Life, Interrupted

Getting to know yourself can be very hard. I only recently realized that I've walked through most of my life having no idea who I really am. I swore to myself at some point in my late teens that I would never be like my birth mom. I fought so hard to be different than her. She was a free spirited hippie type, so I went through any phase other than that. Because we need to label people and put them in boxes, I would hear people now and then refer to me as a hippie "type" and it would just drive me bonkers. But, no matter what ridiculous outfit, make-up and hairstyle I was sporting, I guess my true self  shone through to everyone but me.
When I got adopted, it was just a fact in my new home that my birth mother was the enemy. Everything she did was wrong, and there wasn't room for any other type of discussion. As a matter of fact, after about a month or so, it became obvious to me that it was best for everyone if she just wasn't brought up. After awhile, I fell into the routine. It's not that I don't ever think about my birth family, I always do, it's just that somehow in my mind my life as a child and teen were almost erased, or pushed way to the back of my mind. It was easy to do that living in Seattle, because I didn't have any family to be around, so I never really had to find my place, or question who I really am. I could just be.
I've realized I am very much like my birth mom for awhile, but this is the first time I'm honoring that. I can't live the rest of my life running from who I am, and punishing myself for it. Through meditation and really trying to work on myself, and forgive myself I'm forgiving my mom too. And I'm seeing things differently. Enough time has passed, I'm not the wounded bird I was, so I can look at things much more objectively now. I can see her pain, her hurt. There are a million sayings out there about hurt people hurting people and so on and so forth, so I believe that she had some pain that led to her making some bad life choices. After some of my own choices, I can hardly judge.
I understand that my adoptive parents thought they were doing the right thing by kind of shutting the door on my past, but looking back I think it really confused an already very confused girl. I wish I would have been able to work some of this out more, I wish I could have felt like it was okay to be me.
It is hard for me to not feel some real anger and frustration towards my adoptive parents. I need to come up with another moniker for them, because truth be told I don't think of them in any kind of parental, or really even familial way. But, I do feel like some mistakes were made, and it's easy for them because they have their families. I don't. There's no whoopsie, let's go back in time and make a better decision.
I can't help but feel a little bit robbed.