My Missing Piece(s)

I love Shel Silverstein. I remember sitting on the floor of the library in elementary school, reading through A Light In The Attic and feeling this overwhelming sense of joy and awe. The love affair I have with his various works has continued over the years. In fact, as soon as we found out that we were pregnant with our son, I purchased a few of my favorites for his bookshelf. Whether he will appreciate them like I do, I do not know.

My favorite Shel Silverstein work is The Missing Piece. It has been my favorite for quite some time. On all of the sites that ask you to list your “favorite book,” I always list this one and I have for years upon years. Prior to the adoption, the book was just a favorite for its meaning, its gentle way of teaching us a good lesson about “finding ourselves” and “being whole.”

After the adoption? It took on another meaning, somewhat more melancholy. Suz of Writing My Wrongs recently touched on it in a post of her own. In the past few years she has entered into reunion with her daughter, placed for adoption over twenty-one years ago. She says it best with these few sentences.

My daughter has been a missing piece of my soul for over 21 years. Finding her filled some of that gap. It did not fill everything and what it did fill still needs some adjusting and refining. The remaning, I am finding, is being filled by resetting my expectations, educating myself, working on myself and realizing that the fulfillment I seek comes from me – not her. I can never get back my child, at least not the child she was supposed to be before the laws of man intervened and changed her name and the course of her life.

I found myself crying, reaching for my own copy of the book which sits on a shelf in my desk. (Yes, I love the book that much that it is always on hand.) It’s true, what she says. Even though our adoption is fully open and while she still remains my daughter, she is not the child she would be if I hadn’t placed her for adoption. How different would she be? I don’t know. D doesn’t know. The Munchkin doesn’t know. And while she is in my life, gently and somewhat filling that gap as Suz talks about, there’s still… and always will be… a missing piece.

I’m slowly realizing that I don’t need (or want?) her to fill it in the ways that I can mentally imagine at this point in my life. I’ve always known that nothing else could fill it; no other child, no success, no money, no really cool camera. I’m just now coming to realize, however slowly, that even though she’s in my life, and thus a part of my whole, there will be missing pieces, if only slivers, of her throughout my lifetime. And, from what Silverstein teaches us with his book, apparently that’s okay.

Do you have a favorite Shel Silverstein book or poem? More over, do you have a book that you loved as a child that has taken on new light and meaning since relinquishment? Tell us about it.

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For more books, read:

1. Book Review: Girls in Trouble.

2. The Secret Fears of Birth Parents.

3. Books from the Birth Mother Perspective: Where Are They?

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