How Relinquishment Created a Fisted Heart or Singing My Way to Love
I am two people. There is the entitled person. I was born to this world and I deserve all that everyone else around me has: a mother, a father, a nice car, skin that doesn’t age. I deserve a house on the Vineyard and your attention and the right to vote. I deserve my original birth certificate and access to my biological family. I deserve money in the bank and lots of free time. I am also the unwanted person. She is headed for the gutter in every way imaginable. She’ll either throw her there herself or find someone to do it for her.
Being these two people keeps me so busy!! I have to do something amazing and then fuck it up! Do you know the kind of willpower and focus and courage and idiocy this takes?
Hello, Smith College! Thank you for admitting me into your hallowed halls.
Fuck you, Smith College! I’ve tried you on for ten days and you are not for me. I’m going to get on my bike and find the Mass Pike and go home.
Last night I had dinner with another adopted person. We both struggle with depression, and we talked about wanting love, wanting a partner who felt like an equal. We talked about our hearts, the tightness of them, and the fear that we will die without having bloomed.
It’s funny how, in your twenties and thirties and forties you can act like you don’t give a shit. You can throw yourself around and to all the world it looks like your heart is like everyone else’s, and then, slowly, or maybe overnight, the fake gold or the dusting of glitter wears off, and you are down to what you started with—the terrified, shocked heart of she left and I will die without her.
How can you love when you are in shock? How can you love when you think you will die if the person you may have not even met yet will crawl into your heart, love it open, and then leave?
How can you love if your heart is more no than yes?
How can you flip the story of relinquishment so it works in your favor?
She left me so I could love.
I can love with all my heart because it was broken open as soon as I was born.
I am looking at how to change my stories of relinquishment (my mother didn’t want me…my mother didn’t keep me…I was born but then my mother never touched me…) because they do not help me love. My story could just as easily be one about creation: two people who didn’t even know each other
I think I was conceived in March of 1964. The #1 hit song at that time was She Loves You by the Beatles. My birth parents met, so the story goes, at a party. There’s a good chance this song was the music the egg and sperm danced to as they decided to step up to the plate of creation and try to make a baby.
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah You think you've lost your love Well, I saw her yesterday-ay It's you she's thinking of And she told me what to say-ay She says she loves you And you know that can't be bad Yes, she loves you And you know you should be glad She said you hurt her so She almost lost her mind But now she says she knows You're not the hurtin' kind She says she loves you And you know that can't be bad Yes, she loves you And you know you should be glad, ooh She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah With a love like that You know you should be glad You know it's up to you I think it's only fair Pride can hurt you, too Apologize to her Because she loves you And you know that can't be bad Yes, she loves you And you know you should be glad, ooh She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah With a love like that You know you should be glad With a love like that You know you should be glad With a love like that You know you should be glad Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
I’m going to try singing that song for a while and see what happens next.
