Playing Your Life

Last night I was talking to Amy Geller. She is writing a book about about being both an adopted person and a therapist and what she has learned along the way that has allowed her to, finally, really, really, wildly thrive.

She was talking about the blog post I wrote about adoptees and suicide. She wants to laminate it and give it to every new parent who is adopting a child. I feel this way about her book. It’s gold. If I had her book when I was a teenager, I would have had the keys to the kingdom. Instead, I had the keys to the car and I drove in enormous circles for most of my life until only very recently.

I went in circles as a way to refuse the future. You can’t make me grow up. I will not be this person. I am not her, but I don’t know who I am, so I will continue to spin. In my twenties, I drove across the country 9 times, I think. I lost track. Being between two places, the East Coast and the West Coast was the best feeling. I was free. I was myself because I was neither the past nor the future. I could argue that this was present moment living, that this is the goal of life, and, while I was driving through state after state, I felt I had life figured out. I was behind the wheel. I was captain of my ship.

But then I would get to where I was going and I would run into the wall of myself. Once again, I had brought me with me, and she had no idea what to do with her life other than get back in her car again and start driving, and this is why I was not living in the present moment: I was living in a place that was a refusal of every moment in the commitment to movement. Ever forward. Anywhere but here.

Adoptees call each other crib mates. This means that I am a baby hanging out with other babies. Nancy Verrier, an adoptive parent, called the damage relinquishment does to a child the primal wound. So I am an injured baby. For three years I have been writing about how damaged I am because of relinquishment and adoption. I have been singing the song of damn this hurts and when will I stop crying for years.

In some ways, I’m still in the car, still driving from coast to coast, refusing to land. I am living at a friend’s house because I’m not fully committed to a coast. I’m not in a romantic relationship because, for one reason, I don’t have a home into which I could invite someone. I feel like I’m waiting.

In other ways, however, I’ve landed. I have come to this place of acceptance: I am who I am and it’s never going to get better than this. My face and body are aging in ways I thought happened to old people, but not to me. I am different from a lot of my friends: I spend more time by myself; I think more about writing than I do politics or current events. I am coming to terms with understanding that this feeling of always being between two places is maybe just my life. That I’m not not home. That this feeling is what living is like. I could label it as not belonging or not right or trouble, or, as I am doing now, I could call it my life.

When I was a teenager, I used to look at fashion magazines, and every time I was ready to put the magazine aside, I would close on a picture of someone I would rather be than myself. Her. Her. Her. Her.

My brain used to exist in a state of comparison where I came up short, less than, the loser. That life. That mother. That city. That career. That hairstyle. That amount of money. If I had those things, then I would finally be okay.

The blog post I wrote about adoptees and suicide was, I think, my most-read post. The magical thing that happened when I was writing it was that I let myself create the world in which I wanted to live. I wrote about a mother’s breath on the child’s skin. I wrote about understanding. About love. About the decision to stay. It was like my bones wrote that post, and I felt done at the end. Like I didn’t ever have to write about adoption again. I felt I had slid into home plate.

My writing teacher Tracy Daugherty once told me that his teacher, Donald Barthelme, had suggested that Tracy write another sentence when he thought his story was finished.

This essay is my sentence after I thought my story was finished. The reason to continue writing is to push past what you think you know, to see what is even deeper beneath what you are saying. We say generally say words in patterns that our brain has been preparing all our life. People get drunk in part to disrupt these patterns. Writing one sentence beyond your conclusion is a clean way of getting drunk.

You get to surprise yourself.

I thought that?!

Last night I went to an event in Boston where adopted people read their creative work. As soon as I walked into the space, my body started to vibrate. It was like my cells were Christmas lights and someone had plugged me in. The room was crowded, and so I stood in the back and listened to people talk about their lives. I vibrated while I nodded my head, while I laughed, while I cried the entire time a Russian adoptee talked about her experiences in Russia and the United States.

I was standing next to a friend, and I was happy. The sadness was an expression of my happiness, and I felt complete. I was so safe, I could feel both sad and happy at the same time. It was like I’d been sitting in front of a piano my whole life but my arms had been bound so I could not play all the keys, and suddenly, I was free and I could play every note. I could feel everything because I was playing.

I was not feeling sad because I was in danger. I was feeling sad because I was playing. The luxury of being an adopted person is that I get to be a person who is acutely aware of each key on the piano. I am acutely aware of how life feels.

I can either live in tantrum, arms bound, notes limited, or I can play.

When my daughter was born, I became someone I loved: a mother. What I have learned recently was that I was that person, that mother, all along. People do not have to have children to be a mother or a father, for we inherently are those things. We carry both the child and the adult in our being, even, I believe, at birth. I have seen my daughter mother herself again and again. She takes care, she listens, she attends to her own needs.

That last paragraph was me doing what Donald Barthelme had told Tracy Daugherty to do: I kept writing after I thought I was finished, and, holy cow, I am glad I did. I wrote something I had not known I thought! And I love that idea, that image, of the child carrying the parent. I just changed my own brain and the way I see the world by letting myself write past what felt like the finish line.

I am going to try something new. I am dropping the idea that the world doesn’t understand me because I am adopted. I am going to live with the idea that I am a drop of water in an ocean, and so I am inherently understood as I am part of something bigger than I am. Any division or separation I see is a creation of my mind, and I don’t feel like seeing separation any more. I want to rest in the whole.

Mother. Father. Ocean. Love.

It is cold here in Boston today, and the dry leaves are falling off the trees.

It is so beautiful.