Thanksgiving and the Habit of Talking about Adoption and The Space Between Us

I had told myself I wasn’t going to write about adoption. I had told myself I was done, and that I wanted to write about love, but good lord, adoption is just there and there and there. I drove to my brother’s house for Thanksgiving, and part of my brain was telling me, No one there is really your family, and so I have adoption on my mind, and I want to write about it. Still.

My daughter was next to me in the car as we drove. She is really my family because my body created her body. The other people are family by paperwork. They feel like family. I call them family. But I also know what it’s like to have family and not have family at the same time, and that’s a hard thing not to write about. It’s like, if I was hungry and there was a loaf of banana bread on the counter, but for some reason the space between me and the banana bread prohibited me from touching it, I would begin to obsess over both the space and the bread. In the same way, I obsess over both my family and the space between me and my family.

How much of this is my limbic brain fucking with me? How much of me thinking about the space between me and my family is my limbic brain getting me ready to be abandoned, left behind, forgotten?

How deeply are the grooves of thinking worn in my brain: You are adopted. You don’t know your past. Your past is important. Without your past, how can you understand your present? Maybe you are unlovable. Maybe there is something wrong with you. She did, after all, let you go.

Having thought loops that bring us down is not just an adoptee thing. This is a human thing. And it’s so annoying. You can take a perfectly good person on a perfectly good day, and then a negative thought loop gets activated and suddenly you are in Shit City with no path home.

I am beginning to listen to myself a lot less. I feel like nature has a lot more truth to tell me about the world than my own brain. When I walk in the woods, I’m not hearing the chatter of negative self-talk in the outside world. The trees are smarter than that, and they don’t have vocal cords (thank you, God). The are so busy being trees they don’t worry about what the grass is saying about them. And the sky! It’s so itself! And the rocks! The just sit there and don’t feel bad about it!

What I want to tell you is this Thanksgiving I went into my nephew’s room to visit Zeus, the bearded dragon, and I watched that strange, still creature sit there and soak up the heat of the lamp, and I thought about how we both have lizard brains, and I wanted more from myself than to sit in a cage, year after year, just waiting for the next cricket.

I am truly grateful this Thanksgiving. If I didn’t have the family that I do, today would not have happened, and it was perfect, and it was just the way it was supposed to be, and I was so lucky to be a part of it.

I just used two words many adoptees hate: grateful and lucky. It’s one thing for me to use them, and it’s a whole other story when I’m told i should use them. They are mine to feel, mine to claim. And I am using them with reckless abandon.

I love my brother so much.

He came to us when he was two years old. He wore a striped shirt and had a double ear infection that wasn’t discovered for days. What if he had gone to another family? What if his mother had been able to keep him? I wish, of course, for her sake and for his, she had been able to, but I am overwhelmed by the fact that because of other people’s misfortune, I got to have someone who turned out to be one of my favorite people in the world as a brother.

A couple of years ago the big wave surfer Frosty Hesson told me he knew the secret to life, and when I waited, silent, he finally said, “Glide.” Then he took me out into the water and he pushed me into the tiny waves and I had so much fun, but I still didn’t understand the whole glide thing. Right before I left Santa Cruz, I was watching the surfers, and I watched one surfer pick a wave, stand up, and do that magical surfer thing of balancing a piece of fiberglass on a wildly moving crest of ocean, and it occurred to me that maybe our life is one wave, and that either we glide on the wave we have, or we fight it, wish we had picked another one, dropped into the water and quit altogether.

Maybe the secret to life is letting the wave carry you, letting a force bigger than you take it where it wants.

I don’t know.

I’m so busy trying to control everything I haven’t given this much thought.

This wave. This ride. This family. This Thanksgiving.

Let go.