Then I lost me...

This adoption journey has not been what I thought it would be.  In the weeks since meeting my darling Jason, my world has been turned upside down.  Not outwardly.  Outwardly I get on with the business of the day.  But inwardly, there is constant turmoil.  I've discovered all the things people never tell you about reunions.  My emotions betray me daily as I experience the highest highs and the lowest lows. Before this I thought of myself as a fairly reserved, stable, not too emotional person.  Then he came.  Let me say now, that this is about my journey.  It doesn't really have to do with Jason.  He has been wonderful and lovely.  I love the person he is.  It is not because of him that I am going through these things.  It is because of the situation.  Little did I know, that picking up the phone and answering his inquiry would set into motion changes that would leave me questioning everything in my world.  What has changed?  For one thing; how I view adoption.
Adoption is a crap shoot. 
I gave my son up because I bought the party line that he would have a better life.  Well, he didn't.  I thought someone else (anybody else, really) could give him more than I could because society told me I was young, and poor, and basically a piece of shit incapable of giving a baby what it would need.  Well, that was wrong, too.  My baby needed Me and I needed him.  Maybe I didn't have much, but what I had, I would have given him.  So the societal narrative is; "Hey, young stupid girls, don't be so selfish.  Give your babies up to a nice stable married couple.  They'll do a way better job than you ever could raising a baby."  No one ever suggests that your baby could end up in less than ideal circumstances.  I feel as though I've been duped- on a grand scale.  Is adoption just a social experiment to get babies away from their young single mothers and placed with supposedly nice, stable couples? Does society deem me less than and as a lesser mother?  He is my CHILD.  He is MY child. I feel as though I've fallen victim to some cosmic evil scheme.  I feel as though I had an unwritten agreement with God or the universe and it was broken.  I gave my child up- like I was led to believe I should.  I did what society told me was the most loving thing of all- separate myself from my child.  It doesn't feel that way now.
I was not prepared for the emotionality of this.  Up, down, up, down.  I was not prepared for the intensity of this.  Why did I not come across any of this in a book before?  Why have I not heard about it in a support group?  I didn't know that meeting my son, would feel like 'falling in love' only more intense.  I didn't know I would obsess about him, always want to be in his presence, and when I am around him, I didn't know I would not be able to keep my hands off him,  that I would be overwhelmed by my need to smell him, that my arms ache for him.  He is 6'5" and 31 years old, but if I could figure out  way to cuddle him in my arms, I would have done it.  I recognized all of this as 'baby-hunger".  These were all things I would have done when he was a baby.  All the same bonding needs have rushed back as if 31 years have not passed in the interim.  Wow, just wow. 
I've had to figure out ways to help myself through all of this.  I found an online community of birth mothers.  It helps to hear other people's reunion stories.  It helps to ask questions and get answers.  It helps not to feel so all alone.