When an Adoptee (I Mean a Human Being) Watches Her Father Disappear

My dad may have years left on the planet, but after his holiday hospital stay it doesn’t look that way, and recently I’ve been making jokes about hurrying his exit.

I want him gone so then I can start missing him for real. I felt the same way about my mother, and then she died and I thought I was okay until I could see that I wasn’t because, for one, my handwriting became almost indecipherable and I had the habit of crying the way some people yawn. Like—Where did that come from? I must be tired/bored/short on oxygen/overloaded on Co2, except it was like, Where did that wash of tears come from? I was at Anthropologie having a fine old time until out of nowhere I was miserable. I must miss my mom.

Jokes are a great way to pretend I (hey, Brad! I erased you and replaced it with I) don’t give a shit. Go ahead, take my dad. I don’t want him. My dad didn’t answer his phone—he must have fallen over his own bullshit. Jokes are like armor a knight puts on before having a sword fight with a mortal enemy. I am armoring myself against feeling because losing someone when you were brought into the world tasting loss the way others taste their mother’s milk can feel like you are going down a drain. Or it can feel like nothing.

Feeling nothing is worst of all because it’s a lie even though it can feel like the most true thing about you: you feel nothing about your father getting old and dying because you’re adopted and he was never your real father anyway.

What you—say it, Anne—I can’t admit and continue to feel nothing about is that my “real” father was a sharp shooter with his sperm and is now Captain Unavailable. I can’t let this sink in because that means the father that I have, my Dad father, my when-I-was-little Daddy father is my real father since he’s the father I had. How can I feel both numb and flooded at the same time?

I think I’ve felt that way my whole life, so what I don’t know is what normal feels like.

I’ll do with my dad what I did with my mom—I’ll keep going back as long as I have the opportunity, because what if today is the last time I’ll ever get to see him? I’ll also have this sinking feeling as soon as i see his eyes that, as always, tell me he is drowning and needs me to do something to save him. Maybe I’m supposed to be a good girl. Maybe that will bring a spark to those sad eyes. Maybe he wants me to make him a sandwich. Maybe he wants me to fail so he can feel good about himself and rescue me yet again. Maybe he wants me to magically become his DNA daughter so the space between us can relax. Maybe he just wants me to sit next to him and be quiet so he can breathe in the love he feels for life and for my brothers and for me and the love we feel for him.

This last one is a kicker.

I tried it yesterday with my dad. The time before I had gone to see him, I’d driven an hour and a half to get to him, and when I got there, he asked me how long I had, and something in me pushed a panic button and I said, “Fifteen minutes.” I would have rather sat on a hot stove than negotiated whatever energy was between us because it felt like I was on the moon without a helmet. The air was so thin. Maybe if I sat there with my dad I would suffocate, pass out, and hit my head on the way down, dying first.

The body’s constantly figuring out if it’s safe. It checks the internal world, the external world, and the space between the people with whom it is in relationship. When I am an hour and a half away from my dad, my heart and body feel expansive and I have empathy for him; I worry about him; I want to bring him comfort. When I am within an arm’s reach of him, the safety alarm muffles my life force and makes it hard for me to stay.

When I am away from him and I think about him getting old and feeling alone in his apartment, my heart speeds up and I numb out. It’s his fault, I say to myself. He should have been more aware of other people’s needs. He put himself in this place. He’s living out his actions and choices.

I want to be a person who has no parents so I can feel what that’s like—to no longer be an adoptee because there are no bodies alive that adopted me. It’s like I’m an Etch-A-Sketch that is covered with scribbles and I ache to clear the whole thing off so I can see what it looks like when it was first created—clean, unmarked. When that happens, there is no going back. I can no longer fantasize about what might be because what I’m fantasizing away from is gone. How do I know I’ll be okay when this happens? How do I know things won’t be worse, I won’t be emptier, more adrift?

One thing I’ve learned is that if I’m not willing to risk everything, I’m not likely to gain everything, or anything of much note. Yikes. The monkey had to let go of the banana to get his hand out from between the bars. Maybe I have to let go of being a child in order to feel I’m free.

My heart occupies the space between what I fantasize about and what I fear. I fantasize about my brain forgetting my father ever existed so I can be myself without being influenced by someone who bought me from a NYC agency, and I fear not being attached to someone to whom I think I’m actually deeply attached. My heart knows what’s true: uh…uh…uh…Okay. It knows, but I don’t.

Here’s what I am learning as I race around the track and head towards 60: my heart speaks a language that I need to learn. It’s like I grew up in Spain but lived locked in a room that only had English on the TV. My heart is trying to tell me how I feel about my dad, and I know it is because my heart feels like it’s not in the right spot in my chest. It feels like it’s sitting on the edge of its seat. It feels speedy, light, like it’s standing in front of a microphone getting ready to speak and is nervous, uncertain it will be heard.

My poor heart. It’s been trying since it started beating to talk to me, but I’ve been so intent on listening to the sounds around me, looking for proof that I’m as unsafe as my guts and brain tell me I am, that my heart had to keep doing its thing without feeling fully understood.

I wonder if this is how my dad feels, too.

What I didn’t mention is that I went to psychedelics to find a way to sit with my dad. I ate some mushrooms and I asked them to help me. I lay down, closed my eyes, and right away there my dad was in my mind, at an angle, sliding away from me. The mushrooms took my through his life and they showed me why he is the way he is. They showed me how my father and I in many ways survived my mother’s unrealized dreams. They showed me what it was like for a man to take a baby into his arms knowing he couldn’t create a baby of his own. The mushrooms showed me how my father’s sadness and my mother’s sadness at not having children “of their own” went into my body because they didn’t process this massive grief on their own. This grief slippage allowed them to believe they had children “of their own” because they didn’t ever fully face what it meant, emotionally, to “have” to adopt in order to have the family they wanted.

The mushrooms showed me that I could sit with my father as a body that is separate from his body, as a human being sitting with another human being. The mushrooms showed me it is not my body’s job to make my father’s body feel okay or at home in the world. My father is my father, not my problem.

When you are adopted, it can be hard to know what the boundaries of your own body and life are. Watching my father disappear tests these boundaries. I have to keep telling myself, my father’s body is his body; my body is my body. His life is his life. My life is my life. I have to keep telling myself, I have a father. He was mostly there and now is is disappearing. I can still love him even when he disappoints me, abandons me, sets me free. I can still love him even though I can’t find any feeling in my body at the moment. My hands are cold. This, I think, is fear.

The blood will return and soon I will feel things I will try to name.

That is what I tell myself.

I hope my father is okay. I know he wants to live. I want him to be happy.

I want to feel I can be okay when he isn’t.

On this New Year’s Eve, I wish peace for all of us. Peace and love, peace and love.