A Bathtub Full of Money
When I used to ride my bike a lot, I had a riding partner who liked to pass the miles by playing the game “What would you do if you won the lottery?”
I hated this game because chances were extraordinary I was never going to win the lottery and, in asking the question of myself, I was implying that my life as it was could be a better. A lot better—millions and millions of dollars better.
It was like asking someone on a high school track team to describe herself as an Olympic gold medalist. Suddenly being a member of the team was not special enough. She could be so much better if only the virtually impossible happened and she suddenly had a different body.
I know my friend had not asked How would you make your life better? I know he had asked What would you do? but I still found the question disruptive. I was out on the hills of Cupertino on my bike, working my ass off, and my friend was telling me there was still more to reach for—more that was a shortcut to success: for a couple of dollars and a willingness to gamble, I could conceivably change my life by hitting the jackpot.
I felt as if his question was undermining my whole life. That what I was doing—working brick by brick to build a life for myself and grow into the person I wanted to become—could be upended by a random string of numbers. MEGABUCKS! and suddenly my adult life of brickwork would be not a worthy endeavor because I no longer had to labor for material things in my life. A big new house, a fancy new car, a facelift (!), hell, a bodylift (!!), new jeans, undies, trips to Japan, France, Australia, presents for all my family and friends—for you, dear reader!!—would be handed to me by the state and by all the people who had spent hard-earned dollars praying that, just once, they could get a break and fill their bathtubs with cash. They could sleep at night and not worry about finding a way to get health insurance, and feel hopeful for the first time in years, that the terrible pain in their back could finally get some attention. But when the numbers are announced, it is not they who get to sigh with relief. It is the other guy, again.
If I won the lottery, all my hard work and focus would suddenly become…the stupid stuff I did before I magically became a millionaire.
When I was a little kid and upset that my mother had asked me to sweep the floor, I reached deep into my quiver and told her that when my real mother came back to get me, she was going to be very angry. The arrow sank in my mom’s heart, more deeply than I had expected, and she ran, wounded. I never said that again, but I lived with the knowledge that the life I was living was shadowed by another life, the life I would have lived if my first mother had kept me. This mother that I had at home with me, this other mother, was not the real one. Even though I loved her. Even though she felt real to me. Oh! The confusion! The mother that was my mother was not really mine! Oh! How I loved her! Oh! How I hated her! Better to erase this life altogether and start again, somehow.
Fantasy is a way to escape the dark corners of being alive. Instead of talking with my mom or a therapist about these issues, I escaped. I got high from eating sugar. I ran endless miles around our town. I skipped school, hid out, avoided commitment as a way to avoid being completely myself.
Since I was small, I have loved to read. I love the escape of fiction. I love to think life can be more or different than what it is. I love to think I can be more or different than who I am. A healthy imagination is a wonderful thing, a house with doors and windows that open—a place to live, to take up residence. But it also becomes a place to hide and to stay singular. If you asked me whether I would like to go to a party or stay at home alone and read, I would 99% of the time pick the latter, and although you could easily argue that this is because I’m inherently an introvert, I feel in my guts that I'm avoiding other human beings because part of me, my skin, my personality, my brain, feels vulnerable, not fully cooked, and I’m afraid if someone gets their fingerprints all over me, I’ll lose myself.
Part of being an adoptee for me has been the ability to turn myself into a blank slate or an unfired vessel—malleable clay—when I meet a new person. This is, after all, what my parents wanted when they got me. They tucked away my paperwork, my history, changed my name, didn’t tell me I’d had another name for the first ten weeks of my life. This was normal behavior on their part. They got their fingerprints all over me, and I become one of them, one of the family. This is what people did when they adopted babies, they claimed them, whole. If I walk into a party and am completely Anne, the guilt and shame I feel afterwards is overwhelming. I feel the way you might if you went to a party and loudly paraded around naked, exclaiming all the while how wonderful you thought you were.
It’s better just to stay at home and read magazines or books or watch TV shows and fantasize about what my life would be like if I…had cool clothes, if I lost ten pounds, if I were smarter, were prettier, had a partner, a pet, a career that fit me like a glove. The spiral end of this kind of thinking is, I could have been raised by so many other people. I could have grown into an entirely different person. I am not who I am supposed to be.
This kind of thinking, I have realized, is, a narcotic. It is numbing. It can also get me high. Low. Thinking about the life I didn’t lead is like wondering what I would do if I won the lottery. Neither happened. I am living the life I am living because that’s the one I have.
Allowing myself to wish my mother had kept me is like wishing a dog would remain a puppy or that my friend Andrea was still alive or that I was six inches shorter. I’m burning through brain power I could use to imagine my future of my dreams to rehash the past. This is craziness! The past is an idea reduced to stories. It does not have a pulse! I will never be in the past again, no matter how much I fight the way it went down. The only place I’m headed is the future, so I might as well get out of the backseat of the car, peel my sticky face off the rear window, and climb into the driver’s seat.
Let’s take a breath and regroup. This is all moving so quickly. Listen, Darling. I want to tell you I’m sorry she’s gone. It’s not the story you want to tell yourself, but it’s the story you have. Stop screwing yourself into the ground with your insistent refusal to move forward. You’re not that fun to be with; you are making your body sick with anxiety, and you’re missing out on the movie of your own life because you’ve made a full-time job of selling yourself short.
What are you going to do next is so much more interesting than what would you have done differently. Why? Because one is actionable.
When I reread what I’ve written here, I want to stamp my foot and say NO! YOU CAN NOT MAKE ME PARTICIPATE. I WILL NOT BE ANNE. Part of me hates my life. But when I write that, I know it’s not a part of me that feels true or real. It’s some stagnant, poisoned, old part. It’s so weird. I feel like I’m two people. I’m the one who is living one life, really making a go of it, and that’s the person who is writing this, and then I’m this other fisted, tantrum of a being. NO NO NO NO. I WILL NOT PARTICIPATE. I JUST WANT TO DISAPPEAR.
And this is what, when people say, But adoption does not affect everyone, and so you should be fine, they don’t know: when a baby is born and removed from its mother, the damage to the body and brain of both mother and child is comparable to nothing. And so this is why people don’t get it. Maybe it’s one of those you had to be there things.
Maybe one way for people to acknowledge, accept, and to at least try to understand adoption trauma would be to consider what it would be like if an alien was discovered that had sex by burping. We would not understand because our brain could not process the experience. We would just see a burping alien and have no idea why it gave him or her such intense feelings. Or, maybe, getting people to acknowledge and accept adoption trauma is like people trying to picture God. Our brains are so small, so human, so self-obsessed! I have the feeling that until you have experienced the trauma of relinquishment, your brain is too small to understand it.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions. It doesn’t mean you can’t be curious, kind, open-minded. And this is also true for me. I can ask questions of myself. I can be curious, kind, open-minded. I can look at the part of me that screams NO and approach it as you might a barking dog, slowly, hand outstretched, with tenderness and love.
The part that says NO is the tired baby part. It’s so loud it gets a lot of my attention, but it’s finally starting to bore me. Like, come on, don’t you have another song you can sing? Another dance you could do? It’s the same routine day after day. When I was a kid, my mother signed me up for dance classes, and I cried my way out of going to the second class because I was afraid. I fantasized that the teacher didn’t like me. That the other kids didn’t like me. That I couldn’t do what the teacher would ask and I would get in trouble. I didn’t like doing what wasn’t familiar. I didn’t know if I was okay in a place where I didn’t feel in control or know the rules. My mother let me stay home, not knowing that my scared body/mind needed the stretch and stress of the new so I could grow into a person who could handle leaving for college, who could get married, leave the familiar for the new.
Living in fantasy lets me avoid some of the nitty gritty of life. It lets me stay in my head where I feel in control instead of being out in the world. It lets me imagine being married instead of going out on a date and feeling annoyed because the person is a human being.
If I won the lottery, I would buy a small house on the Vineyard, one in Santa Cruz, an apartment in New York City, and another apartment in Florence.
I’d lead writing retreats in my living rooms.
I’d get a dog.
And some black boots.
And whatever you want, Darling. In triplicate.
