One Reason It Can Be Terrifying to Feel Successful in Life as an Adopted Person

“You’re my child, mine,” my mother once cried to me when I was young and we saw on the news a story about a biological mother reclaiming her child. My mother ran out of the room and we never talked about the incident again.

I was her child.

That meant there were rules. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but mostly they had to do with not being so much myself that I was out of the realm of her reach or understanding or feeling of connectedness. Want attention but don’t get too much of it, was one of the rules. Be really good at what you do, but don’t be better than me so I don’t feel bad about myself—so maybe fail often was another. You can be adopted, but know that’s just a story. The real fact is that you are mine and that there is not other mother that you need was also one.

An invisible cord developed between us, binding us to the love and terror-based proclamation that I was her child and mine that she was my mother. The cord was long enough for me to move across the country when I was over 18, but the cord could only bear the stretch for a few months, so many times a year I would fly back “home” to relieve the pressure. The cord delivered information about how I should dress and talk and what classes I should take in school. The cord got tight and uncomfortable when I made choices that represented myself more than the agreement that bound my mother and me, that I was hers, her child. And no one was going to take me away from her, not even me.

A pattern developed: I would do my stuff: school, athletics, relationships, work, and once I started to do well, at first we would both be happy, but after a while I would start feeling terrible and dirty and sick inside. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was. I would decide it must be me: I was wrong. I’d get sick, irritable, moody, and before you knew it, the success would plummet to failure or some form of a sudden ending.

Aaaah. The relief of landing back home in the place of I need you because I can’t do this by myself. Even as an adult. Even after you have died.

I wish when I’d been adopted my new parents had signed an agreement that they were taking on the responsibility of helping me to recognize and embark on the hero’s journey each relinquished child lives out as the fundamental need to find out who they are in this life and this body they live within. Agreeing to be my parents and agreeing to support my well-being are not necessarily the same thing. When a child is adopted and the primary focus is on any of the parents or the child, what is missing is the focus on the gap of not-knowing. The space between what was and what is.

Adopted people are as much what is as they are what might have been. They have double lives: the one they are living as they sit down to breakfast and the one that would have been if the narrative of a man and a women met and made a baby wasn’t disrupted by and then they gave the baby to someone else (or, and then the baby was stolen and sold to someone else). Living one life is enough to keep your brain busy. Living two can be like trying to drive down a road full of invisible mountains. It takes you an unreasonable amount of time to get from A to B and no one can see why.

There must be something wrong with you.

Sometimes I think the greatest gift you could give an adult adoptee is a few nights of deep, restful sleep.