Brigid knows what it is to be renamed by an institution and still burn underneath the name. If adoption laundered my family’s destruction as love, Catholicism laundered Brigid’s ancient fire as obedience. But the fire remained.
Brigid was my Catholic confirmation saint before I understood misnarration as a spiritual wound. She was Irish and I had been told I was Irish. This turned out to be a lie.
Only later did I learn that Brigid was not only a Catholic saint but also an ancient Celtic goddess: fire, forge, poetry, healing, protection, and sacred power. The Church did not entirely erase her. It laundered her. It translated her into a form it could bless.
That is why I trust her.
Brigid knows what it is to be renamed by an institution and still burn underneath the name. She knows what it is to survive inside a story that diminished her. She knows what it is to be made acceptable without becoming extinguished.
If adoption laundered my family’s destruction as love, Catholicism laundered Brigid’s ancient fire as obedience.
But the fire remained.
Hekate came first as threshold and torch. She illuminated the crossroads where the official story and the embodied truth diverged. In her light, I could see what had been hidden: the sealed record, the erased father, the coerced silence, the family story preserved by casting out a child.
Kuan Yin held what could not yet be transformed. She did not ask me to forgive. She did not require gratitude. She held the grief before anyone tried to improve it.
Kali entered when holding was no longer enough. She was the sacred refusal of the lie. She slashed away the demand that I soften the truth to protect the innocent self-image of institutions and adults.
And Brigid, misnarrated and still burning, became the one who could reforge and transmute the story.
This is the sacred architecture I need because adoption culture offered me only a prettily polished lie.
Adoption destroyed my family. Then the Catholic Church, the state, and popular culture called the destruction love—and celebrated.
That is the part I cannot forgive: not only the separation itself, but the laundering of it. The way harm was washed through words until it appeared sanitized and neat. Placement. Blessing. Chosen. Saved. Life-affirming. A beautiful answer to prayer. A gift. A miracle. Salvation.
My adopters’ joy became the official meaning of the event, and by proxy, mine. Their beginning became the story. My ending was not allowed to be one.
There was a mother before them. There was a father before them. There was a family before them. There was a lineage interrupted, a name replaced, a record sealed, a daughter removed, a father erased.
There was a wound before there was a joyful blessing story.
But the joyful blessing story won.
It won in church language. It won in court language. It won in amended records and sealed files. It won in the demand that I be grateful. It still wins in official files and documents that I am not legally allowed to access.
For most of my life, my grief remained carefully hidden. Not because it was small, but because I knew the available story had no room for it. The grateful adoptee is often the child who learns which griefs are unsafe to speak.
Before an adoptee can be asked what she is grateful for, someone must be willing to ask what she lost.
I lost my birthmother at birth. I lost my birthfather. I lost grandparents, aunts, cousins, ancestors, stories, resemblances, medical history, and the ordinary right to know where I came from.
I also lost the knowledge that I was desperately wanted and being searched for.
The story I was given as an adolescent was simple: both natural parents had voluntarily relinquished me; neither had tried to find me; neither had made contact. It was a symmetrical story, clean and devastating.
Then my birthfather told me another story.
He said he had not consented. He said he had used his student loan to hire an attorney who took pity on him. He said he sued and lost. He said he searched for me. He told everyone he ever met that he had a daughter who had been stolen and that he was looking for her.
I grew up inside the agency’s story of voluntary abandonment. He lived inside a father’s story of egregious theft.
Neither story gave us back to each other. Neither story made up for the time stolen from us.
When we reunited, he cried and apologized for abandoning me. I needed that apology and was stunned by it. I had also learned that abandonment was not the whole story. He had fought. He had lost. He had searched. He had never forgotten. I had been repeatedly lied to by the “official” keepers of my life story.
Still, I had grown up without him.
He has no other children. I am his only child.
The adoption did not only make me fatherless. It made him childless.
We were in reunion for nearly nine years before we had a falling out. I wish I could say reunion healed and restored what adoption took. It did not. Reunion gave us contact. It did not give us back time or undo harm.
This is one of adoption’s terrifically specific cruelties: it takes the relationship, then expects reunion to prove whether the relationship mattered. It removes the conditions under which love might have grown and then asks the damaged and traumatized people to build from wreckage. If they cannot, the failure appears personal rather than intentionally engineered. The system remains innocent.
The world knows separation harms children.
But adoption makes an exception.
When the same separation creates an adoptive family, the wound is renamed blessing. The severance becomes placement. The abandoned child becomes chosen. The grieving adoptee becomes ungrateful. The erased father becomes irrelevant. The sealed record becomes privacy. The destroyed family becomes a beautiful beginning.
The body does not stop being human because the law calls the separation adoption.
I know this because my body did not consent to the story. My grief did not dissolve because other people needed me to be grateful. My depression was not evidence that I failed to appreciate being saved. My cPTSD was not a character flaw. My psychiatric hospitalizations were not proof that I was broken beyond reason.
They were the body’s record of what the official story refused to hold.
I was not saved from trauma. I was required to silently survive trauma while everyone called it benevolence and love.
This is where Goddess spirituality matters. Not as escape. Not as decorative imagery. Not as spiritual bypass. Goddess did not tell me to move on. Goddess did not tell me to be grateful. Goddess did not tell me to forgive.
She gave me thresholds, mercy, blades, and fire.
Hekate gave me the torch.
Kuan Yin gave me the bowl.
Kali gave me the blade.
Brigid gave me the forge.
In October, I had a hysterectomy. I was not allowed to keep my uterus, but my surgeon agreed to photograph it for me. In the picture, it lies bloody, enlarged, with tubes and cervix detached, shockingly pink and red against the blue surgical drape. The organ that could have continued the line. The organ that carried the possibility of inheritance. The organ that I refused to make into another vessel of grief. The organ that had caused me pain and mess since I began bleeding at age 9.
My father had no other children. I am his only child. I have no children.
What remains of our fragmented family will die with me.
The family line did not end because no one existed. It ends because too much was broken before it could continue. Adoption did not only remove me from a family; it interrupted a lineage. The wound became genealogical.
There is no public funeral or marked grave for what adoption took.
No sanctioned grief for the father-daughter life stolen before it began. None for the years my father spent telling strangers he had a daughter and was looking for her. None for the version of me who might have grown up knowing I was wanted. None for the child who learned to hide loss because everyone else needed the adoption to remain beautiful.
So I write.
I write because the official story made him absent, but his own story made me remembered. I write because my father cried. I write because mental health professionals asked me to be grateful before anyone asked what I had lost. I write because I was family, too.
I write because Brigid was my Catholic confirmation saint before I knew I would need a forge.
I write because Brigid is what survives institutional rewriting and laundering.
I write because adoption destroyed my family, then required me to celebrate the destruction as love.
I write because I will not.