Pam Cordano, Motherloss, Adoption, and Dignity

My friend Pam Cordano is almost finished writing her book 10 Foundations for a Meaningful Life (No Matter What’s Happened), and it has already altered my thinking and life more than once. More than four times.

A couple of weeks ago, she read me her chapter about dignity, a word I almost never used. It was for people like Toni Morrison, Bruce Lee, Queen Elizabeth—someone with whom I would not joke, not because things weren’t ever funny in the world but because when this person came into view, something sacred had arrived, and my body/mind responded by getting still, reverential.

I pictured dignity like a snowy egret silently standing in a field, unmoving.

The way I saw it, dignity was for others. But Pam was writing about the word as a trait we could cultivate, and I was thrilled with the idea that dignity was something I could live with on a daily basis.

What does it look like to be a woman living with dignity in a world where her body often seems to be literally up for grabs? What does it look like to be a man of color living with dignity when every time a cop car drives behind him with its lights flashing, he holds his breath? What does it mean to be a child living with dignity when everyone else in your classroom has new sneakers and you are wearing your brother’s too-big hand-me-downs and the others make fun of you for your tattered Nikes?

So many adopted people talk to me about feeling like garbage. I understand this feeling. When you walk around with the story inside your head that your mother gave you away, it’s easy to leap to the conclusion that whatever is given away is unwanted, and what is unwanted is garbage. So many adopted people talk to me about suicidal ideation. This life is too hard, they tell me, too painful. They can’t be honest with the parents who adopted them because they love their parents, and if their parents know how sad and broken they were, the parents would suffer, and so the adoptees live, stooped inside of themselves, smaller, busted.

What if when a child was separated from his or her mother, dignity was a kind of oil that could be rubbed all over the baby’s skin, sealing it, making the baby golden with security and purpose? What if the baby went home with a cup of dignity, and whenever patches of distress formed on the body, whenever a child started to doubt his right to be on the planet or doubt her essential goodness, the parent or the child could open the container of dignity, dip his or her fingers in it, and refresh the skin, reminding the child he or she is loved, strong, safe, and purposeful?

When I think of dignified, I think of Viktor Frankel, Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, John Lewis. I think of Pam writing a book about choosing life after being born to a mother who both beat and abandoned her daily when Pam was an infant. I think of focus so intense it becomes a force field of energy, protecting, serving, inspiring. I think of steady eyes. Strength. A dedication to stand strong in order to best show up for others.

If I were to go downstairs right now and turn on the impeachment hearings, I would see a country so deep in mud dignity would sound as confusing as ancient Greek if our President tweeted it. Our media is a shouting match. Dignity is somewhere else, perhaps down the street holding hands with an old woman who can not afford her diabetes medicine and is trying not to cry out and disturb the neighbors.

To be adopted and to have dignity means that you feel human, seen, strong, loved. I think it is dangerous to take things personally, having done it myself. (Today even! I’m a work in progress, after all.) It’s easy to be self-centered when you are thinking of yourself as a child, but the fact is, it can become habit for adopted people and orphans to let stories define our sense of self, but if you brought all humans to a lab and broke us down to our smallest components, you have wave and particle and a whole lot of empty space. We are all the same breath of miracle air.

Dignity comes with the decision to make the most of what you have. Dignity comes with the realization that no one can decide for you who you are or what you think.

There is so much hope when a person claims dignity. Claiming dignity might be the single most rebellious and healthy thing an adopted person could do. It’s Whitman’s barbaric yawp, with purpose and style.

We all have a purpose: to be ourselves and, in that way, we make the world a better place because we are present, just as the field is a better place for the presence of the snowy egret. Being a person is not rocket science. We make it really complicated. God forbid we just wake up and enjoy the day with dignity and grace and screaming love.

When I read The Primal Wound years ago, it was the first time I’d heard someone talk about adoption as trauma. I had a wound. I was wounded. I had a primal wound. Just as I was an adoptee, now I had another objective word to describe me: wounded. People were handing me language and labeling me because of something that had happened to me, not because of something I had done. Now, I agree that relinquishment is a primal wound, but did walking around telling people I was wounded actually help my life, truly? Did it make my parents understand me better? Did it help me connect with my friends better? Did my teachers get it? Did my therapists? Did saying it help me feel happy?

I know healing is complicated and that I’m skating over certain things, but it’s to make a point.

What if, instead of The Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier had named her book Dignity? What if the book had basically the same content, but also a chapter on how to tap into and claim dignity as an adopted person? What if, in my thirties, I had walked around thinking about how much dignity I had instead of how wounded I was?

Now, bear with me. I’m not dismissing the wounding. What I am dismissing is the necessity to have a painful life because other people decided how to language my experience. Other people who, I’m guessing, weren’t adopted. I’m pretty sure an adopted person didn’t come up with the word relinquish or wound or, while we are at it, adopt. I think we would have been more creative and accurate. Wound is pretty good, but what losing my mother did at birth left more than leave a mark, you know what I mean? Wound is just a start.

Anyway. What I am saying is I would be a lot more interested in seeing what kind of life I would lead if I felt dignified rather than wounded.

Anything is possible.

The eyes are bright.

The hands are steady.

The heart continues its pulse, with a beat Keith Richards, somewhere, is madly working to imitate, that wild, craggy, strange, and dignified man.