A Secret Confession from an Adoptee for Adoptive Parents

If I don’t tell you this, I won’t be accountable to my actions.

It’s so tempting—to stay quiet, but I wish my parents had better understood how my brain worked when I was a kid. When I was a teenager. When I was an adult.

So I’m going to tell you a story.

I got the opportunity of a lifetime this week--a really cool chance to live out significant dreams I have. It feels like I’ve been treading water for the last three years, and this opportunity would feel like walking steadily on solid ground.

So guess what happened?

I got sick. Instead of being able to name anxiety and fear I got sick, really, really sick. Sick as in I had my friend call an ambulance as I lay my head down on the table and watched the lights go off in my head. One by one, like a series of rooms going dark, the lights shut off and I thought, good lord, this is how I’m going to die? Sweaty and grey in the Fern Bar? Death comes this suddenly? This sloppily? I felt too sick to make calls to tell people I love them, to say goodbye. I was just holding on, wishing I could make it to my car and die there, in the privacy of my own bubble.

Luckily, I had a plastic bag in my pocket. Luckily I was able to creep outside and take care of business, after which I was able to cancel the ambulance, missing the thrill of having paramedics rush in to a crowded bar to rescue me.

(The fact that I ended yesterday’s blog post with the sentence “Call 911 if I don’t write tomorrow” so bizarre. I have never called 911 for myself, and then I end up calling it that day!)

My mother signed me up for dance class when I was little, and before she was supposed to take me to the second class, I desperately negotiated, trying to get her to understand why dance class was not for me. Wearing tights, shuffling our feet in the sand, new faces. I didn’t know that world. I wanted home, the place where I knew I was, the place I felt loved, safe. (The irony was, of course, that home was a place of its own drama and tears, but when I was threatened with separation, it became a place of romantic perfection.) My mother caved, and I didn’t go back to dance class.

I also couldn’t make it to school by myself when I was in grade school. I’d get as far as the cross walk and then I’d go back home. My mother tried to bribe me with a Barbie, but I ended up getting the doll even when I kept coming home.

When I was a little kid and at sleep-away camp, I ended up in the nurse’s office. I slept there, avoiding the unknown world of camp. I didn’t have language to describe my experience. My stomach hurt and so that told me I was in trouble and I needed a nest, a mother/nurse to keep me safe. My parents came to pick me up and so I didn’t have to negotiate finding my way outside of home.

This also happened three times in college. I didn’t belong, and so I’d drop out, go home. The problem was that, to the outside world, I did belong. It was like I was walking around crying that I was on fire when I appeared, like everyone else around me, to be just a person making her way in life. No flames.

I want to go home now. I want to curl up in a little nest and feel safe. I don’t want to stride out into the world and expose my skin to the unknown, to go out into a life where I don’t know all the rules. It’s all too big, too much.

Luckily, my friend is a therapist, and so I get to talk this out and have her point out I am in crazy thinking. Luckily, my other friend is a therapist, and I get more of the same. Both women are so encouraging, so understanding. Both are also adopted. They get me, and they aren’t going to let me off the hook because they know it’s possible to both live with trauma and to thrive.

I can’t imagine how hard it would be to be the parent of an adopted child. The messages are so mixed. I would just let my kid quit everything, live at home forever. I would bring my child breakfast in bed and tell them it was okay they hadn’t showered in three days, that hibernating was a natural thing. Even as an adoptee myself I would probably do those things because I would feel so bad for them! I would give them all sorts of concessions because they were wounded, fragile.

Yuck.

There has to be another way. This is why I tell adoptive parents they should have an adoption-competent (more than competent—rock star level!) therapist on speed dial. I don’t think raising an adoptive child is something that was meant to be done in the privacy of your own home. I think you need a village to support an endeavor like that!

It’s taking a village to get me to grow up as I’m here at 55. I need all the support and understanding and encouragement I can get because my body is terrified, and I can’t believe the lengths it will go to to keep me a child. Really, you’re going to try to kill me out in public? You are going to incapacitate me, make it so I can’t get to my own car?

Okay, sweetheart. I get it. You are scared. You are a little baby who had the unthinkable happen when you went from the inside world to the outside world, and your life seemed to disappear just as the light appeared. The world to your nervous system is a place of grave danger. But, sweetheart, that loss is just a memory now. It’s not happening. Here, take my hand. Breathe. Give a name to your fears. Talk about your stomach, the need to throw up. What are you holding on to? What are you letting go of? What are you so afraid of losing?

What would happen if you walked out the door whole, strong, independent, fulling accepting the fact that she’s never coming back to infant you and that you survived. You made it.

You are here.

Now what are you going to do?

I am here. You are not alone.

Keep breathing.

The world is scarier to you than it is to most people. You don’t have to fake that you feel okay. Talk. Let it out. You are not alone even though your brain is certain you are. Things are not as they appear. Your life is not as you see it. You are not alone.

I promise.