Calling it National Adoption Awareness Month is So Stupid

The definition of awareness is knowledge or perception of a situation or fact. It seems to me that when you ask an adult adopted person about adoption, and if they trust you enough to be honest, more often than not the story you will hear is that, while they love their parents, adoption was something that ultimately wreaked havoc on their health and sense of self-worth.

I think, then, what National Adoption Awareness Month is, by its name, is a shout-out that babies are still for sale, and that you should start your Kickstarter fund now because they are getting more expensive by the day. Be aware! If you want to fill that gap you feel you have in your life, you should start saving now!!

If this month were called National Adoptee Awareness Month, it would be a whole other story. Every day the nation could focus on one of the adoptees who had committed suicide the previous year, perhaps, and tell his or her story so we as a nation could be aware that this person had existed.

We could start with one of the people who had been adopted from overseas but whose parents didn’t file all the necessary paperwork, so then the child as an adult got deported to a country to which he knew not the language or the people.

We could start with the person who tells you she is fine with adoption and ask her why she is fifty pounds overweight. We could ask her why she drinks two glasses of wine every single night. We could ask her why she is single and has problems with migraines. Yes, there are many people in this situation, but at the end of the day these people aren’t hiding their loneliness because they have a body terror of being abandoned.

What I want to tell you this that this month I am going to write a daily meme about making love. Here’s why: adoption worked for me in that I am here, writing this, and I love my life and every part of it that got me here because it is my only life and I refuse to take it away from myself, but also, and this is a big also, I live with an anxiety that is crushingly high and I fight the desire to disappear daily. It is so much work being an adopted person. And so, while I love my life wildly, this love comes from a force of will, and I wouldn’t wish what goes on in my traumatized brain on anyone.

I need to reframe my relationship to adoption. I need to stop looking to the past because it only makes me more anxious. This requires a lot of work because the past is in my body. It’s in my brain, in my nervous system, in my musculature.

I don’t want to be more aware of adoption. It’s like being more aware of global warming. The more aware I am of global warming, the more I want to do to stop it.

I want to be more aware of life. Of my life and what I can do with it. The fear is, of course, if I become happy and content then people will be able to say that adoption was not a failed social experiment, because, look, Anne Heffron and so many others are thriving. I am thriving because I turned the decision to thrive a full-time job. Literally.

If I hadn’t met Pam Cordano, a fellow adoptee, I might have been stuck in trauma brain my whole life, but I met her and this miracle happened, we started mirroring change and growth to each other. I began to see I could be different. I could live in this body and feel consistently good. I could break down walls I had created out of fear and live a bigger, more courageous life. I wish this kind of friendship for all adoptees. It’s like so many of us are Serena Williams and we’ve been trying to play tennis with beginners. With Pam I finally met someone who plays tennis the way I do, and now we just whack the ball (you know I’m speaking in metaphor, right?) back and forth with great glee and focus.

Pam and I talk about ways we can make love with life. We don’t use those words exactly, but that’s the idea. What we do say is, What are you going to do today? How can I best support you? What do you want to do together next? What can we create? Making love with life means I am putting a higher priority on the present moment than on the past. I have to train myself to do this because traumatized brains want to return to the past again and again and again in the failed efforts of finally fixing the things that had gone wrong.

This month, I am going to be more aware of the friends I have through adoption. I can make love with world that way, literally—my body produces chemicals that tell my brain I am in love when I think of these amazing people. I can not even begin to name them because there are so many and the fear of forgetting a name is worse that the pleasure I would get typing out each one, but I am mentally going through the list: May you be happy, may you be free from pain, may you be loved.

May you be loved.

May you be loved.

May you love yourself.

Endlessly.

Everything is going to be okay.