New Skin--a Guest Blog Post by Leah Cooper (ending 2021 with big love to Adoptees On)

I want to tell you about the time I was on Haley Radke’s podcast, Adoptees On. Actually, I don’t want to tell you about it. Anne Heffron wants me to tell you about it because she thinks this weird shame spiral that I went into after telling my story in such a public way is an experience that other adoptees can relate to and learn from. I don’t want to even think about, much less talk about it, but I’m trying to learn from it, so here goes. 

Several years ago, I co-wrote and co-produced a play about adoption. Not my adoption. I didn’t think I had much to say or feel about that. It was a play based on the stories of hundreds of other people – adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, the whole dang world of adoption. It’s what my theater company does. We pick a community that has great stories people don’t know or understand and we spend years working with that community to turn their stories into a play. Then we produce it with a huge cast and crew mixing professionals and real people from the community, all on stage together. It’s beautiful. Exhausting. Cathartic. Magical. I love my work. 

In 2016, we did this with adoption – it was an epic musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland starring two adoptee sisters who fall down the rabbit hole of adoptee grief. The play was a big fat success. Every sold-out performance ended with a lobby full of crying, laughing, hugging people saying it was life changing. Even as it was ending, everyone involved, and so many who saw it, started asking when we would do it again so more people could see it. Live theater is hard to repeat and nearly impossible to capture. Video doesn’t do it justice. So, we had this idea to turn the play into a graphic novel. Something lots of people could experience, across age groups. We knew a genius illustrator. Flash forward a couple years, add a pandemic and a ton of zoom meetings between she and I, and we proudly published our first graphic novel, capturing hundreds of adoption stories. 

I am surprised to discover that I am more proud of this novel than anything else I’ve ever done. And I’ve done a lot. I’m kind of an overachiever. Back when we were doing interviews and story circles for the play, we met this amazing woman, Penny, who is an adoptee, a music teacher, who organized support groups for adoptees in lots of middle and high schools. She described an interesting pattern in adoptee siblings, which actually inspired the relationship between the two sisters in our play. Wherever there were two adoptees in a family, one was usually the “good” adoptee, and one was the “bad”. One overachiever and one underachiever. She theorized that the bad adoptee acts out – they push people away before anyone can think of abandoning them, and they flee success before they can be judged. The overachiever adoptee acts in – they make themselves so perfect nobody can possibly imagine abandoning them. They succeed, at any cost, so they won’t be judged badly. Apparently, I’m that kind of adoptee.

I wish I could say that I was a longtime fan of Adoptees On, Haley’s marvelous podcast featuring exclusively adoptees talking about the adoption experience. That would be a better story, but even though we read dozens of books, lots of articles, interviewed literally hundreds of people, we just never heard of the podcast until we were looking for ways to promote the book, and I stumbled on it. It would have been helpful back when we were getting started. It might have even prepared me for all the feelings that were going to come up for me, but now, as I perused the episode titles, I just thought, wow, this is the perfect audience for promoting the book.

I set out to get on the show like the overachiever I am, reading every word on Haley’s website. One of the questions on the application form was something about your favorite episodes of the podcast. I hadn’t listened. I didn’t want to listen. Adoptee stories exhaust me. But I listened anyway. To tons and tons and tons of them. Not because I was interested. Because it was research. Ok, I was interested. I’ve been in adult adoptee support groups. I have a love hate relationship with them. They feel like therapy and exercise – something that’s good for you but definitely not pleasurable. I have a love hate relationship with the people in them. The validation is nice. The people are heroic for even being there. But also, they represent everything I don’t want to be – a broken, sad, whiny victim. I know, that’s not very nice. It’s not how I see them. It’s how I would see myself if I was like them. 

By the time I filled out the podcast guest application, I’d listened to so many episodes I had a hard time picking just a few favorites to list. I’d accidentally become a fan. I wrote the application half a dozen times and recorded the audio sample even more times using a pretty fancy microphone I’d ordered just for this. It had to be perfect. Somehow, getting on this podcast had become a holy grail, a pinnacle of achievement and validation for me.

A little more background – despite being an almost pathologically shy child, through sheer overachiever will and theater training, I’ve become someone who is good at public speaking. I’ve had several jobs that involve giving press interviews, making speeches, telling stories to rooms full of people to inspire them, lead them, persuade them. I’ve learned to package whatever sound bites need to be delivered inside of charming, funny, moving stories, just the right length, created on the fly, tailored to the audience at hand, with a suspenseful climax two-thirds of the way in, a surprising ending, and a pithy wise conclusion every time. So, I thought I’d be a pretty amazing podcast guest.

The day Alan – he’s the co-artistic director of my theater company, the co-writer and co-producer of the adoption play, also my ex-husband – more on that later – anyway, the day Alan told me that someone named Haley Radke in Canada had ordered a copy of the book, I howled with glee like a finalist in some competition. The day Haley wrote to formally invite me to be a guest on the podcast, I danced around my home office like a pageant winner. The week leading up to the interview I was like a girl with a crush about to go on a first date, mentioning in every passing conversation with everyone I knew that I was getting interviewed this week for that podcast I mentioned. They’d nod like I’d already told them three times.

The date of the interview I prepared carefully, gathering notes for what I wanted to say, testing the microphone, checking that I had Haley’s skype handle right. I had a zoom-based class that ended just half an hour before our scheduled interview, and I didn’t want to feel flustered, so I did all my preparation earlier in the day. My partner, Robert, and I share a small apartment, and ever since Covid, instead of going to a gym, he works out at night in our kitchen using these stretchy bands that have metal hooks and bars at the end of them. He’s an adoptee too, kind of an overachiever about exercise, and his workouts are punctuated by groans, grunts, random numbers hissed through clenched teeth, and those metal parts hitting the tile floor. Recording at my desk in the dining room next to the kitchen was not going to work. Anyway, Haley sends helpful instructions ahead of time with tips like be in a room with as many soft surfaces as possible, so the recording doesn’t sound like you’re in a box of echoes. Earlier in the day I had rigged up extension cords and carefully stacked pillows to turn our bedroom into a recording studio. 

 After my class, I practically shouted to Robert, “Try to be quiet and don’t come in the bedroom, I’m doing the interview for that podcast!” He smiled. I’d told him about the podcast like ten thousand times by then. I set my laptop on a shoe box, plugged in my headphones and fancy microphone, put a glass of water on the nightstand next to my notes, took a deep breath, and sat down. I was 20 minutes early. Did some vocal warmups. Took more deep breaths. Looked at my notes. I don’t usually use notes for public speaking because I like to keep my eyes on my audience, but I really didn’t want to leave anything out, and this was audio only anyway.

When Haley came on the call, I was briefly starstruck. That voice I’d listened to for so many hours, saying things about me that nobody else know, was suddenly here talking warmly just to me. I tried to click into my most professional self, letting Haley know that I’d read all the instructions, had everything at hand, was excited and ready to go. She calmly gave me a few more instructions and assurances that everything I said would be edited later, so I could pause, go back, even ask later to have things edited out. I smiled in recognition; told her I’d given those same assurances to hundreds of people before recording story circles for my own work. Yep, yep, got it. Ready. And then she hit record. I was suddenly more nervous than I could remember being in a long long time, like since childhood. 

I said, “Wow, I’m kind of nervous.” She reminded me again that this would be edited, and I realized now that I was on the receiving end of that assurance, that it was only intellectually calming. My nervous system was having its own reaction that had nothing to do with whether this would be edited. I’d probably over-prepared I thought. Shake it off. Plunge in. You got this. Took a drink of water, breathed deep, “OK,” I said. And then Haley asked the question she asks every single guest on the show, the question I knew was coming, “I’d love if you told me a little about your own adoption story.” Haley has the sweetest voice, the perfect voice for asking intimate questions. It’s caring, warm, patient, confident, kind, and sincere.

I’d prepared for this question, thought about it more than anything else leading up to the interview, asked myself how much and which angle of my own story was right for this audience, for this moment, for talking about the book. I think we adoptees get thousands of chances to practice every possible version of our “Yeah, I’m adopted” story. For the interview, I’d decided to keep it brief so I could get to talking about the book as quickly as possible. Just enough of the cute details to be intriguing (“my adoptive mother saw me on a TV show and called an 800 number”), just enough of the messy stuff to establish my adoptee trauma credibility (“was told I was multiracial but not what kind, just that I was hard to place, and I ended up with a family full of mental illness”), and just a little humor and humility (“didn’t even think I had feelings about being adopted when I started this project”) for people to relate to and create some suspense around my journey out of the fog.

But my own story was just going to be a launching pad to the real story – the book and all the other wonderful people in the adoption community whose stories were in the book. All the talented artists who helped make the play and the book. All the reasons people should buy this book. Well, I don’t know how it happened, but the next thing I was aware of was that it had been an hour, and we were done with the interview. Haley was super warm and effusive about how great it went, thanked me, reminded me I could follow up if there was anything I wanted to cut, and then Skype made that sad little beep that signals the call is over. 

I became aware I had a body. That it was drenched in sweat. That it hadn’t moved, at all, in an hour. Every joint was clenched. As I moved out of the odd position I’d been in, everything creaked and cracked and hurt. Oh, there were my notes that I’d never looked at and the water I’d never drank. What had just happened? What did I say? What didn’t I say? Had I even said the name of the book? Or named any of my collaborators? I don’t think I even mentioned the illustrator. It’s a graphic novel, and the illustrator is a genius, and I don’t think I’d even said her name. Becca. Becca Hart. That’s her name. Oh my God, I didn’t even say her name. 

It gradually dawned on me that I had basically just babbled on and on and on about my own experience. About what I have named the “volcano of grief” that erupted after making that play, as I not only came out of the fog, but found myself virtually exploding with unprocessed sadness, anger, fear, self-loathing, regret, and insecurity. How my marriage ended. How I cried every day for months. The room spun and I felt nauseous. 

Oh my. Not good. Not good. “Well, that happened,” I said to myself. Drank some water. Got up. OK, something I’m usually good at is moving on. So much shit that you could only say “wow, that happened” to has happened in my life, I’ve got a lot of practice at dusting off the debris and walking into the next room. So that’s what I did. I don’t remember what I said to Robert, but I’m pretty sure it was something like, “that went pretty well.” I drank some tea. I stared into space a little bit. We probably watched some TV. I went to bed. It would surely seem better in the light of day, after some sleep. 

I usually sleep well. It’s one my greatest skills, cultivated carefully over a long time, after a childhood filled with terrifying dreams and torturous insomnia. I did sleep that night, but I dreamt every possible version of that interview, on repeat. All the things I could have said, should have said, like I was rehearsing for the thing that had already happened. Too late. In every version of the dream, I started to say the right thing, but then realized that wasn’t what came out of my mouth. By morning, I had recalled, in horror, while sleeping, dozens of things I had said that were mortifyingly honest and totally inappropriate, and twice as many things much more important and relevant that I’d left out entirely.

I want to say it was Haley’s fault. She’s got that unnerving ability to innocently ask just the right question at just the right moment in just the right way, to dislodge the most honest confession ever. I was trying to get in a sound bite about how many perspectives had informed the book, describing all the story circles we’d done with birth parents, adoptive parents, siblings, social workers. And then she said, “What was that like for you, to listen to all of those stories?” And suddenly I’m saying that it felt like the birth mothers were trying to eat my soul with all their displaced love. And I’m saying that I was anxious that the adoptive parents might never stop talking about all their pain and suffering, and that sometimes their self-righteousness was infuriating. When she asked about the success of the play, I meant to talk about how brave the adoptees were who performed in it, and how beautiful their own catharsis was in sharing their stories all the way to the stage. But I think all that came out was how my own catharsis exploded my life after the show was done. 

Had I said a single nice thing about anyone else? I couldn’t remember. All I could remember was talking, out loud, about me, me, me - my pain, confusion, grief, vulnerability – without pause, for 60 minutes, without a single thought for what anyone else might want to have said about them, or what anyone else might want to hear. I’m an expert at saying what others want to hear, damn it. How had this happened?

So, I’m lying there, the morning after, the burning throb of shame pounding in my ears, but something I’ve had to learn from working in theater is, you do not lay in bed recalling all the mistakes. You move on. After the unproductive rehearsal, the dropped line, the missing prop, the off performance, the unreceptive audience, the scathing or dismissive review, you do not lay there in bed counting your mistakes. Or you’ll never get out of bed or back on stage again. I got up, shook it off, went to work. 

In our theater company we start meetings with check-in’s. Everyone just says how they are feeling that day, partly to contextualize how they show up, mostly to leave what’s happening “out there” behind so we can be creative together. Old me would have spent the night before smoking a lot of cigarettes, drinking a lot of wine, and telling some friends a funny story about something else entirely, and by this morning’s check-in, I’d be tired, dehydrated, and hoarse, but “fine, just fine.” But ever since the volcano of grief I am less inclined to flee my emotions and I try to name them as they come. It’s hard. The words for bad feelings come slowly to me. In my check-in, I say, “I feel … not fine. I am … a little … off today. Cranky. Raw. Disoriented.”

A couple days later, I’m in a weekly meeting with my co-artistic director ex-husband, Alan, and I try to explain what happened. For one thing, he knows me well after 11 years of marriage and 18 years of friendship, but also, as the co-writer of that book, he was one of the people I felt I had failed in that interview, and I needed to confess. I tell the story of the interview, how I’d fucked it all up, and as I recalled out loud the events of the night, that’s when I realized it was Anne Heffron’s fault. 

The zoom class I’d been in right up until half an hour before the interview is a weekly writing class with Anne and a bunch of other adoptees. We’re a cohort and an experiment. Anne thinks adoptees have tremendous narratives and points of views inside them, but also that we silence ourselves because of all the messaging we’ve received that our experience isn’t the right story of what’s happened to us. She’s been giving us all kind of exercises and prompts to help us describe our experience truthfully. That’s how this happened. I’ve been writing every damn week about how I really feel about what really happened to and around me. And then I got on that microphone and all that truth just kept on flowing like a freaking river. And what happened was I’d become one of those adoptees that talks endlessly about being an adoptee. The dam had burst and now I felt like I was choking on my own river of rage and grief, and I just really wanted to somehow reverse the flow and take it all back in.

Alan processes emotion quite differently than I do. In ways that are complementary for collaboration, not so complementary in a domestic partnership. Just so you know, that took about four journals of writing for me to be able to say so concisely. Anyway, Alan doesn’t mind difficult feelings. He kind of revels in them as fertile soil for creative work. He said that everything I shared was probably resonant for the podcast’s audience and made the book even more interesting. He said that I’m always very intelligent, thoughtful, and generous, that all of that surely came through, and I’d probably done just fine. That I was only focusing on the parts that made me feel especially exposed. I knew he was probably right.

Part of me knew I hadn’t failed that badly and the stakes weren’t exactly catastrophic, but I just couldn’t seem to get that message to my nervous system. Haley had been the nicest, most supportive interviewer ever. Alan reminded me I could ask her to edit out any part that was causing me anguish, maybe ask her if I could record a few things I’d forgotten to say, even do the whole interview over again. I considered reaching out to Haley. But first, us adoptees never want to be a bother to anyone ever. And second, as I wondered if it would make me feel any better to re-record, I realized this whole spiral I was in wasn’t about what I’d said or not said. It was about how I felt about saying it. How it felt to be the person who had those feelings inside of me at all, and how it felt to let others see it, whether they liked it or not. To be judged, to be found lacking, to not be liked. Fear of these things all live in my body right next to the fear of death. 

It didn’t matter how much anyone told me I had done fine, or even if I had done fine; either way, I was still drowning in the fear of not being loved.

A couple more days later, I told the whole story again while taking a walk with another member of our company, Adam. He’s a good friend, a birth father, and his wife is adopted. He is over ten years into sobriety and recovery. He knows me well, and he thinks a lot about what’s selfish and what’s not. He said I was brave, and of course that was hard, and he said, “Good job.” I could see he was proud of me. He didn’t try to cheer me up, just nodded in acknowledgement of my feelings. Something shifted. It got slightly easier to breathe. This naming of feelings thing; it does help. 

Then I told my boyfriend how I was feeling. It’s not like he didn’t know I was feeling stuff. But he’s remarkably patient with the way my difficult feelings get expressed first and named later, the way lightning arrives ahead of thunder in a storm. There’s a lot he instinctively understands because he’s an adoptee too. He didn’t say anything at all, he just hugged me tightly as I finally got teary eyed and let that big old lump of grief rise in my throat for a good cry.

 In this writing cohort, we get to talk to Anne one-on-one twice a month. It makes a great writing deadline for me because overachiever me always wants to have something to share with her. This time I had nothing. That desire to reverse the flow, take it all back, had transferred over to my writing. It was like my creative muscles had gone into reverse. If I could have taken the ink back off the page, back into the pen, I probably would have. Every time I tried to write, I’d get maybe three or four words down, judge them, cross them out, start again. And again. And again. I confessed what happened to Anne, asked her, “my God, you’ve probably had to do tons of interviews about your book, does this happen to you, what do you do?”

She said that’s exactly why she doesn’t listen to any of her own interviews, just plows right on, gets back to writing. I wasn’t sure I had any plow in me. She said of course I had felt small, exposed, and terrified after that interview. That even though I had been speaking with my adult voice, I was sharing from the experience of a frightened abandoned baby filled with that tiny body’s unprocessed emotions. I told her about my conversations with Alan, Adam, and Robert. She loved hearing about the big hug from Robert, and then she compared sitting with adoptee’s feelings to sitting with a burn victim. You can’t really help, just be with us while we hurt and try to heal, she said. And then she suggested I get writing again by writing an essay about this experience. Because it might be helpful to others. 

Telling me something might be helpful to others is like offering a dog the biggest bone ever. It usually works. I tried. It came slowly. Well, the first draft came fast actually, tossed off in a single sitting in two hours I walked away from with a sense of relief and accomplishment. But when I read it a couple days later, I realized it was just a litany of what I thought I probably should have said in that podcast. Turns out what I thought I should have said was a little boring. Like a resume. Or a grant proposal. 

I’m trying to learn to be patient with myself, to not measure my worth by my output. It’s hard. I’m pretty good at being bedside with people who are sick, sad, or dying, so I thought about what I’d do if I really was sitting with a burn victim, my own burn victim self. You don’t rush someone who is in pain. You sit with them gently and wait. Until they decide they are ready to try getting out of bed, to take off their bandages, pick at the scab, examine the forming scars, and tell the tale of the fire. Sometimes the story of the fire comes first, sometimes it comes last, sometimes it takes many tries to tell. 

By the time of my next call with Anne, I had written a second, slightly less shitty draft of this stupid essay, with a little more about how I was actually feeling. I wasn’t proud of it. But I was proud I’d written anything at all. She praised me in that wonderfully honest and compassionate way she has with us adoptees, but she also pointed out the places where I’d dodged sideways into being clever instead of honest. She’s smart like that. I don’t remember how I segued – it doesn’t matter I guess – but I found myself telling her about how I couldn’t stop thinking about a friend who had died recently, Dominic. I’ve lost so many more friends to cancer than to Covid in this year, and without funerals to go to, the grieving comes out a little sideways in unexpected conversations.

The funny thing about Dominic was, I didn’t even think of him as a friend. He was annoying as hell, stubborn, argumentative, loud, arrogant. And he’d left town years ago to pursue TV writing in L.A., so he wasn’t in my life anymore. I thought of him more as my ex-husband’s friend. They had been part of a cohort of playwrights, all brought to Minneapolis from various places for a year-long fellowship. They’d all stayed many years more, working together, being each other’s community. When he passed, not long after word had got around that he was sick, Alan and I kept talking about him and how much more upset we each were than we understood. We both kept saying, “I’m not even sure we were friends,” because he really was a difficult personality and a difficult person to get close to. But we kept talking about him, about how absolutely devoted to his craft he was, how uncompromising he was in saying the truth how he saw it, onstage and off, how trustworthy that made him as a colleague, how even though he didn’t ever say how much his friends meant to him, he always showed up for them, how nobody could make a difficult truth more wise, witty, and funny than he could. The more we talked about him, the more we wondered if we had even liked him, the more I realized we’d actually kind of loved him.

I told Anne a story that had been relayed to Alan about Dominic in his last days, from one of many friends out in L.A. who had been caring for him. It’s a perfectly emblematic story of him. Dominic was Italian and from New York. He also didn’t drive. In his last weeks he made his friends drive him all over town to the best Italian restaurants where he would ingest mad amounts of pizza and pasta. Dominic had bile duct cancer. He absolutely could not digest this food, so he’d vomit it all back up, sometimes when he got home, sometimes in his friend’s car on the way home. This did not stop him from bullying them into taking him to more restaurants and it did not stop them from doing it, despite all the cleanup involved. Alan said, “well, it’s refreshing to hear that Dominic never changed.” Laughing so hard I’ve got tears streaming down my face, I said to Anne, “what an asshole, right?” And she said, laughing too, “If adoptees would just let themselves be assholes sometimes it might be good.” 

Another friend I’ve lost in the past year was a psychologist who worked with veterans who had PTSD. She’d written this short story, for kids, about difficult feelings. It had been sitting in a drawer for a long time. She was always too busy helping other people to get around to doing anything with it. In her last year of life, as she raced against brain cancer to do the things that felt most important with her time left, she worked with an illustrator to turn it into a book. I couldn’t go to her memorial service out in California, but her husband mailed me the program and a copy of that book. It’s beautiful. A gift. 

Anne told me to write another draft without the clever bits. This is it. I’ve been sitting with this idea inspired by Dominic and Anne, that maybe some of us are entitled to be angry, stubborn, and loud; to name our discomfort, even if it makes others uncomfortable. I’ve been asking myself why I think speaking my own feelings out loud makes me sound like an asshole. And I’ve been thinking about what to do with all these feelings about friends who have died too soon. As I sit here, with my burn victim self, I think maybe telling the truth is what I’m supposed to do with all these feelings. Even though it feels uncomfortable and fragile, like new skin. These are my scars, and this is the tale of the fire that made me who I am. Maybe this is the thing I have, that I am meant to give, so I give it to you.

notes:

Leah’s Adoptee’s On episode, as of this writing, has not yet been released. Look for it in early 2022.

You can find Leah on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/leahecooper/ and to order her graphic novel In My Heart: The Adoption Story Project go to https://wlproductions.org/.