Adoption and Eating, Energy, Money -- More Questions than Answers

I’ve been eating a lot recently. I’m not used to having food in the house. Usually I go to the market daily and get what I need, or I go and eat take-out or sit down in a restaurant and eat that way. Served.

I put the scale away because my body feels good and I don’t want to play any numbers game right now. I am not in a body bag. I am not gasping for breath. If I gain weight during this epidemic, it’s a privilege.

Old habits die hard. At the end of the day part of my brain wants to list what I ate so I can see if I am a good or bad person. The thing is, when this happens and I stop to check into my body, every time I have felt good. Solid. Full of energy.

I go for a walk an hour or so after dinner because I can feel the energy building and it wants to be expressed as movement.

I put on my earbuds, play 70s music, and sing as I walk.

There's a port on a western bay
And it serves a hundred ships a day
Lonely sailors pass the time away
And talk about their homes

And there's a girl in this harbor town
And she works layin' whiskey down
They say, Brandy, fetch another round
She serves them whiskey and wine

The sailors say, "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (you're a fine girl)
"What a good wife you would be" (such a fine girl)
"Yeah, your eyes could steal a sailor from the sea"

I’m listening to 70s music these days because somehow it suits the way being sheltered-in-place makes me feel. It’s sexy and innocent at the same time. It feels simpler.

It’s so fun to sing out loud when I walk! It reminds me of when I was first at the University of Oregon as an M.F.A. candidate, and I walked to my apartment openly eating a big cookie. I wasn’t hiding my appetite! I was publicly eating a cookie meant for four!

This may sound ridiculous, but when you own a body, a female body, that the world feels it has the right to constantly comment on, eating a cookie in public can feel radical. Wild.

And so can singing along to music no one else can hear in a voice that others can hear. A voice that can’t “sing” but can happily warble off-tune.

It occurred to me tonight after dinner that one reason I’ve struggled all my life with food is that I don’t know what to do with all the energy I have. Still. If, as a child, I’d let the energy be pure, undamaged by copious amounts of sugar and the resulting highs and lows, I would have told people exactly what I thought. I would have been less reactive and more proactive. I would have been a “problem” child because I would have been like a river carving at the stones surrounding it instead of habitually trying to be good.

What I am trying to say is that if I ate purely for energy instead of for medicating myself, I’d be so afraid of burning others, so afraid of what I might do, of how big I might get.

What I want to tell you is that the more I wake up to how it feels to have lost my mother at birth and to have grown up with parents who loved me, parents whom I loved, but parents who were not related to me by blood, the more I realize the substantial ways I have tried to keep “myself” under control, small, hidden.

I have a funny feeling I’m going to gain about 20 pounds in the next couple of months. I think, actually, I’m halfway there. I also have a funny feeling I’m going to get really physically strong this year. I wrote my book four years ago and got almost, what felt to me, frail. I lost weight. I could feel my bones thinning. My spine started to crumble.

I used to worry my parents wouldn’t like me if I got fat. My mom’s dead, and I’m still worried that she won’t approve if I show up, larger. My father for sure would comment, will comment. I am Byron Katie’ing myself and saying “I look forward to my father saying I have put on a lot of weight.”

Why is weight such a big deal?

I want to be able to ride my bike up big hills, really big hills, and I want to be standing up out of the seat; I want to be grinding up that hill. I started riding my bike again recently, and it seems that here in Sebastopol you either go up or down on the roads. My rides are short, but I am out there almost every day, getting stronger.

What would I do if I ate just for energy? What would I do if I weren’t drugged by sugar or an overfull stomach? Would I rail at the world, show it my fury? Would I stay up all night doing push-ups because I couldn’t fall asleep? Would I burn out? Why is having energy so scary? Why is having money in my bank account so scary? Why am I more comfortable not having money than having more than I need?

Money’s energy, right?

What if, when babies are born and taken from their mothers, a plug is pulled, and the baby loses a vital connection with source? What if the baby becomes a hungry ghost because all it knows is want, not have? What if, as a child, as an adult, this human surrounds itself with either too little or too much because just right is not a feeling he or she knows?

Do you know what just right feels like? Are all your cylinders firing? Are you in love? Are you gentle with yourself? What did you do today? How are you feeling?

I have so many questions.

I think I am also afraid of my fatigue, of my need to relax. I am so braced. The muscles running on either side of my spine are like cables. I’m driving with my feet pressed hard on the brake and the gas at the same time.

Maybe another way to talk about what it’s like to be adopted is what it’s like to be in the mud, wheels spinning.

Maybe I’m afraid if I plug into source, into pure energy, my wheels will gain traction and I will fly.

What do we lose if we fly?

What do we gain?

And how will we know when it happens?