse to even acknowledge “what-if” questions anymore as I don’t feel that they are a healthy way to explore this journey that I have been making over the past six years. I refuse to be made to feel less because I have found a place of peace. I refuse to be told that, because of that peace, it means that I’m not a truly loving birth mother.

I refuse to let others ruin this place where I currently reside. Peace suits me well.