Sometimes sleep seems like a forgotten language. My body is like, Rest? But why? You have things to do!

I’ve been thinking about the comment a parent wrote here after reading my post about adoptees walking a tightrope, and, in order to answer, I decided to take on an authority I don’t have, and to speak universally when really I’m just speaking from my own experience. I thought about not replying because any answer I might give won’t be enough—it will be one paint splotch on a bare wall, but at least it will be a start, so here goes.

This is the comment:

We struggle with our daughter who refuses to acknowledge her tight rope, her emotions, her feelings, her history, her grief, her loss, etc. She shuts down or goes straight into fight/flight whenever we try to bring up any conversation about her life experiences. We feel we have a wealth of loving support available from all the books, support groups, counselors, reflection, study, personal growth, etc. we have gathered over the years and she is still unable to open her heart. We will continue to offer everything we have and pray that one day her heart will soften and she will trust us just enough to get a taste of the unconditional love, support, and comfort she rejects. She deserves so much more than she is willing to accept.

Here’s my response:

I had a friend who was in a terrible car accident, and years later, once when we were sitting at dinner, she scratched at her scalp and a small piece of glass broke through her skin. She dropped the sharp triangle onto the table. “More windshield,” she said. “The last piece came out of my face while I was teaching.”

What if the trauma of motherloss, the primal wound that Nancy Verrier writes about, is a car accident that has embedded jagged pieces of glass inside our bodies? What if these pieces cut our muscles, internal organs and brain, causing messages of distress to travel from the vagus nerve both from the organs to the brain and from the brain to the organs? What if no one can see these glass fragments because no doctor has the right machine, the right kind of x-ray to find them? What if they are things that have to naturally work their way out of the body with the help of time and space and nutritional support and exercise and therapy and other friends who are adopted? What if this process takes decades? What if this process takes a lifetime?

What if the pain these pieces of glass cause the person to act in certain ways, ways that confuse those around them because, to the naked eye, nothing is wrong—the accident happened a long time ago and the person looks fine? What if the parents of this child they adopted believe their love can heal pain of which they can not see the source?

If a body is full of glass shards and the person cries out in pain and is told that everything is okay, that they are safe, loved, and if the person is asked why can’t they just accept the love and relax, then what happens?

The body gets tighter. The barriers between parent and child get thicker.

What if being relinquished and adopted is a body experience that takes time for the wounded person to sit with until the glass fragments finally, if they do at all (many people die with the glass still in their guts and hearts and minds), emerge?

This is what I think happened to me: when I was young, I felt the discomfort of the glass parts but I did not know they were there because I could not see inside my own guts and brain, and no one knew to tell me the story of my pain.

If they had been able to tell me the story of my pain, I might have fought them, hated them for speaking, for putting me in a forever prison of different than. Being different than your friends, particularly when you are young, is its own death sentence. So I don’t have an answer for you here. I don’t know what good all the information you have gathered about the side effects of relinquishment actually does when it comes right down to it. I mean, it’s not nothing, but, it’s clearly not enough.

Now that people are finally talking openly about adoption, we’ll figure it out. How do you make the best of a bad auto accident? The simple answer is that you avoid the accident, but we all know life doesn’t work that way.

When I was young, my body was supple, and I moved like a tornado, and so the pain was not debilitating. It was a confusing thing, a pebble in the shoe, a hair in the eye, but by the time I was 50, my body had so tightened over the years in reaction to the constant rubbing and twisting of the glass bits that the pain had become a fierce, crippling thing, leading me to long bouts of grief and tears. It felt like I was dying, and it was so difficult to believe that an “accident” I had at birth was the cause of all this pain, and so my body stayed hard because I still wasn’t hearing it. I didn’t know how to listen to my body because it was speaking a language no one had taught me. The language of loss.

But then I wrote about the pain, and I met other people who had stories similar to mine, and the pieces of glass started to work their way out. My life at 55 is radically different from my life at 50 primarily because, I believe, I have dropped shard after shard of glass on the table. I am getting to move from reaction to engagement.

This brings me back to the note the adopted parent wrote to me. My answer in brief is to be love but to know that when you decided to adopt, you entered a different universe. The rules you grew up with, rules for living, may well no longer work in this new life you now inhabit. For example, you just can’t hug a burned person the same way you do everyone else.

I think many people adopt babies for the same reason people adopt kittens: they want something soft to protect and love that will love them back. What if you think of an adoptee more like a porcupine? A porcupine doesn’t choose to have quills. It just has them, and this changes the way you can touch it. Hoping that one day the quills will disappear and soft fur will emerge is useless and harmful. What if adopting a child does not guarantee you will receive love back in the same measure you give it (or, I have to say, at all)? Would you still travel this road?

We like our stories to have happy endings, and we force most of our experiences through the funnel of “and then everything was okay,” and I’m here to tell you that I’m doing the best I can in this life with the body and mind I was given: one full of glass shards, and it’s a lot of work to try to keep up with those who weren’t in an accident. I know the ending is supposed to be happy, and so I’m trying. When you look at me with your lipid eyes, wondering why I don’t open to you, I won’t tell you it’s because I can’t. I won’t tell you it’s because I am in so much pain I can’t even process your questions. I won’t tell you because I know you won’t understand. I won’t tell you because maybe I don’t understand myself. I won’t tell you because you are asking a porcupine why it doesn’t purr, and this blindness makes me fear that either you or I are crazy, and this fear makes real communication feel impossible

I believe the best thing you can do as an adoptive parent is to create situations where the body of your child has a chance to relax so the tissues can stop their tight pull that aggravates the cut and rub of the glass fragments against muscles, organs, heart and bone. I stopped being able to do yoga when I was fifty, when I was writing my story and deep into processing the acceptance of the fact that I was wounded, almost mortally, because movement hurt in ways that were sickening, breathtaking.

Maybe having glass bits of trauma work their way out of your body is a little like childbirth—you have to let go in a way that feels like you are going to die because something that feels impossibly large and jagged is coming out of your body. I do Feldenkrais exercises now because the slow, mindful movements feel like warm water to my body. I’m working my way into movement, into embodying my body, the way you might approach a baby deer, slowly, slowly. I’m learning what it means to be in a body that does not have the same glass bits it has been carrying all my life. I’m learning to tolerate painlessness. I’m also learning to move in ways that soften my body and allow the shards that still embed themselves into my guts, my biceps, my paraspinals, to work their way out.

As an adoptive parent, you can help create the space in which your child can have this type of healing experience, but the experience itself is deeply personal. You can’t shed the glass for me. It’s something that’s going to have to happen on its own—on the timetable of the body, my body, not on any agenda you might carry.

Everything I wrote here feels jagged—like this post itself is a piece of glass working its way out of me. It’s not something that feels comfortable or right, but here it is, falling onto the table for both of us to see.