Is there even an adoptee feeling chart?

Pam Cordano, my brilliant friend, talked to me about the word “terrified” the other day, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

That’s it, I realized when Pam first said it. That’s the word at the root of my pain. 

All those times, all those years ago, I went to the doctor for depression, but medication didn’t help. At all. 

After the nurses would do their intake work, I’d imagine them whispering to the various doctors This is really bad or It’s terminal or Call an ambulance, but this never happened. I’d end up trying to make the doctors laugh after maybe crying to them and then they’d write a prescription for something—one doctor wrote “read a good novel” when actually I had a kidney infection, but screw him. My point is that these doctors could not see what was going on because the fire was in my brain, in my heart, in my soul, and they did not have tools to see these kinds of injuries. They didn’t know that mother was one of the most loaded and potentially dangerous words a human could say because once I’d told the nurse I didn't know my history since I was adopted, all conversation about family ended.

I tried to find my way out confusion by writing. I wrote about feeling furious, heartbroken, confused, lost, worthless, but those words circled the drain. They weren’t the drain. 

You can’t let go of a feeling that you can’t name.

Then yesterday my friend Chris Dickey posted a picture of a hungry baby robin, and I saw it. My body knows terrified. It knows coming naked into the world and not having the mother there to sustain me, to save me, to keep me alive.

Yes, someone fed me, but, I promise you with every molecule in my body, a body suffers when it is not fed by the body that made it. A baby is not whole without the mother—it can not live on its own. And you can argue that mothers are interchangeable with women and men and metal structures holding bottles, and I will argue back that alive and well are not the same thing. 

No doctor, no therapist, no parent, no teacher, no friend ever asked me if, in my core, I was terrified. I never asked myself. I looked, for the most part, fine. 

And I will tell you, again with every molecule in my being, I was and am terrified. 

I have so many ways of covering it up. I have been covering it up from the moment I realized I was alone, when someone wrapped me in a blanket and may have said something like, Everything is okay. You are okay. And it was the wrong voice, the wrong words, and I went into shock and withdrew so deeply into myself, I wouldn’t emerge until 51 years later when I would have a waking dream about what it might have been like to be born and not have my mother there.

 That’s when the crying started for real. The terror was beginning its slow leak out of my frozen guts and into the world.

But I still was overcome by feelings I could not name.

Terror isn’t even on the feeling charts I looked at online.  

Once when my daughter was small, I lost her at a birthday party that was in one of those humungous buildings full of tubes the kids climb through—just writing this makes me weak. Her dad and I had been doing a good job of tailing her, and suddenly she was gone. We yelled her name. We frantically crawled through tubes. We ran to the bathrooms. I was terrified because I was imagining she was gone, lost forever. I was outside of my body, outside of reason. I was a few fast hearbeats away from dead. And then we found her, happily playing with her friends, and her dad and I collapsed into chairs and waited to feel strong enough to walk again.

I bet “terrified” isn’t on most pediatrician’s charts because doctors figure they could see if a kid was terrified. It would be like having “on fire”. I mean, duh.

And that is where adoptees are so hard to figure out, understand, diagnose. They are often on fire looking like isn’t it a nice day.

Terrified’s on my feeling chart now, smack dab in the middle, right next to free. For the opposite of terror, in my book, is freedom, and now that I can name the first, I can have the second. 

The end. 

The beginning.

photo by Chris Dickey