The Orphan, The Gut, The Freeze Response, The Big No, and The Most Excellent Bookstore

Something occurred to me today: if I had to reduce the adoptees I know down to one word, one word that stands for most of what comes out of their mouths and their way of living, the word would be NO.

Here are variations of the story of NO.

Once upon a time, an egg and a sperm tried to hook up, and one said to the other, NO, but it was too late, they’d already connected and the cells were dividing.

Once upon a time, a baby was born and her mother reached for her, and the doctor said NO and whisked the baby out of the room.

Once upon a time a baby was born and the doctor went to give it to the mother, but she said NO and turned away, and the doctor had to find another home for the baby.

Once upon a time a baby was born and the mother was not there to hold it, and the baby said NO to everyone else around it, and its guts clenched in refusal of this reality, and then the baby grew up, become a parent itself, got old, and died, finally, in death, as the flesh fell from the bones, the dead person that was once a baby who had said NO found a kind of relaxation in the freedom of flesh leaving bone.

Here are some other variations on the story of NO:

No, I will not be successful.

No, I will not accept my body.

No, I will not have a career I love.

No, I will not attach to anyone.

No, I will not believe you will stay.

No, I don’t know what I like.

No, I can’t tell you my dreams for the future.

No, I can’t stop thinking about the past.

No, I will not keep my favorite things.

No, I will not have enough money.

No, I will not take care of myself.

No, I will not have enough of anything, ever.

Here’s the thing: I think the NO response is an automatic, unconscious one. It’s the same one that the body often does with an organ transplant. The body knows the organ is from another body, and, without a lot of scientific intervention and many, many drugs, the body’s going to say NO to this other liver, just as, a child, when given parents that were not the parents (primarily the mother) who created him or her is going to have a gut reaction that something is wrong and will want, on some level, to reject the transplant that is him or herself into a new family.

A gut reaction.

Almost every day I wonder what it’s going to take for me to have a body that does not store stress in the gut. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to eat like a normal person, without having almost everything I chow down on give me either a headache or a stomachache.

When I go to the acupuncturist, they check my tongue and the various pulses that can be found on my wrist. He or she always comments on the split that runs down the middle of my tongue. It, the split, tells the practitioner I have…wait for it…gut issues. They always also nod as they feel my pulses. “Yes,” they say. “Digestion.” Acupuncture helps, meditation helps, a clean (Not a lot of processed foods or dairy or gluten or eggs or sugar and no Diet Cokes or iced tea or alcohol. Criiiiiiiipes.) diet helps, but the feeling in my abdomen is almost always there. It feels…wrong. Both empty and bloated at the same time. Like a factory that is at a standstill.

It feels like there’s a dead baby in my guts.

It occurred to me this morning that my guts are saying NO to life. They are refusing to wholeheartedly involve themselves in digestion, in helping me to thrive.

How can I change this? How can I get my insides to say YES?

I think I need to start over. I’m not sure how to do this, but I need to find the switch in my brain that went to NO when I was born and flip it to YES.

When I was a baby, I didn’t understand that one mother could take care of me and keep me alive. I think part of my brain was 100% convinced that when I didn’t get to finish cooking in my original mother’s arms (for we aren’t “done” when we are born because otherwise we could survive on our own, like baby turtles) I was going to die, and so my body went ahead and tried to dead itself for me. My guts slowed, my brain scrambled, my nervous system became stuck in fight or flight.

But I was taken care of. I did live! It’s just that my guts are listening to an old script and they keep on playing their role of someone on the edge of death.

That act is so old!!

What if, when I was a child, my parents read me books about the body saying NO? What if I learned I could make a choice to say YES to a life of my own choosing? What if I learned how the body reacts to mother loss? What if I was helped as a child to talk about grief and anger and confusion? What if I was taught the language of NO so I could also learn the language of YES?

What if each adopted person wrote the children’s book they wished they’d had when they were small? What if we flooded the market with books for adoptive parents to choose from? What if adopted kids could go into bookstores that had hundreds of books to choose from that talked about what it was like to be adopted?

I’m going to chew on that thought for a while.