Taking up Space and Blowing Through 7-11's Storefront Window

One of my favorite things is to get a text from Pam Cordano that says HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

That happened this morning during Flourish when I said I thought being born is like being a cannonball that was packed into a cannon that was pointed to the moon: Fly, child! Realize all your hopes and dreams! while being born and given away is like being a cannonball in a cannon that is facing the window of a 7-11. Hold on! Right away things are a shit show. Glass everywhere. Blood. Chaos. And you wonder why adopted people walk around talking about healing so much.

One of my favorite things to hear Pam Cordano say is You are fucking brilliant. I can feel my peacock self swelling up my behind. If I had feathers, I wouldn’t be able to sit because I’d be so popped out. Yo! Brooklyn! I’m fucking brilliant!

Pam said this a little later in Flourish when I was talking about all over the place. I had felt all over the place the day before when Pam asked me how I was, and I told her I wasn’t sure and went from talking about my chapped lips that were bothering me to the feeling that I had no real purpose in life. The more I talked, the more all over the place I felt: the fires in California, bras that are either too big or too small, my dog’s coat doesn’t seem as shiny as it used to be—is he sick? I felt like a train that had no intention of stopping but that was careening from one side of the track to the other. What was too much? I was taking up so much space in our conversation! When was Pam going to sigh and say, What are you even telling me?

But she kept up her quiet listening, kept up with her questions that indicated curiosity and not judgement, and finally I ran out of steam. I felt…done. Ready to take a nap and see who showed up in my body at the other side of I’m awake now.

I heard a woman once say that other women just need for their man to stand by them with a trash can at the end of the day and repeat something along the lines of “And what else?” until the woman has processed verbally all she needs to process. I don’t like the suggestion that what we are saying is garbage, but I do like the idea of my needing to talk things out in a way that is not linear or focused being supported and encouraged.

Adoptees, I think, need this support and encouragement particularly intensely. There is so much confusion and emotion and fear bottled up in bodies of people who lost their mother, and to be able to spill the contents of our hearts and guts and brains out on the table without the agonizing process of trying to tie it all up in a bow is a wonderful gift to our systems.

So many times when adopted people are about to read their written work to me they say, “It’s all over the place,” or “I’m all over the place,” or “This is a big mess,” and it’s like someone offering me an ice cream cone and saying, Careful. It’s hot.

It’s just not.

When I was growing up, we had this heavy metal loop with a handle you could put in a frying pan to make perfectly shaped fried eggs. I think the sense we have of needing to be in control or presentable is like this metal loop—restraining and small and unnatural. We are each an egg, and when you break us open, we are going to spread out, but the thing is, we aren’t going to go everywhere because we are only one egg and we can only cover so much space. We can’t be all over the place because we can only be all over our place.

In case you are still looking for the brilliance, that was it. Pam said she’d never thought of herself this way, as an egg, as something that inherently could only take up as much space as it was designed to occupy. We can’t be too much because we are what we are.

Isn’t that marvelous?

So go crack yourself open and see what happens. Be big. Be messy. Walk through that blown-out window at Sevies and get yourself a snack.

And a Big Gulp. Talking can make you really thirsty.