Speak, Adoption
Increasingly, I am thinking that adoptees are people who have bought into the stories in their head that they are different and therefore flawed.
I have been arguing for over five years now that, as an adopted person, I am different from others who were kept by their mother at birth. I have been using my own behaviors and thoughts as proof that my brain is shattered and…
Oh, never mind. I still believe I’m different because of what happened to my brain when I was created in a body that did not want me and then was passed from that body to I don’t know where for ten weeks until my new parents came to get me.
I think of going to a party full of people who weren’t relinquished or adopted, and what I see is that there would be some moment in the night when my sense of belonging would collapse. Blood is made of red and white blood cells, plasma, and platelets, and, I believe, if you lost your mother at an early age, sorrow. It is the sorrow that makes you heavier, confused more prone to seek out whatever will give you the relief of the numb. Me. It is the sorrow that makes me heavier, more confused, a seeker of stillness. Please, god, just let my brain stop spinning for a moment so I can catch my breath and feel safe in my body, in the world.
What do you do with sorrow that no one in your closest circle can relate to? Just how many times can you cry in front of your spouse or your best friend or your child and say, I’m thinking about when I was a baby? I’m wondering why my mother didn’t want me? I’m bent over double because I can’t believe this happened?
And what happens when you find others like you and suddenly all you do is talk about when you were a baby? How misunderstood you feel? How scared? How unseen. How unsafe? Does this help you crawl out of the pit of sadness or do you make an ever more well-worn home there, circling like a dog to get it just right before you lie down to sleep?
What exactly is the goal I am supposed to have when it comes to being adopted and being a person whose blood circulates grief through my heart and all over my body every minute of every day?
Is what I just wrote also story? If I went to Kaiser and asked for a blood test, could they find the grief?
When I go to the doctor as I have been doing since I was sixteen or maybe even nine and complaining of fatigue and the sense that something in my body is wrong, I don’t get asked about grief. I get asked about where I want prescriptions sent. I get tested for low iron, thyroid problems, vitamin B and D.
I’m told everything is normal. I’m so healthy! My weight and blood pressure and cholesterol are all good! I have no problems!
What if I am fine? What do I lose if I have no problems with being adopted?
I don’t agree with not being mirrored in a way that made me feel safe when I was young and then when I was not so young. I don’t agree with the fact that I could not talk about my birth history without making my (adoptive) mother cry or my father yawn. I don’t agree with the fact that I just sent fifty something dollars to New York state to get my original birth certificate.
If you got 100 adopted people in a room and asked them what risks they weren’t taking in their lives that they wished they were, I’d bet you that one of the top three would be telling their family how they really feel about…almost anything, but adoption in particular. If you don’t live your truth, your beliefs, then you are feeding the grief in your blood and that’s so flipping sad both for you and the rest of the world.
No one’s getting to bask in the full light of you.
And you’re walking around half lit.
