I am going to be so mean to you. I am going to say horrible things to you. I am going to act dreadful and come up with and use the most hurtful words ever to spew at you. I will find out what your soft spots are and dig into them with cruel verbal daggers. You see I am trying to get you to abandon me ‘cuz I’m not worth it. I am just a bad kid. That’s why my first family left me, of course.
It’s my fault my parents left. I feel guilty and full of shame that I caused the breakup of our family. My birth parents rejected me. Soon you all, my new family, will figure out how bad I am and ditch me too. I’m going to make things awful in my new home, so at least I can control when this eventual abandonment happens. I’m going to leave you before you all can leave me. I am going to hurt you before you can hurt me. It’s just easier if I reject you as I know you will see how awful I am one day. I can be so angry at you for adopting me. Sometimes I think you kidnapped me from my biological home. I cannot see clearly what happened before I met you. All of these feelings inside of me make me say hurtful things to you. I am going to lie to you to feel better. I will have power struggles with you as I have never really been in control of my life and see where that got me.
Just because you are my parents now, I still want to talk about my birth family. Not once or twice, but over and over again. Please keep talking about all of this with me. It is not a reflection of my love for you.
Every Mother’s Day is super hard for me and I will warn you that I will try to ruin yours so I don’t have to feel my feelings. Christmas is also dreadful as that is when I was removed from my birth family. I plan to sabotage Christmas every year now. I don’t understand why I do this but I guess I feel like I don’t deserve a happy Christmas. Or a happy family. I am bad.
But maybe you can learn to see through my mean words. Maybe you can understand how scared I really am. Maybe you get that I am sure you are going to abandon me too. Maybe you can be present and hug me and just sit with me. Maybe you can breathe with me. Maybe you can see that instead of mad, I am afraid. I am trying to survive and don’t know how to do it without being mean. Try to remember that I want to be close to you but just don’t know how. I love you despite what it may seem.
