The Fairy-Tale Fuckery of Reunion or You Owe Me, Bitches, Part 2

Once when I was in therapy with my second husband, the therapist turned to me and said, “Do you realize he’s a person?” That question shook me out of my fury.

I was not thinking of my now ex-husband as a person. I was thinking about him as a problem that needed to be fixed. I was thinking about him as a knot of untruths. I was thinking of him as a wall between me and the self I wanted to be. I was thinking of him as a series of behaviors that were driving me insane.

All my focus was on him. I conveniently kept myself out of the picture. He needed to be fixed, and I was just the person to fix him.

The poor guy.

When my birth mother told me I had the wrong person the first time I called her on the phone, that my real mother was her cousin who had died in a car crash, I did not feel like a real person—I felt erased or like a dream being. I felt like that little bird who walked around asking everything, Are you my mother? Only instead of asking a steam shovel, I knew I was asking my mother because I had proof. I’d hired a search agency and, after seven or so years, they’d found her. So, if I introduced myself to my mother and was told that, no, I had the wrong person, then the world did not work the way I thought it did. I thought mothers claimed their children. I thought mothers loved their children. If my mother did not love me or claim me, what did that mean?

The way I protected myself was to call my mother The Bitch From New Jersey. Instead of finding compassion, I went to fury because the minute she said I had the wrong person, she also stopped being a person to me and became an adversary. A problem. Something that was not giving me what I wanted.

One reason I did not find compassion in my heart and love my birth mother for the life she had given me was because I did not know what it was like for a woman to birth a child and surrender it to other people. I thought my mother had made a choice. I thought she had decided not to love me.

What I didn’t know was that she had probably had to numb part of her brain to survive birthing a child at a young age and then giving the child to strangers. I was thinking of her as a fully functioning person, but I believe that when a woman gives up her child, something dies inside of her and, in some ways, unless she gets a lot of help and does a lot of work on her traumatized brain and body, she lives in survival mode the rest of her life.

I have heard crazy stories of the things first/birth mothers do. I have heard of them treating the children they gave up like garbage when the child/adult tries to connect later in life. And here’s where some understanding is really helpful: they do this because they feel like garbage. It’s not personal. They aren’t even seeing you. All they are seeing is the screaming fire in their brain that lit up the moment their child left the pull of their skin. We keep thinking all of these things are about us when it’s about trauma, how trauma affects the brain and leaves us blind to the human before us.

I wish I had given my birth mother more space and more gentleness. I am sorry I did not, do not, know better than to live in anger and disregard. Part of me wants to free up the tightness of my aversion and love her. It doesn’t matter that she is dead. It matters that it is a relationship that needs to be addressed and healed.

I want to really care whether or not I was conceived under mutual consent for her sake. The hatred and disregard I feel for her and for her well-being is a mirror for how I feel about myself. I need to change how I feel about her in order to change how I feel about myself. It is almost unbearable to love someone who did not seem to care about me, so I don’t let myself touch those hot-stove feelings I have towards her, but I have the feeling that loving for the sake of loving is an act of grace I am capable of, not loving because things went the way I wanted them to go.

I don’t need her to have embraced me in order to embrace myself. Right?

Perhaps, for her, hiding out, growing me, birthing me and then finding a home for me was the best kind of embrace she could offer. Perhaps I need to redefine what it means to be held and loved by a mother in order to find compassion and acceptance in my heart.

I met my birth father once, and I was grateful that he flew to my town and spent a day and a half with me. And I wanted more. I wanted his wife to accept me. No, more than wanted. I thought she was an idiot for refusing to have a child he had sired before they had met in his life now. I thought she was mean. Small. I went again to anger because part of my brain told me I must not be good enough, because if I’d been better somehow, he would have not been able to resist me. He would have insisted I be a part of his life.

You know what’s funny? My birth father’s brother and his son and his son’s family took me in. They flew me to their home, they housed me, they fed me, they loved on me hard. And yet all I’ve done is to go on and on about all I have not gotten.

I am standing here with a full bowl of food, crying because this other bowl I have is empty.

I think I have the right to have both bowls full. I think the world owes me something. I think adopted people are owed the truth of their origins. I think I am owed the respect of family members to meet me even though I don’t fit the lifetime narrative of their family. I didn’t exist for their whole lives, and now here I am, a sister, a cousin, and aunt, and I want in.

I am embarrassed by my level of entitlement.

The thing is, I do think people operate better in the world when they have the facts of who they are. It’s hard not knowing your lineage, your people. It’s scary to feel you might have come from another planet. So there’s that. We are pack animals. We need to belong.

But I also think I have been in an extended tantrum that is very first world, the anger of the privileged child. If I were hungry I would be more interested in getting my next meal instead of having the luxury of wanting to know my roots. There’s that Rolling Stones song:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

I read The Primal Wound and other books about adoption and I saw that I had been wounded, hurt, damaged. I wanted the care I hadn’t received. I wanted to be claimed. I wanted and I wanted and I wanted. I was owed. Fuck everyone else. If I want something and the world doesn’t give it to me, I’ll just take it. The world took from me, so now I’ll take from it. I felt I had the right to be a thief, a liar. Why? Because the world had stolen from me, had lied to me. I didn’t even know my real name until I was in my twenties.

As if the name I’d been given at birth was any more real then the name I was given at ten weeks old.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t get those things, and that time’s over. The opportunity is gone. The train left the station, and I’m standing there, yelling at the bare tracks as if that will pull the train back into view. The worst part about writing this is that this is the kind of comment non-adoptees say to me that drives me berserk and makes me feel not seen or understood, so now here I am, saying the worst things to myself and meaning them.

Grow up, Anne. Life is not just about roots. It’s not just about parents. Life is about you. Your friends. Your work. Pull your head out of your ass and face the really hard stuff: see what happens when you stop blaming others for your problems and make the most of the life you have.

Yesterday morning I got a notice from Pam Cordano that she had changed the status of our relationship to “sisters” and Facebook wanted to know if I agreed.

I felt blessed. I had a sister. I totally agreed. I felt like a balloon.

I have the power to make my own family, to surround myself with energy that resonates with me and feeds me, energy that I feed in return.

Then my birth father’s nephew wrote to me to tell me how much he loved me. Earlier in the day I had sent a message wishing his daughter, the sweetest 17 year old on the planet, a happy birthday. Later in the day, his dad, my uncle, wrote to say he loved me.

When I look for birds, I see them everywhere. When I look for trouble, I see that everywhere, too.

I am trying to be more humane, more human.

In our adoptee retreats, Pam Cordano taught about the default network versus direct experience. She said our default network is the looping thoughts that try to keep us safe by seeing and reporting on the worst in everything. Our default network reminds us of all that is bad and dangerous and threatening. Our default network steals the show because it is the fastest part of our brain.

When I worked at the girls’ juvenile hall, the counselors used to try to get the girls to cross their arms and take three breaths before reacting to a situation. This is an attempt to override the default network and get the girls into direct experience, the moment that is right in front of them. It’s an effort to get the girls to use their words instead of shooting or stabbing someone.

I feel like living as an adopted person is an opportunity to live forever in the decision to chose between direct experience and the default network. Since my brain was created from and born into trauma, I am especially hardwired to live in fight or flight mode, but that is not a generous place from which to operate. To my brain, it feels right to operate from trauma. It feels right to talk about how my needs were not met. It feels healthy. Sort of. It also feels compulsive and alienating. Recently I have started to feel trapped in this cage of complaint that is of my own making.

There’s a blind man I used to see walk to his work when I lived in San Jose. He had his red-tipped stick, and he walked slowly, but with great dignity, his stick sweeping the way before him. Some might say that walking down the street like that would be torture, the fear that any second you could run into a wall or stumble into traffic. But if you saw his face, you would not think he was in any kind of discomfort. More often than not, he had a bit of a smile.

I imagine his experience of getting from A to B and my experience are completely different. I imagine, when I really think about it, his journey is probably more interesting than mine because he is probably more aware. He is not walking and texting on his cell phone at the same time. He’s just walking, he is not separate his action—he is walking from and in that way he is closer to everything that makes up this world. He is part of it all.

What if trauma has made me seeing impaired, and the “stick” of direct experience is what will get me from one place to another in the truest, most vital way? What if again and again I chose to cross my arms and take three breaths before I respond to something that “triggers” me? What if I am more committed to being myself than to reacting to stimulus from the outside world that my brain tells me I should respond to in order to stay safe?

What if, in this way, by focusing on the present moment, I find a way out of the story of relinquishment, abandonment, and loss? What if the air I breathe is truer than the words that float in my head and in the tissues of my body? Or what if I’m not looking for a way out of this story? What if all of this mindfulness and acceptance is a way in?

I am not denying the importance of experience. I am not saying that adopted people should not strive to find their roots, their stories, their families.

I’m saying I know there’s another way to deal with all this craziness of the primal wound that allows me to be more able to love and leaves me less likely to bite your head off if you tell me I should be grateful for what I have, grateful that I wasn’t aborted.

Anyway. I’ve put so many words here, and I’m starting to forget what the point was. I think I’m trying to say something I have never articulated before, and so I am going around in circles, searching.

I am coming to the end of this time of being alone. I feel like I have paid my dues, whatever they were and to whomever I was paying them. I want to be normal. Have a normal life. Have a dog. I don’t want to think of myself as a wound that needs to heal. I want to be a person who goes out for a walk and intentionally tries to do good things.

I want to love, to be more than a visitor. The reunion I’ve been seeking is not with a mother, a father. It’s with the world, with humanity. I want to go from feeling like an alien to feeling like a real person. The whole tantrum of my birth mother should have wanted to meet me is ridiculous. She didn’t. End of story.

Retraumatizing myself can get to be habit. I can find a handful of people who tell terrible stories about being adopted and we can pump each other up to a real high state of upset in no time. This feels safe and familiar and also like I am somehow cheating. It feels dirty and sad.

It’s not about feeling lousy as a way to feel at home in my body. That’s an old story.

The new story has to do with how well I am able to listen to myself, how seriously I take my needs, how carefully I tend to my sense of safety in the world.

You don’t owe me anything. Have a wonderful life.

Thank you.

Note to self: We create the world we see.

Leaves move in the windows. I cannot tell you yet how beautiful it is, what it means. But they do move. They move in the glass.

William Gass

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce