A Gift to Give Your (Adopted) Child at Bedtime

First off: I’m not a therapist. All of what I’m about to tell you came from my own head, me, an adopted person who writes about adoption and who knows a lot of adopted people but who has had no special schooling in what adoptees need except that I have lived through being adopted in a world that does not recognize that losing your mother when you are young is trauma and I survived. So there’s the disclaimer.

I have not felt well recently—at one point, lying on the floor, I Googled signs of a heart attack. This whole week, every time I walked up the stairs I was out of breath and I felt like I was going to die. It felt as though everything was wrong. So wrong. Wrong as in, my life is like a car that is about to slam into a wall I can’t even see. Wrong as in, Oh, so this is what the beginnings of a panic attack might feel like. Holy shit. That stuff is scary. I can’t breathe!

I have been blogging regularly for about three years. It’s just something I do. Wake up, write a blog post, move about my day, maybe write another one. I have about four thousand readers, and it’s a wonderful feeling when someone leaves a comment telling me my post helped them or that they liked it or that, best of all, that they love me. (I’m a cheap date—just tell me you love me and I’m all yours. Not really, but sort of.)

Last week I wrote a post that a lot of people shared, and suddenly I had 56,678 readers. This may sound exciting or cool, and it is, but it also makes me feel sick. Who are those people? How did this happen? How does a person go from 4,000 to 50,000? I didn’t get it. That’s more people than lived in my hometown when I was growing up. I feel like 50,000 is a lie, a random number Squarespace created to make me feel good about myself, maybe.

I feel both empowered and powerless, for if the number 56,678 is a lie, then I am excited for no reason. What I think is real is not real.

I want to talk about executive function. It’s the management system of the brain. It helps us set goals, plan, and get things done. The three main areas of executive function are working memory, cognitive flexibility (flexible thinking), and inhibitory control (includes self-control). Executive function helps us pay attention, organize, plan, prioritize, start and complete tasks, understand different points of view, regulate emotions, and self-monitor (keep track of what you are doing).

One sign a person struggles with executive function is when he or she has trouble following directions or a sequence of steps. From what I’ve read over the past few years, I believe the trauma a child’s brain has to cope with when he or she loses their mother at a young age often affects the future health of the brain’s ability to carry out executive function activities.

Seth Perler has a tutoring business in Colorado where he specializes in executive function. An adoptive dad told me about Seth. The dad also told me something Seth doesn’t talk about in his marketing materials is that he’s adopted. This doesn’t prove anything, but I think it’s interesting. I also think Seth might be a great resource for you if you are a student who is struggling or a parent of a child who is struggling in school because of executive function issues.

Here’s the connection to my anxiety and executive function: I can’t see the steps of how I got from a writer of a blog with 4,000 readers to a writer of a blog with 56,678 readers. And this lack of understanding, this lack of seeing, makes me incredibly anxious, makes me feel I was hiking a mountain that suddenly disappeared, leaving me unmoored, lost.

It’s sort of like when you are told you are adopted, and you don’t get it. How did you go from the belly of one woman to the lap of this other person? How does that work? I mean, the stories I was told as a child left out a whole bunch of steps such as why? how? when, exactly? what exactly was said? what was I wearing? what did she sound like? what did she smell like? why did I go to you and not another couple? what really, really, really happened?

We love movies because we see how people go from point A to point B. We hate when the narrative is broken and significant details are left out. (What?—how did that guy get from the bottom of the mountain to the top?? And why are they calling him by a different name? I hate this movie. The director clearly doesn’t give a shit about the viewer. I’m leaving.)

When I’m out walking and talking to someone on the phone and they ask me where I am, I usually laugh. I have no idea where I am. Most of the time I feel like I was just dropped where I am standing, and I can’t tell my location and I can’t really tell you how I get there, either. Maps make no sense to me. Maps are someone else’s story, someone who understands getting from A to B is a linear process that can be traced.

That tracing from A to B thing does not happen in my brain.

I was born. There was a big gap, a void, and then I was with my parents. The way I understand life is different from people who have a cohesive narrative that tells the story of their childhood. I can tell my daughter about being pregnant with her, giving birth to her, taking her home, raising her with her dad and then as a single parent. My parents could not tell me the same story. There was a gap in the narrative, and so, to deal with the gap, a decision was made that the gap did not matter.

But it affected the way I see the world. For me, A to B is not a real thing, not a thing that can be honestly connected with a line. That means anything can happen at any time. This means the rules the rest of the world base their lives on—if a person does this, then that happens—do not apply to me. It’s one reason, I think, so many adoptees feel like aliens.

I need someone to tell me a bedtime story of how I got from 4,000 to 56,678.

Something like this:

One day your friend Erin created a blog for you, and you wrote your first post. (At this point, dear reader, I want to stop writing. Connecting the dots is hard. It hurts my brain. It feels like trying to put two opposing magnets together, but I am going to do it. If I stop doing things every time they feel hard, I’m not going to have a very interesting life.)

It was scary to put yourself out into the world like that, to have opinions, to be a person saying her voice was a thing that mattered, and even though you secretly waited for God to send a lightning bolt from the heavens to take you out, you kept writing, and the more you wrote, the more you found you had to say.

(Aaaah! I want to quit here!)

One day not too long ago, you felt ashamed about how much your writing focused on adoption. You felt you had overstayed your welcome at the table of the world with this particular topic, and you thought it was time to talk about something else so people didn’t get tired of you or push you away, so you said you were done writing about adoption. You said you were going to write about love.

But then people wrote to you and asked you to keep writing about adoption, and , when you let yourself listen to yourself, you heard that your brain felt punished because it was not done with that topic. It had so much more to say. And so you decided that, oh, well, you were going to be the person who wrote about adoption maybe until she died, and that was okay, that was your purpose. And then your brain went on fire with excitement. Your brain opened all these secret doors and started sharing its deepest secrets with you and you just wrote and wrote and wrote. And that, dear child, is when all the people came to read what you wrote. It’s because people knew you had gone to the deep place, and you were writing from a place not everyone has accessed.

To have someone else knit together for me how I got from A to B is such a relief. My brain can rest. I feel less lost, more grounded. Safer.

The other day I had a private lesson with my yoga teacher Kent Bond because I couldn’t stand up straight and I felt like I was having that heart attack I talked about in the beginning of this piece.

He had me lie on the floor with my knees bent and he talked meditation story to me. He talked about the purple light my body was absorbing from the earth every time I inhaled.

I inhaled and I felt the purple light. I felt my back soften in the way a child’s face softens before the child starts to cry. My back was so hungry for this gentle light. Tears ran down the sides of my face. My brain was screaming at me YOU ARE NOT SAFE. My brain was begging me to keep tight, to keep on high alert.

Kent told me then to imagine a golden light every time I inhaled, to imagine my belly was reaching for this light. Oh! The softness! The yearning in my body for this light! I thought about what it was like to be a child and to be lying on the beach next to my parents after a day of playing in the ocean, my body well used and tired in the best way, a body that was absorbing the sun like food, like a balm, like love, like home.

My brain screamed louder DO NOT GO THERE! DO NOT SOFTEN! THE GOOD FEELING WILL GO AWAY AND THEN WHERE WILL YOU BE?

My breath caught in my throat. A spasm went through my body. “I feel scared,” I told Kent. “I’m so afraid to let go.”

It was the worst feeling. I felt as though I was on the starting line for a long race I’d already run a million times, was still running even as I was standing still. My hands began to shake. I didn’t know how I was going to maintain this momentum. My adrenals had been stressed since birth. Feeling successful and feeling that if I didn’t keep busting my ass 24/7 was overwhelming. I needed a rest.

Kent touched my belly with his fingertips. “It’s okay, Baby,” he said. “Let go.”

I imagined the sun. I imagined the ocean, my child’s body so thrillingly alive, so fed by the world.

I thought about how what I saw over and over with the people I help to get their voice on paper, the less they tried, the clearer and more powerful the voice was.

I was making a career out of telling people to let go, of telling them they had already done the hard work, and now they just had to relax and let the truth of the story out.

I let my belly soften.

And my back pain went away. My heart calmed.

I felt hope.

I cried some more.

And I just kept breathing, imagining all that light filling my body.

Man, tracing the line from A to B takes so much focus and faith. That line is one of the biggest fairy tales I’ve ever been told.

So now I’m making up my own.

https://sethperler.com/educational-coaching/

https://www.understood.org/en/learning-thinking-differences/child-learning-disabilities/executive-functioning-issues/understanding-executive-functioning-issues