An adoptive parent I admire a lot for her dedication to her daughter’s well-being, curiosity, and journey as a person with a brain altered by loss and change, sent me a picture of a succulent almost bare of leaves, its little green twiggy leafless stems reaching out into the ether.

The mother wrote that when her daughter is mad at her, sometimes the young girl pulls leaves off the plant. “It’s a succulent,” the mom wrote, “and I tried it and the leaves actually have a very satisfying ‘snap’ when you peel them off.”

I’ve been thinking about this for days now. The anger. The snap of a leaf being broken from its home.

It all feels so true. So right.

Working as a farmer-in-training this past year at Spirit Hill Farm has been slowly helping my brain experience mother/child separation in a way I can handle. I routinely pull plants out by their roots and either plant them somewhere else or move them to the compost pile. (I was going to write “throw them away” or “throw them into the compost pile”, but for reasons which I hope are obvious, I chose “move”.)

So many of the seeds I planted didn’t even sprout! No broccoli. No pumpkins. I don’t know what what wrong—maybe there wasn’t enough water or light or maybe I planted the seeds too deep in the dirt. I wonder about those guys sometimes. About what they are doing down there. If a seed does not grow, is it still alive?

I learned how to thin plants this spring. That was rough at first—all those hopeful, sweet green sprouts that were going to choke each other out if I didn’t create space. At first I apologized to each one as I pulled it out of the ground by the base of its tiny stem, its little roots dangling helplessly. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

But then I got really into it. There is the faintest tug when you pull out a baby plant. The roots are in the earth, and their tiny hairs are holding on. Pulling out a baby plant is like a microscopic body experience of reeling a fish in from the sea. The sea holds on to the fish, and the hook and the person reeling the line pulls the fish in to the air, out of the water. I love this feeling. The catch.

It’s empowering, pulling a fighting fish out of the water, pulling a rooted plant out of the earth. You have to exist to do these things. You have to be real.

To affect change is satisfying. There was nothing like walking up to a domino structure my brother had carefully organized on the floor and kicking it over. The sound! The chaos! My brother’s reaction! It was also a little sickening, knowing I had done something “bad”, but that didn’t stop my leg from kicking out. I needed to exist, I think, more than I needed to be “good”. This was a painful contradiction to carry. Was I good or was I bad?

It’s confusing when part of feeling alive also involves destruction. For example, the fact that I was alive was not an entirely clean enterprise since clearly not only had it had caused a woman problems when I was born but then my parents had also needed to have social workers inspect their home and a lawyer to help with the paperwork in order to get me. I didn’t just arrive. I had caused trouble. I was a baby. A trouble-maker.

There was the other part, too, of course, where it seemed like being adopted was not a big deal in my family, only we couldn’t talk about it much because talking about adoption in my family was like trying to play tennis on a court by yourself. There wasn’t volley. There was the grey book that told the story of the mother and father adopting a child, and there was a file folder of paperwork, but there was no snap in dialogue, just thick silence.

I started running when I was 13, and I think if I hadn’t been able to run off the wild spin of my brain that way, I think I might have become a cutter or a drinker or something that snapped the confusing discomfort/sometimes agony of my life into something feelable.

There was a sort of snap when I stole something or lied. I broke the narrative of you are our good girl.

When I started dating as an adult, there was (is) a (short-lived) snap when I broke up with someone.

I had one friend whose mom had died when he was very young. When he was anxious, he pulled out his eyelashes. Snap.

We adoptees are leaves snapped from the mother plant. The big snap. So there’s that.

I wonder what happens inside the little girl when she is angry at her mom and then goes to snap off leaves from the increasingly bare succulent. I wonder what words are under the snap.

I hope one day she can speak them.

They will help us all.

The more we can verbalize trauma, the more we have the chance to be human and connect with others instead of tearing ourselves into a solitary life, and in order to speak our truth, we need a receiving ear.

Something occurred to me as I thought about how alien it can feel to be an adoptee: E.T. was able to go home because Elliot listened to him.

The end.