A True but Partial Account of Why and How Being Relinquished and Adopted Made Lying My Second Language

I don’t know when it started. I wrote about it in You Don’t Look Adopted since the habit of twisting the truth to fit my needs has, for me, been a big part of my life.

The lying thing.

The first time I remember lying is when my mom told my brothers and me whoever saw a robin first could have the cookie batter beaters to lick. I ran out into the spring afternoon and saw no robins, but I realized I could say I did and get the treat. It worked. My brothers lost out and I got both beaters.

I lied all the time. It was so interesting to live in a world that stretched. Other people, the non-liars, lived in a world with boundaries, but so much more was possible in my world! I not only lied, I stole! What do you mean you don’t have money for gum? Just go in the store and take it? What do you mean you didn’t do your homework? Just lie and say you lost it. Cry! No one argues with a crying person! Get yourself to believe your own lie! That’s even better because then you are, sort of, telling the truth!

Growing up, I didn’t know myself all that well. I was a good girl according to my mother, but she didn’t know about the lying and stealing, so that meant I was also a bad girl. You can’t be both, I thought, so that meant I was…what? In school I was also the good girl, but I cheated and skipped classes and whole days and so I was also…what? One day in high school, I was called to the principal’s office. “What are you doing?” he asked, pointing to my attendance record. “This is not who you are. Stop it.”

Standing there in front of him, I was embarrassed and afraid. It felt like a dream. Only bad kids got called to the principal’s office. I was Anne Heffron, dorky good girl. What if he called me out for what I really was: a lying, cheating, messed up girl who just wanted to be with her friends and to get good grades and to have a boyfriend and to run a 5:20 mile?

(What if the principal had known about trauma and adoption? What if my teachers had known? What if this incident could have been a gateway to…to…to…)

There was something wrong with me since all of those things I wanted were issues for me, but it was so hard to pin down why because whatever was wrong was both subtle and screamingly obvious. I was like a cute puppy at the pound that no one was choosing. I was a cute puppy! I had four legs! I had a home! (Granted I was in the place for unwanted dogs, but, still, I wasn’t dead!) What was the problem?

If no one in the pound mentioned that I wasn’t being chosen, if no one stopped to see what was wrong with me, I could continue with the game that all was fine and one day I’d be…I’d be…I’d be…

Free to be myself.

When you are adopted, permission to be yourself is like…is like…is like…

All of these ellipses are a reason to lie. When you can’t easily explain yourself or when you can’t even think of what to say or know how you feel, a lie is such an easy way to avoid the strange dark of the unsayable.

Here’s the thing: mothers and children are not meant to be separated. Babies die if they fall out of their mother and the mother walks away. Babies can’t feed themselves. Babies can’t fend off predators. Babies can’t lace up their shoes.

The lie is this: your mother could not or would not take care of you, but we will and you will be fine.

The lie is this: you are ours.

The lie is this: you are hers.

The lie is this: you are both ours and hers.

Everything that is not mother and child, flesh of my flesh, is a lie.

Truth is broken when the mother and child are separated. The world is broken. Life is broken. Language does not work for this child and this mother because the language of the world was made by people whose mothers got to keep them.

Go ahead, argue with that last point. If you do, I’ll bet you a million dollars you’re not an adoptee or weren’t relinquished.

We once-orphans live in a world that is a gap—we live in the space between—the space between what is real and what is unreal. One hundred percent of the time when I hear adoptees talking about meeting birth family they use the word surreal. Actual life, truth, feels like a dream—truth has become otherworldly.

For people whom reality is surreal, the laws of civilians may well seem for others.

I had a life with my parents and that was real, but I had this unreal life where I had another mother and father somewhere and where I was this other person I would have become if I’d been with them, and so somewhere in me is the language I would have spoken in that life. So what language is the right language for me? Since the world doesn’t seem to care, then neither do I. Fuck all y’all. I’ll say and do what I want and live with the terror that you will find out and hate me and leave me. I’ll lie because the truth doesn’t fit me. I’ll lie because I am angry inside even if I don’t know that I am. Even if the anger feels to me like depression or endless hunger or confusion. I’m spinning so fast I’m just trying not to fall, not to pass out. I don’t even really know what I am doing. God help me.

It was like I was an apple with a rotten core. No one could see the bad part, not even me, but I felt gross. Like, I was shiny and good on the outside but stinky and in trouble on the inside. My job was to keep up the shiny part, because who wants a rotten apple? This is where suicidal ideation can step in: if I’m rotten and no one knows, maybe I should kill myself because my family and friends are going to be so disappointed when they finally see me for who I am. Being rotten inside is borderline unbearable. You can’t see it. It’s just this terrible feeling: a Mexican jumping bean with a flaming seed inside.

When you are trying to save your own life, lying can seem inconsequential, like the thrashing arms of a drowning person. I’m too busy trying to survive to have the luxury of thinking about whether lying is good or not. It just, like the thrashing arms, happens. It’s a survival instinct.

What I needed were boundaries, safety, understanding, and love. I am not a therapist, and I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly suggest you find one if you are a lying adoptee or the parent, friend, or lover of one, but I would say that if my mother had known I’d lied about the robin, I would have needed her to both call me on my lie, and to make me feel so, so, so safe because what she didn’t know is that if she said I lied, the resulting shame would have been monumental I would have lied like crazy to keep her from pinning me down. It would feel like I was trying to save my life, for if we both admitted I’d lied, then I was the lie, and I would….I would…I would….

(If my mother had called me on the lie without being firmly grounded in trauma care and having a deep understanding of the needs of a dysregulated nervous system, I imagine I would have hated her more, hated myself more, distanced myself from her and myself and the event. This is why I think adoptees need to arrive in their new home with the phone number of an adoption-competent therapist attached to their clothing that the parents can have on speed dial. Adopting a child without also adopting an adoption-competent therapist seems like bringing an alien into your house with no plan of learning anything about the language it speaks or its home planet in the hope that it will just morph into a shape like yours.)

If you tried to say I had lied, all the rotten in my core would flood my brain and I would lose my mind. Truly. Maybe I would run away. Or shut down. Or punch you in the face. Anything to get away from the scorching truth that you just saw me for who I was: a …., a…., a…..

I still lie. I tell people I don’t, but I forget that I’m lying even then. Lying is like tying the cherry stem with my tongue. It’s a party trick I can do. Why would I stop? It’s fun. Sometimes it gets me attention.

And it’s sickening and exhausting. I have to hold up a mask, remember it’s there. Keep the stories straight.

I try to catch myself on it and stop, but it’s so second nature, so fast, so easy. Why tell you how much money I spent last month when I can just make up a number?

I’ll tell you why I’ve been working on honesty: when I am honest, it means my feet are on the ground. It means I exist. It means I have a right to be on the planet. It means it’s okay for me to have needs. It means it’s okay for me to be messy, to make mistakes, to take more than my fair share sometimes.

And that is so, so, so hard because my brain has been slipping under the fence forever, it seems. Maybe my father whispered into my mother’s ear as he came, “I love you.” Maybe he said, “Darling,” because he couldn’t remember her name. Maybe she told him she was on the pill. Maybe he said he wouldn’t but then, strong and persuasive, he did, right inside her.

My mother’s family sent her into hiding from their community when she started to show.

She went back to school after it was all over as if nothing had happened.

“You have the wrong person,” she said when I finally found her.

My birth father has a few sons, I believe, three maybe, but no one is talking.

The truth matters because it’s real.

Real matters because, if it’s all a dream, we can do whatever we want and not worry about the consequences. Real matters because when I fall in love with you and reach to take your hand, if it turns out you are invisible, fake, a dream, my hand will flail in the empty space where you were and my heart will be broken.

I do not believe I can survive and tell the truth. I can’t even imagine a life like that. You would distance yourself from me if I told you the truth, that you are both my mother and not my mother, that I love you and hate you. That I wish I could go back and start over, this time get it right, this time know what was really real. I could not bear the distance.

Writing my story, writing You Don’t Look Adopted was my pledge to honesty. I found my voice writing that book, found my truth, and so now I know pretty much all the time when I am lying and when I am not. Learning to hear my own truth was the single best thing that ever happened to me. Better even, if I had to compare, than having a child, because having your heart walk outside your body but not living in truth with it is not a pinnacle life. Finding my voice made me start using words such as god and spirit and hope and future. It made me a wildly determined writing coach because I believe finding your truth can save your life and make your relationships with those around you better, more real, either because they can’t bear the honest you (or the honest you can’t bear them), and you part ways or because they (and/or you) even more deeply proclaim their (your) devotion and stay.

Either way, you get to be you. You get to touch the face of truth, lay your cheek against its head, swim in it, breathe it, sing it.

You can spit in the dust, wipe your mouth, and go find the path you most want to walk.

I watched the fishermen bring in the fighting fish, grab the fish around the belly, hold the fish while they pull the hook from the mouth, hold the fish while it fights. The fish can not breathe. The fish knows it’s going to die, and it fights and fights and fights, and yet the fisherman holds on.

I wanted to be held in that way, held while I thrashed, while I fought the death I knew was coming, the death that was coming, the death of the story me, so I could finally collapse, exhausted and unbelieving: this life, it exists, this life where I am accepted for who I am, this life where I no longer have to pretend to be someone else.

This life, my life. Your life. It exists.