Grudges, Hatred and The Blame Game

I recently walked into a buzz-saw and am glad to have kept all my limbs. Said buzz-saw is an adopted adult male who is very close to a cherished family member. Just mentioning the idea that this person might have been hostile towards me due to the fact that I was a mother of adoption loss started a poisonous rant against his own natural parents and several direct digs at me.

He's a BSE/EMS baby and has no compassion or empathy for his natural mother or father. He used the phrase, "they hammered me out at Woodstock" and referred to their youth (13 and 15 at Woodstock???) with derision. His anger was so intense as to be palpable and I felt both offended by him and very sad for him. I think the "facts," as he has them, were told to him by his adopters and there might have been some exaggeration on their part. Adopters have a way of doing that, sometimes. They want to be the "as if born to" Mommy and Daddy so much that they might slip in a distortion or two.

This toxic resentment is turned against himself as well as his natural parents, only he doesn't see it. He's a lot smarter than he makes himself out to be, but keeps that a secret. He's a "bad boy" and that is how it is. My family member loves him so I accept him, hostility and all. We have come to a place of peace between us, but he doesn't know how much I was able to glimpse the pain inside. He thinks he has it covered up with his anger. He is rabidly stubborn about this, so it is what it is. And he does love my dear one.

My oldest son has serious anger management issues. However, he cannot bring himself to direct that anger at me, so it goes out to anyone who gets in his way. That, of course, has caused him innumerable problems. Again, there is little I can do but love him as he is, unconditionally.

There is righteous anger at injustice and then there is malicious anger. One can be harnessed and turned into creative and productive action. The other eats away at the person who feels it until they are controlled by it.

I stopped reading at a particular forum where the resentment against natural mothers, all of us, regardless of the situation, ran like a fresh, hot lava flow. I can't subject myself to that and maintain my peace of mind, but I do worry a lot about the people on that forum and their mothers. So many hold their anger to their bosom like a beloved pet, stroking the grudge, ramping up the hatred and blaming it all on the mothers. The people whose mothers rejected them at reunion transfer their blaming to all mothers, regardless of their story, reunion status or stance on adoption.

I used to blame my father for all the bad things in my life. I hated him, held a long-term grudge and thought I was justified. I had to laugh when I grew up enough to learn that the only person hurt by my hateful grudge was me. My dad was going about his (monkey) business, blissfully uncaring of my feelings. That was a big, fat "Whoa!" for me. That's also when I first learned that hatred is not the opposite of love. It is the other side of the same coin. Indifference is the opposite of love and I obviously was not indifferent to my father.

I wonder if the young man in my family's life or any of the mud-flinging adults on that forum realize that, if they flip that coin, they are going to find the ache of love, denied. I guess it is a lot easier to be pissed from the get-go. Examining the side where the love is can be a lot like exploring a painful cavity in a tooth with your tongue. It might even call for looking inside oneself and taking responsibility for one's own feelings and actions.

Until they are able to do that, I tread warily among them. Even though I disagree with the essence of their complaint (abandonment) and feel it is, more often than not, baseless in fact, I do accept and understand, better than they know, their feelings.

I just know better than to pet a rabid dog.