I got a text from a friend asking for advice. She’d had a wonderful, star-popping first date, and now she was in crisis because some time had passed (sixteen hours) and, much to her confusion and deep distress, she’d yet to hear a peep from her new guy.

She was, to be more specific, on the floor either in labor or dying.

Okay, I made that last part up. I’m going to make a lot of this up because her text was short and I didn’t ask for any details because I didn’t want to feel her pain. Truly. I didn’t. I wanted her three thousand miles away from me with her hurting heart and empty hands because I can barely tolerate that place myself—to think of someone I care about feeling similarly is awful. It’s like being a parent without a first aid kit. Sorry about that open wound, kid. Mama doesn’t have any bandages.

Mama’s just gonna run around to the corner bar and have a pop or two so she doesn’t have to think of you bleeding all over the kitchen floor with no one there who knows who to help you.

But forget all that. I need to be there with my friend. When one adoptee suffers, we all do—so here I go to the floor.

I’m thinking of opening a dating service for adopted people called I’m Going to Lose My Mind. This is how it will go. An adopted person will be connected with a non-adopted person, and, because a lot of thought went into the match, the two will have an amazing time. Let’s call the adopted person X and the non-adopted person Y. X and Y will kiss goodnight and something will happen after twenty-seven seconds of kissing: X will fall into Y the way a pebble disappears over the edge of the Grand Canyon, but Y will not notice because Y is busy having a nice time.

The night, both X and Y will fall asleep dreaming of the other, happily, excitedly. Y will get up, go to work, to to the gym, come home, make dinner, watch some TV, and go to bed thinking about the sweet kiss they’d had the night before. Y will think that maybe they will call X in a couple of days to ask for a second date. Y is happy. Y sleeps. Y dreams.

X has a different experience—X goes nuts. X wakes up in the morning after date night, their pulse already racing at the memory of being held, of being touched, kissed, seen. X hugs themself, smiles, and rolls over to check their phone, hopeful Y will have woken up in the middle of the night to say how much they already love X.

No message.

X’s heartrate accelerates, and X feels the sickness of driving too fast around a sharp corner fill their nervous system. X tries to get hold of the wheel. X thinks about what they will wear that day just in case by some miracle they run into Y even though they live 30 miles apart. X feels sick with anxiety that is seemingly coming out of nowhere. It’s like a waterfall coming out of the eye of a needle! How can this be happening! What is happening?

X checks that their phone is actually on, and that the ringer is on loud. What if Y calls and X can’t hear the sound? X puts their phone on vibrate, also, and tucks the phone into the side of their undies as they walk downstairs to make coffee.

Halfway down the stairs they check the phone one more time.

The thought hits X likes a sledgehammer: Y doesn’t like them. It’s over.

X wants to cry, but X has been working on keeping things in perspective, so intstead X goes into the kitchen and puts on the Smith’s What Difference Does it Make and grinds some beans. X thinks about how they will respond to Y’s text.

Hi!

Good morning!

X thinks about not responding when the text does come in to let Y see that X is busy, that X has a life, that X doesn’t in fact have their phone in their undies with the ringer on loud. X thinks about how much they sort of hate Y.

Jerk. Who has such a nice kiss and doesn’t text to reassure the other that all is well?

X thinks about how Y rubbed the side of X’s index finger with their thumb softly, as if reading it.

X loves Y. X feels as if someone is ripping the boat they sail through life on from under their feet. This day may kill X.

The next thing X knows, they are texting Y.

Hi! Good morning!

X pours their coffee, puts the phone on the counter, and pretends to plan their day as they stare at the screen and wait for a message to pop up.

X does not know how they will live without Y. As they were kissing, the future showed up like a movie in X’s brain, true and glorious: X and Y would get married, have children, and die holding hands as old people. There is no other life possible for X now.

The phone is silent.

The caffeine is kicking in. X picks up the phone. You feel like my other half. I have been waiting my whole life to meet you. We fit.

X thinks about the way Y’s neck smells like summer, and X is now in tears. It feels as if their guts are trying to leave the building at the same time. X wants to die. X remembers now the look in Y’s eyes as the said their final goodnights, and X sees that Y meant the final part: goodbye.

X puts down their coffee and falls to the floor and balls up into the fetal position. X thinks about a life where they will never see Y’s eyes again, never hold Y’s hand again, never smell Y’s hair.

X is crying so hard they wonder if a body can die from sobbing. They can’t live through this.

X crawls to the counter and stands up to get their phone. I can’t do this. We’re just not right together. All the best.

X feels a gust of strength. At least they didn’t get dumped. At least they dumped first.

The phone dings, and X’s heart pounds, realizing the error in their ways. Y is going to ask if they can come over right then and there to get things straight. Y might even stop for a ring on the way to X’s house. X, X realizes, will say yes.

X does love Y after all!

X reads the message.

This was a lot to read right when I woke up. I thought we had a good time last night. I’m glad you can’t do this, because neither can I. All the best.

X feels like throwing up.

I’m sorry, I get crazy sometimes, X writes. Want to have dinner at my place tonight?

There is no response. There is no response to the next fourteen messages X sends Y.

Just silence.

PART 2

I want to tell you something I have learned recently after working with Amy Geller, my love coach, and that is to sit with my feelings. What this means is that I have sat through silent periods—periods where I thought a person I had gone on a date with would have texted or called but didn’t—and I felt I would die or that I wanted to die.

When I have these dying feelings now I make myself think about how I am a body that lost its mother, and the excruciating fear and loss and dread I am feeling are body memories of what was left unprocessed in my system. I am not grieving my first date or my second date when I don’t hear from him for days. It’s too early—I’m confused. I think I have attached to a stranger, to someone a week ago I did not know.

The fact is, I’m grieving her, and so now I sit there and feel the pain that is both so empty and full and dead and alive. Feeling mother loss is like being a tube that is running six times the amount of energy one tube was made to run. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world, to feel left, and yet if we leave it in the body, unfelt, we carry it and act in ways that are confused and confusing.

My friend Pam Cordano once suggested I get into my bed in the fetal position when I was in this state and think about my birth mother. I told her she was mistaken, that I was actually torn apart over a guy whose name I briefly forgot but then remembered. She asked me just to try getting into bed to see what happened.

Pam’s smart and full of brilliantly creative ideas, so I got under the covers and transferred the wild pain in my heart from Mr. What’s His Name to My Mother I Never Met after Birth. What do you know—the sobs tore through my system for maybe fifteen minutes or longer and then, wonderfully, I stopped. I felt clean. Lighter. New.

This pain of loss is also one of the most beautiful things I could feel—it’s me so full of life I don’t know if I can bear it. It’s me living in the ache of need, in the desire for connection, in the pull of love.

The epidural many adopted people could use after a most excellent date, I think, is community. Talk about what you are feeling. Spread yourself like peanut butter. Hug a friend and cry and wail and just live it out.

It hurts to be born, to live. That’s just how it is.

And then there’s cake.