The Story under the Story

When I was a kid, news broke in our town that some time around the turn of the (20th ) century, a muralist painted the walls of some houses. I don’t remember seeing any pictures of the discovered murals, but I do remember going down into the cellar to get a tool to scrape some of the (very old) wallpaper off my bedroom wall. 

This wasn’t something, of course, I announced to my parents I was going to do. I wanted to surprise them. I was certain there would be a mural on my wall because the first librarian of our town had lived in this house, and how could she, a literary person, not have a muralist visit? 

 I was so certain of the mural that I didn’t even pull away my bed to scrape away at a secret spot. I went to work right in the center of the windowed wall, the one most likely to be seen as the centerpiece of the room for an artist and his paint. 

The walls in our house were made of horsehair plaster, and as I scraped away the thin flowered paper that had basically become skin to the wall, I found pink dust. So I scraped more, searching for story.

I have kind parents, parents that let me get away with murder (well, I have never murdered a person, but I have the feeling that my parents are the type (were, in my mother’s situation) to regularly visit me in prison and fight for my freedom), and so I don’t remember getting yelled at or punished. I do remember walking downtown to the hardware store to pick out new wallpaper.

In general, I think there is always something going on under the surface. It’s like life is a carpet, and there’s a different kind of flooring underneath, or life is a stage set, and there is a whole other world on the other side. 

Or that you are saying one thing, but there’s a world of meaning underneath your words, and it’s my job to figure out what’s really going on, what’s really being said. 

This is one reason I think so many adopted people seem to have ADHD. It’s because we’re both paying attention to the world and trying to read the substory at the same time. This means we are doing twice as much as regular people when, for example, we sit in class. We are both trying to figure out what is happening and what is happening. We are trying to be present and trying to figure out if we are safe. Always.

I have been reading about people who train to be the best in the world at Cross Fit. These people train for more than ten hours a day—they live to train. I think being an adopted person is like being a world-class Cross Fit athlete. We train non-stop to be here on the planet existing like others around us, others who weren’t born to feel they were constantly in danger of having the rug pulled out from under their feet, constantly in danger of falling through this world into some other one, constantly in fear of disappearing or dying.

I have written this before, but I want a super hero cape, and I don’t want to give it to myself. I want there to be a ceremony, like at the Olympics or for the strongest Cross Fit person in the world, and I want to be recognized along with my fellow adoptees. I want us to be caped. 

I want us to be seen.

And then I want all of us caped bad-asses to go back out into the world and cause a holy ruckus of fearless love and wild devotion to all that is good and generous.