What if the Loneliness of Adoptees is in the Skin?

I get a feeling sometimes—today, even—that makes me agitated. It’s not exactly an ache or nausea or pain, but it’s some combination of the three. Tonight I tried eating it away, shoving a bunch of greasy tortilla chips in my mouth, crunch crunch crunch, but that didn’t do much except fill me up so I had to put my salad in a to-go container. I was still upset. Something was wrong.

I went to the grocery store a few doors down from the taqueria and bought a chocolate chip cookie. Munch munch munch. Nope. Not it.

I rode my bike home and thought about running into people or cars. Nope. Not it.

Before I gave birth, there was a terrible, terrible feeling of wrong in my body. This is bad news, everyone. A watermelon is coming out of a peephole and you’re all acting like it’s happy hour. This is called, you stupid fucks, a shit show—not a normal part of being a woman.

Pardon my French. Women in labor are allowed to say anything they want. Women who are remembering what it was like to be in labor have the same free speech card. Says me.

Giving birth was a shocker. I was not prepared for the level of pain or for the fact I was going to have to embrace the knowledge I was going to split in half if I pushed the way the doctor was telling me to push: with the intention of getting a baby out of my body.

What if life does not, in general, prepare us for feelings.

It occurred to me tonight after I had the chips and the cookie, as I lay on the floor and practiced the breathing exercise I wrote about in my previous blog post, that if I lay still enough and paid attention to the wrong, maybe it would tell me something.

So I breathed and listened to my body instead of telling it how freaked out I was and how out of control my life felt. What I noticed was that most of the feeling was coming from my arms. It was the sort of an ache, sort of pain, sort of a subsequent body nausea. I pictured the skin of my arms like a magnet reaching for another magnet under a microscope, the tiny hairs pulling hard towards the other. That’s what my arms felt like, like the skin of a magnet pulling towards something, only the something wasn’t there.

Was it reaching for the holy spirit? The mother? More chips? A body?

I wondered if this is what happens when a baby’s skin is not soothed and welcomed home by the mother when the baby is born. I wondered, yet again, if the primal wound has to do with the skin of the baby, the unfinished nature of adoptee-skin. We are like burn victims without the scars.

When we are tired or have low blood sugar or are stressed, perhaps then the noise of our unfinished skin gets louder and it gets harder to hear reason: I am a grown-up. I am safe. Everything is all right. Instead, what we hear is the cry of a body for the soothing touch that signifies the birth process is over, that we made it home and that we are safe.

When I listened more carefully to the skin on my arms, I heard the ache for holding, the ache to be held.

What if we carry within us, those who lost our mothers too early, the song of loneliness within the cells of our body? What if the primal wound is everywhere?

This breathwork, this long inhale, this pause, this long exhale, this pause, the repetition, both calms me and makes me ache. I think I can live with the ache. I think maybe this is what if feels to be alive, for, in a way, aren’t we all birthing ourselves at every moment? Maybe my fear of discomfort is the error in my thinking. Maybe I have been brainwashed by Advil commercials.

Maybe the skin feels in ways that I have not ever talked to another person about because we don’t have language for the feelings.

Maybe this is just being alive.