Self-Expression and Fear or The Deep End of the Pool is Where You Can Do Backflips

In a perfect world, being a kid is like being in a swimming pool. We hold on the sides of our parents, and then, curious, ever stronger, we head for the deep end. The love and safety of our parents is the world in which we swim, but the movements of our arms and legs are our own.

Do you remember what it was like the first time you let go of the pool’s edge and kicked off on your own? Chances are you were so young you have no memory of this, but chances are good that you remember the day you almost drowned.

Swimming is not for sissies.

The temptation is to hold on, to stay in the shallow end, feet on the floor of what we know, but then our circulation goes stagnant and the brain gets bored, shrinks.

When you are uncertain about your parents’ ability to take care of themselves or of you, leaving the side of the pool for the deep end can either be a no-brainer—Bye!!—or something that feels impossible: If I leave you not forever, but just to grow up and become myself, will you die? Will you disappear? Will you stop loving me? Will I die?

The price of becoming a fully-realized human being is that you have to leave behind the notion of being someone’s child. For adoptees, this can be especially challenging. Our parents, after all, did not say they wanted an adult. They said they wanted us as we were, a baby, a child. They said, “You are mine.” They said, “I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost you.” They said, “You made our family complete.” (Some parents say other, horrible things, but I’m not talking about those people here. That’s for another post, a post about why people run away from home at age 6, age 8, age 16. That’s the post that asks why adoption agencies don’t screen more carefully for narcissists and addicts and abusers.)

This post is about adoptees (and all people) who are afraid of becoming themselves.

The boldest thing I’ve done so far was to write a book about what it was like to be adopted. I climbed the top of that mountain and, from the top, I yelled my name. And then you know what? I packed up my stuff, left the gorgeous apartment the famous author had lent me and went back to California and slept on the floor of my friend’s apartment.

Why did I sleep on the floor? I felt it was what I deserved. I was the person who hadn’t been wanted by her mother. I was the person who spent her life both building herself up and then trying to throw herself away. I slept on the floor because, in part, I felt bad. By writing my story without thinking about how I wanted to live after I wrote the book I cemented myself to the side. I told myself straight back into the past.

But, as with all things adoption, the opposite was also true. I felt like a rock star. I’d accomplished my dream! I’d written a book! So there I was, a rock star counting quarters in the hope that she had enough for a bag of tortillas.

You know what that floor was? The side of the pool.

By agreeing to sleep on the floor, I was staying a child. I was saying, Look, I can’t take care of myself. Look, Mom and Dad, I need you to rescue me again and again so we can live out our story: I was the baby who wasn’t wanted by the mother who created her and then you came and made me yours. You loved me, kept me alive. I can’t exist without you.

The adoptee birth story is a beautiful, sick tale of I am dead without you.

Next time I write a book, I’m going to walk to the front of the boat and talk about the past from there, all the while being in the present moment, all the while facing the future. (Note to self: it’s okay to exist.)

In sixth grade, I drew my shoe. I wore these brown boots that I loved, and the art teacher helped me with some of the details: the shadows, the tight wrap of the laces. I was so proud of that drawing, so proud of the extra attention the teacher had given me because she’d loved what I’d done and had wanted to help me get it right. I felt like maybe I had some talent! I wanted my parents to go crazy over what I had done, but they didn’t know just how important that drawing was to me, and so I was the one who put the drawing on the frig, not them. If they’d had drawing talent, the response, I think, would have been different. They would have known to buy me special pencils, nice paper, maybe. Drawing would have been a language and experience we shared.

Ever since, I’d had a distant, tapping desire to draw, but my brain quickly says, “That’s not something you do. Not something you can do,” and so I don’t answer the call. When I really pay attention to my body, I can feel the ache of not drawing. I can feel what I wish I could do that does to me, how it increases my anxiety, makes me less in my body and more in the disappointed fall of not in this life.

The other day my dad asked how much money I got a month from the sales of my book. When I told him the number, he sounded as if he’d asked me for ten dollars and I’d given him a nickel. Here’s the thing: if my father wrote books he’d understand that most writers don’t make a lot of money, and that the money that I did make was freaking cool. I felt awful on the phone—small. I had that old desire to quit life. As a child, the dismissiveness a parent has of our talents can shape the rest of our lives. I held on to the edge of that pool until my mom died in the awful pull of I want to leave you but can’t seem to do it. One of us is going to die if I go out into the deep end on my own.

And, then, of course, one of us did. Shortly afterwards I headed for the deep end and wrote my book. And then I went straight back for the edge of the pool, only it wasn’t even there anymore, so I did the best I could to be the child they had wanted and floundered.

But of course they had not wanted a child that floundered. Or an adult.

Or did they?

A floundering child, adult, is one crying for rescue. The rescuing adult gets to feel they have a purpose, power.

Sweet parents, are you okay with your child being different from you? How carefully do you look for talents the child has that you do not? How well do you celebrate what you do not understand?

And, dear child, what are you afraid will happen if you head for the deep end? What will you lose? And, even more importantly, what will you gain? How will you make the world a better place by letting go?

I want to tell you that my dad is a good man. He tries. He really does. How can he know how his words affect me unless I tell him? The adult me needs to speak up, but the child me hopes he dies before I have to. Why? Because what if I tell him my heart’s thoughts, and he doesn’t hear them? What if I have to re-experience the sick drop of my stomach as a look into the eyes of a man who my brain knows is the most important man in my life and also a stranger, one with whom I have no blood connection?

I also want to tell you that. for as long as my mother was alive, I was physically unable to let go of the pool’s edge. It may have looked like I was swimming, but I never stayed away long, always, always, married, single, even when I was a mother myself, I returned to my mother because there was some unfinished business between us that served as a magnet.

Who are you? Do you love me? Is this love between us real?

If I let go, if I swim to the deep end, does that mean we are no longer connected? Does that mean the story of one day you chose me ends with and then I left you? Does that mean I’m going to have to take responsibility for my actions?

How can I hold on and let go at the same time?

Can you tell me the story of that? Can you tell it to me now?

I want to swim. I want to hold on.

Growing up when you are an adopted child is so confusing!

But the water is so inviting.