I Can Not Get You Close (Far) Enough or What Adoptee Skin is Like

Want to know what it feels like to have the skin of an adoptee? Or, if not all adoptees, skin like mine?

Get two magnets. Name one baby and one mother. Or picture two people on top of a wedding cake. One magnet is the first person, the other magnet is the second. Play with the magnets for a minute. Feel how when the south pole of one gets close to the north pole of the other, you would really have to put up a fight to keep those two apart. They click, and then it’s like they are glued together.

Remember when you were a kid and you got your first set of legos and you got to feel what it was like to snap one lego onto the other? Remember the satisfaction, the power, of realizing you could snap two things together so they become one?

Remember when you first kissed someone, really kissed someone, when your tongue was just as much in their mouth as their own tongue was? Remember thinking you were dissolving into that other person, that your bodies were becoming one? Remembering thinking that sex was going to be amazing? That you were going to get to disappear into another body?

Now take the two magnets and try to have the similar poles match. Feel the invisible force that makes one magnet slide off the other so they will not touch.

That invisible force separating two magnets, two people, that feeling of the desire for connection but the feeling of revulsion or fear of it at the same time?

That’s called trauma. That’s called I can not get you close enough because ultimately you or I always slide off. That’s called I can not get you far enough because I really need to be alone with this skin that feels like it’s three sizes too small.

The problem is that the body knows what it feels like to connect. The body, the skin, cries for connection because we are human and we were born to be held, to be touched. Trauma, however, forms an invisible force field around the body and makes the solid click seem impossible because it keeps not happening. It’s a funny force field because sometimes it switches on us, pulls us to people and pulls people in to us; it makes us want touch and more touch and more touch. If only enough people touch us, maybe one will stick.

So sometimes we pull you towards us, and sometimes we push you away. What do you expect when a body is created from a body that then disappears? Skin can not be trusted.

Adoptees can be so confusing! We are like all humans, only more so. So many of our behaviors are just exaggerated versions of yours, you civilians.

I was obsessed with deep sea fishing for years. I would watch the fishermen hook a fish, carefully reel it in so it didn't get free of the hook, and I would watch them bring the fish, thrashing, up into the boat. I would watch the fishermen grab the fighting fish with one hand firmly holding onto the belly, and I would think: that’s what I want. I want someone to grab me as I fight (this not some sick rape fantasy—I’m talking about love here, about family, friends, partners) and I want them to hold on, I want them to hold me and hold me and hold me until I finally get tired of fighting and let myself feel the grip of love. Let myself be held.

When I think of the very best thing my parents did for me, I think of the way they always, always, always, held on. They did a lot of things that didn’t work well for my adoptee brain, things I wrote about in my book, things that were not their fault because no one had told them adopted kids had special needs, but what they did do so well was to make it very clear that always, always, always, I was their daughter and they loved me wholeheartedly. I think about how hard I fought their love, how my body instinctively thought closeness was both a good and a bad thing, and I wish we had known, I wish we knew, more about how to help the bodies of children who lost their mothers get regulated and more able to accept love and stability.

We’re working on it though, aren’t we? We’re figuring it out, how to help bring us closer to love.

If we can go to the Moon, surely we can find ways to connect here on Earth.