Robyn Gobbel and I Are Doing A Webinar on 10 Things I Wish My (Adoptive) Parents Had Known to Do

It seems like a lot of pets are dying during COVID. Maybe it’s that I’m on Facebook more than usual, or maybe people are having more time to mourn. Whatever it is, I keep reading posts about people losing their cats, their dogs, their horses, their chickens. 

 It made me think about when my dog died and how that ended up being the day I decided Kenyon College was not the place for me. I decided to transfer to a college closer to home because when my mom called me in Ohio from Massachusetts to tearfully tell me that the dog I had got as a puppy in exchange for working with a dog breeder (I cleaned the kennels, washed dogs, and other, when you are fourteen and in love with animals, totally fun chores) nobody in school reacted the way I needed them to react. 

I was destroyed, and when I tearfully told my roommate what had happened, she was sad for me, but she also wanted to talk about her boyfriend in the same breath she used to tell me she was sorry. This was true to vary extents for all the newish friends I’d made as a freshman. I didn’t know what to do with my body. It was nighttime and I lived in a dorm and was surrounded by people who did not get me.

I went for a run. I listened to This Must Be the Place by The Talking Heads and Mad World by Tears for Fears and I was a seventeen-year-old girl whose body felt ten times—a thousand times!—too small for the feelings she had trying to find space inside of her. I had no idea I was swimming in loss of first mother grief. Zero. Less than zero, for if you had suggested that to me at the time I would have said you were completely wrong. I would have told her she was someone I did not think about. I would have told you there was nothing to grieve as far as she was concerned. I would have told you I had one mother and that I was fine on that front.

I put my energy into finding another school to go to. At the end of the year, I transferred to Smith College where I lasted for ten days. It turns out Kenyon hadn’t been the problem after all. I was just as lonely at Smith. More lonely because I couldn’t find solace in the idea that I would find my people at another college. 

I just wanted to go home and feel safe, feel like myself. But when you are eighteen and living at home with no certain plans for the future, this is called being a college drop-out. This is called not pleasing your parents. This is called feeling really lost. This is called feeling even farther away from your high school best friend because she was on track and you were not. 

On track as in she could tell people what she was doing with her life and they nodded and smiled in response. They got her. 

 It took me decades to recover from not having people who got me when my dog died, as one reactive action led to another and years later I was getting divorced for a second time and feeling that same despair: Please, someone, help me. I can’t find my feet.

I have a number of incidents in my life that I think, if my parents had been trauma-informed, they may have been able to help me find my feet sooner than in my fifties. 

 I met Robyn Gobbel, a social worker, last year, and it was love at first phone call. I thought she was funny and smart and surprising, and I felt both seen and safe over the phone. She’s one of those people, the ones whose spirit sees you and loves you no matter where you are in the game.  

I asked her if she wanted to do a webinar with me where I present some of the situations I think parental involvement could have launched me more successfully into a life as an adopted person marked by a feeling of safety in my body, confidence, and the ability to more clearly communicate my feelings both to myself and others.  

I needed permission to be myself. My parents believed this was something they were giving me in their dedication to providing me a life that was like the life they had dreamed for themselves. 

They didn’t know my brain was different from theirs. They didn’t know relinquishment was trauma. They parented me as if I were cut from the same cloth they had been.

But I hadn’t.

Please join us Monday, November 2, at 3 PM EST via Zoom. http://bit.ly/AnneandRobyn