Mothers and Their Infants are like Plugs and Sockets -- or The Big Fuck

In Flourish, we were talking about the id being like a bubbling fountain (thank you, Pam Cordano) inside of us telling us I want…I want…I want…

I don’t picture the id like the Hungry Ghost where what it wants is to eat up you and the city around you—I picture the id like a spring—it’s so natural and pure and organic. It bubbles up from source, from something larger and more powerful than it is.

The spring bubbles up from Mother Earth (unless, of course, you live in Sonoma County like I do and the springs are drying up, but that is not the fault of the spring or of Mother Earth. It’s the fault of the lack of rain and we can blame someone who is not us for that so we can keep living our lives just as we’ve always lived them ) and it nourishes the world around it.

Our wants also nourish those around us. Have you ever gone on a date, and the conversation goes like this?

What do you want to do? —I don’t care.

What do you want to eat? —I don’t care.

Do you want to get married? —I don’t care.

That is like dating a wall. You might as well take your own hand and go out for ice cream because at least then you’ll feel like you are with someone. Being with someone who has wants while you also have wants leads to a kind of dance. It leads to a bathing of want recognition and fulfillment. This is called living.

I know what it’s like to be the I don’t care person. When I turn myself into a wall or a turnip or the ground underneath someone’s feet, I’m trying to be accommodating. I’m trying not to be myself because part of the deal of me being on this planet is that I get to be here, but I just can’t exist because existing would have meant I’d had a voice all the way back when I was pushed out into the world and I would have said, I want to stay here, with my body.

And so The Big Fuck comes in.

The Big Fuck occurred to me today as I sat in Flourish and listened to adopted people struggle to say what they wanted.

But right before The Big Fuck, I imagined The Scary Guy with the Bullwhip.

I saw a little kid sitting on a stool. I saw him thinking he would like to cross the room and sit in a different chair, and I saw him sit with that want. I saw him look at The Scary Guy with the Bullwhip who stood in the middle of the room. If this kid stood up and walked across the room to sit where he wanted to sit, he was going to get hurt.

This is what living as an adopted person can feel like. Having bubbling wants can be terrifying and so it’s much easier to sit in the corner and not move and dissociate and pretend to be normal. Otherwise, you’ll be seen and vulnerable to annihilation.

I bet this sounds crazy to you! But it’s real! Having needs and wants when your most fundamental need and want was rejected: No, you can’t feel safe. No, you can’t be with her. No, you can’t feel at home, can turn you into a scared bunny who would rather huddle under a bunch of thorns than risk that kind of shocked terror again.

After The Scary Guy with the Bullwhip, I saw The Big Fuck (you can see why I don’t drink much or do drugs, right?).

I imagined that when a baby is born, the mother is a giant plug, and the baby opens itself into an outlet, and the mother plugs herself into the baby with skin contact, eye contact, by making sounds, by her heartbeat, by her breasts and her milk and her hands and her smell. The baby learns to open to the plug of the mother, and this is how a baby exists as itself and thrives.

The umbilical cut is supposed to be a transition move to get the mother/child unit from one state of being to another—a baton handoff between inside and outside. Here: when you are inside you get a cord piped into your belly. When you are outside, you get plugged into the mother in different, less watery, more skin-swaddling ways.

Babies in the Russian orphanages, for example, to give an extreme example, who are faced away from their caretakers often suffer from a failure to thrive because, I am arguing, they didn’t get plugged into ANY source after the initial cord to source was cut. This kind of contact-less care is called adding insult to injury. This is called a bad idea.

If a baby does not learn to be a socket, it can never be adequately plugged into later in life. I feel like I’m forever sticking things into the hole of me so I can feel full and complete. You can fill in the blank when it comes to those “things” I’m sticking in me. It’s amazing what can go inside a hole! Dresses! Ex-husbands! Houses! A horse! Truffles! The socket of me is a gaping emptiness. I’ll stick your whole refrigerator in it and then look at you with despairing eyes because that wasn’t what I wanted in the first place, and so now I’m full of wrong.

The primal wound may be endless hunger.

Giving a baby to a non-biological mother or father is like trying to plug a light into a wedge of cheese. Chances are solid the light just isn’t going to burn brightly. The light is potentially going to have a failure to thrive on some levels because someone decided a wedge of cheese was just as good as a socket.

I want…

I want…

I want…

You.