Adoptive Parents Have No Idea How Tightly Their Hand Covers Their Child's Mouth

I am going to tell you a secret.

I feel like asking you to send me $5.00.

That’s not the secret. That’s just how I’m feeling.

I feel like writing this is going to cost me something. It would make it easier if I knew there was cash money waiting at the end of the page, but I think there is something important for you to know, so keep your five bucks. I’ll go to Camp Suck it Up and get this done.

A few years ago I wrote a memoir called You Don’t Look Adopted. The purpose was to describe what it was/is like to live with a brain that was affected by the trauma of relinquishment and adoption. At the time, I thought claiming that adoption was traumatic was a wildly bold move, one that most people might dismiss as crazy and unfounded. Now I know it’s like talking about global warming. Most people see the trauma of motherloss as a real thing.

The deeper purpose of writing my story was to save my own life. I felt like a spinning top that could not find stillness. The older I got, the more tightly and the more wildly I spun, and this made no sense to me. What was my problem? Why could I not hold on to a spouse, a job, even a pet?

I wrote my book to name the problem.

The problem was I’d experienced an event my body and mind had interpreted as traumatic because I was not able to talk about it or think about it as a cohesive story it since it had happened before I had language.

All my life, I had walked around with an alarm in my brain telling me I was in trouble. I had no idea that the rest of the world didn’t have the same alarm—I just knew there was something off with me, something wrong. The problem was that the rest of the world didn’t know the language of motherless and so could not teach me, mirror me, help me feel seen, safe, so I could not focus, could not stay still. The rest of the world was busy telling me I was lucky and chosen, and so I walked around feeling like a spinning insane asylum.

My internal world did not match my external world, not until, that is, I fucked up my external world: failed a class, stole from the local convenience store, dropped out of college, dated men who didn’t care about me. Then I could breathe, sort of. I could feel safe in disaster, for that was what my skin new more than safety, more than love. My skin knew the feeling of I am pregnant and I don’t want to be. My skin knew home as a place that said You are not wanted.

The reason I didn’t write the book when I was in my twenties or thirties or forties was because 1. I didn’t think my adoption was worth writing about since everyone around always said it was no big deal. 2. I didn’t want my (adoptive) parents to think I wasn’t really their child. 3. I didn’t want to kill my (adoptive—how I hate writing that—she was, they were, mine! right?) mom. I was afraid if I wrote about having another mother, it would be too painful for my mom to have to think about since she always cried whenever I brought it up and that she would, maybe, die. Or hate me.

When my mom ended up dying of pancreatic cancer, I wrote my book, and then I thought I was going to die. First of all, losing a mother when you’ve already lost one at birth is horrific. The grief spin was intense and frightening and went on for years after she had died; it went on all the while I was writing my book. It was also shockingly painful to write about things I hadn’t even realized were stored in my mind and body!

I went deep into debt to write my book because I figured it didn’t matter anyway. I figured writing the book was going to kill me, so what did the debt matter.

But then there is this wonderful fact: the 93 days I spent writing the book were the best days of my life. I knew I was doing something magnificent, brave, daring, something that was in alignment with my deepest dreams. I walked the streets of the East Village when I wasn’t writing and I was proud. I was actually doing it! I was writing my book and the universe was supporting me! It had a famous author gave me a place to live. It had friends send me money. It had ideas flow from my brain to the page. I was in communion with something bigger than me when I wrote my book, and that made it a holy experience. Yes, I was lonely and scared and grieving, but I was also alive! I was in collaboration with spirit.

I had no idea who I was any more. I was hands on keyboard. I was words on paper.

I was erasing myself and writing myself at the same time.

(Giving birth to my daughter was not a comparable activity. Pregnancy and birth were things out of my control in many ways. Writing my book took so much more will and commitment, and that’s why, ultimately, I say I am the most proud of having done that. But, at the end of the day, would I want my daughter or my book if I had to choose? No contest. She’s the top of the top of the top. She’s the pie in the sky, the beat in my heart.)

My body created my daughter, but my mind created my book.

When I self-published the book and remained alive, something else happened.

And this is the secret you are getting for free even though I kind of want five dollars for it:

Part of me thought I was supposed to die. I had done the unthinkable. Perhaps the unforgivable. I had written in a voice that was mine. I had become a real person. I had become myself. I had taken off the mask. I was not a good girl. My parents had not adopted a good baby after all. They had adopted a problem.

Even writing this makes me feel sick. I want to say I’m sorry over and over the way I might say Hail Marys if I were a Catholic.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen after I wrote my story, but I didn’t expect to live in what, in some ways, has felt like purgatory. I’ve been waiting for the hammer to drop. I’ve been waiting for the punishment. Some part of my brain thinks I did a terrible thing and that I am in a great deal of trouble. I am not who I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be Anne Heffron, the daughter of Frank and Margery Heffron, but I stepped out onto the stage and announced I was someone else: I was me.

I feel so floaty. So unmoored.

And this is strange because that’s also sort of how I felt before I wrote the book.

It’s a different floaty, though. A different unmoored. Because I also feel grounded in ways I never did before. My life is so different. I don’t spend hours fantasizing about some day, about the day I’ll finally get things right, finally feel on track. I am on track. I am living my dream life on so many levels. It’s just taking some getting used to, this rootedness, this being okay in my body, this having a sense of purpose, of faith, of self-love.

And yet: my mother was not there to hug me after I wrote my book and tell me everything was okay, that she still loved me. She’s out there, dangling.

Do you know what it’s like to love someone so much because she’s your mother and then to turn around and to write a book that talks about all the ways you hurt because she wasn’t really, really, really 100% your mother?

Want to know what that feels like? Ask your right hand to be your left hand. Ask 1 + 1 not to equal 2. Ask the sky to not hold the sun. Ask the alphabet to crumble.

How can I be both a person who is the daughter of one mother, of one father, and also be a person who is the daughter of another mother, another father? How can I be a person who in some ways is the daughter of none of those people?

It’s such a gross feeling.

It makes me feel not entirely human. It makes me feel wrong.

Now we come to the secret: since I wrote my book, I have not had health insurance. The secret part of this secret is that I made a choice not to have health insurance. If I’d really, really, really wanted it, I would have found a way.

Not having health insurance is scary. Not having health insurance can mean you may die because you don’t get mammograms or pap smears or have suspicious moles checked. Not having health insurance means you don’t get glasses even when things are blurry. Not having health insurance means you don’t get your teeth checked even though your gums are bleeding.

Not you: I.

Part of my brain didn’t think I deserved to live after writing the book that I wrote. Part of my brain, the part that was terrified of hurting my mother, has been punishing me ever since I made my adoption story public. And, truly, this belief had been going on for a long, long time, for part of my brain has thought I haven’t deserved to live since I was born and my mother disappeared.

That’s how deeply the (usually) unspoken deal made with the parents can settle into the brain of an adopted person: You be our child, 100% ours, and we will take care of you. Otherwise, you’re out.

When I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted, I wrote myself out, and since my mother wasn’t around to do the job herself, I was doing it for her.

Does this sound crazy to you? It feels crazy to write. I’m all over the place. This blog post is a mess.

Welcome to the brain of an adopted person.

Now here’s the amazing thing, the glory moment: starting January 1st, I have health insurance. It feels like a miracle. I earned the money; I made the call; I filled out the paperwork. It costs over $800 a month. Being an adult is not for sissies. But, good god, do I feel excited. I have permission to live! I am safe! I can go to a doctor if I have a fever!! I’m not going to die in a gutter because I was not valuable!!

I made a new decision this year:

I’m worth insuring!!!

Here is why I am telling you about all of this insanity: if you are an adoptive parent, you may well have no idea how your child is hurting him or herself in the effort of not hurting you. You may have no idea the wild ways your child is punishing him or herself just for existing. What would happen if one day at breakfast you gave your child, your adult child perhaps, a truth serum? Does this scare you? Does talking about adoption scare you? Does the fact that your child have other parents scare you, make you sad? However much it scares you or makes you sad, I’m betting it makes your child feel ten times worse.

And that terrible feeling is keeping your child in a prison of his or her own making. She or he is living in the shell of I am trying not to hurt my parents. It’s a tight, lonely place.

It’s a place full of sickness and self-harm and crazy behaviors. It’s a place that’s low on oxygen and self-esteem.

The antidote is curiosity: Who are you?

The antidote is honesty: I love your blonde hair. I wonder which one of your parents had curls like that.

The antidote is therapy and connection with other adopted people and as much information about the birth parents and their families as possible.

When you sit across from the child you adopted, the child who may well be a full-grown man or woman at this point, silently ask them, Do you silence yourself for me? What are you not saying because I am here?

And then say those things out loud.

Welcome to the world of I love you, but…

I love you, and…

I love you.

and

I love me.

And, finally, if you yourself took the truth serum, dear adoptive parent, what would you say that you are hiding deep inside yourself? What are you so afraid to say? What would happen if you said it?

Secrets are the death of the family, the soul, the space between us.