Still Working on the Sequel to You Don't Look Adopted (update #3)
I have been thinking a lot recently about why so many adopted people struggle with feeling free enough to tell/write their story. I wrote these sections with that question in mind.
I Want This to be Different Than What It Is
It feels like the world is so against me saying adoption is high-level trauma. The more I try to convince people that motherloss equals irreparable damage, the more friends I lose, and the more I distance myself from myself in my desire to change, to not feel adopted, to not talk about being adopted, to flower into someone who does not feel damaged inside.
Many people have said that writing my book must have been cathartic for me. I hate that. I didn’t write You Don’t Look Adopted for myself. That’s what journals or diaries are for. I wrote it because I wished a book like that had existed for me when I was younger so I would have better understood why I acted the way I did. In doing this, I wrote it for all adopted people and adoptive parents and people who are friends or partners of adopted people. If you think writing about wearing the same pair of underwear for a year was cathartic for me, you are mistaken. It was painful and embarrassing. But I felt it was important to show that just because your adopted child looks normal on the outside, you still better keep a sharp eye out for what’s going on under the surface of your beloved who most likely does not understand their value.
To be continually misunderstood is exhausting and fundamentally disappointing. I have learned I am supposed to act like everything’s okay in order to fit into society. I have learned to go to Camp Suck It Up, but there is a price, and the price is that I have to anesthetize myself to be able to exist, and that results in a distance between you and me because I am not entirely present.
I don’t want pity. I don’t want to be called a victim. I want to be understood so I can better get the support I need to develop into the best version of me possible. I can then turn around and offer my wholehearted presence and support to others.
25%
I heard that at birth, 25% of our brain is already done its business of wiring itself together. It’s like our brain is a sweater, and the needles are quickly moving, getting the command center of us finished so we can know who we are and our place in the world.
I have some questions. If the body that is creating you doesn’t want you, does this affect the command center? I mean, if both a maniac and Michelle Obama were knitting you a command center made from the same pattern, do you think the finished product would look the same? I’m not saying that birth mothers are maniacs, at least not exactly. After all, mothers who seperate from or who are separated from their babies are something out of the ordinary. They are part of something that breaks a fundamental rule of humanity: a woman’s body creates and cares for its baby until the baby can care for itself, or, like puppies, at the very least for the first eight weeks of the baby’s life. The woman’s body and mind are hardwired to follow this line of caretaking 101 belief system so exhausted women don’t leave their screaming babies by the side of the road or at Starbucks because being a mother turned out to be so much harder than anyone told them. This means that when a mother’s body is separated from the baby’s body, damage is done to both just as if you touch a painted wall before it’s dry, your fingerprint will forever mar the surface.
Of course, mothers do shoot their babies, drive them off a bridge, or throw them out windows, but that’s not the norm, and these women generally end up suiciding or in jail. If being a mother was easy, men could do it.
Just Do It
I was recently talking to someone about writing this book, and I told her I was sad that day because I’d realized I wasn’t going to be writing the book I’d hoped to: one that wasn’t like You Don’t Like Adopted. One that was more triumphant, more a success story than that one was. I was full of sadness because, at the honest bottom of my guts, I wanted to say I believe my brain is different from those who didn’t lose their mothers early in the game. Not wanted: needed. If it were just about me, I wouldn’t really have that much problem with it. I have figured out how to live my life for the past 58 years and I’ll continue to do so for the rest of my time here, but to think of little kids starting off without the kind of understanding and help that might have radically changed my life and not do anything about that makes me terribly anxious. I have to talk about this because if I don’t some little kid is going to think there is something fundamentally wrong with them when really it’s that they are adopted and no one knows the extent of their mental and physical trouble.
I said these things to my friend, and she said, Hold on. She said, You can’t say those things because then you create them. She said, Haven’t you read Abraham Hicks?
I’d read Abraham Hicks. I would love to manifest a non-traumatized mind and body, but after years of trying, I’m suspicious. What if my sweater brain just is what it is? What if there are parts that can not be rewired? This is not the kind of thinking I enjoy. I enjoy the anything is possible kind of thinking. I like to believe I am the captain of the ship of me, and I can sail me wherever the hell I want.
And yet. I have responses to situations that cost me jobs, friendships, safety. Over and over again I’m like a dog who didn’t fully graduate obedience school. It’s not that I want to be obedient. It’s that I want to behave well enough to maintain quality relationships. And my brain is really a troublemaker with that one.
Once Upon a Time
I want to write a book that brings me love, love of myself, love of and from others. This does not feel like that book, and that is borderline unbearable. I have to dedicate my energy to creating something many people actively don’t want to hear? This is so, so sad.
This is my life, making something other people will say, Not that. You can’t say that. Haven’t you listened to this? Can’t you be different? Can’t you make something else?
When a mother leaves her baby, she throws the stone of that life into a still pond, and the life of that body is lived out in the ripples. I did not choose to be the stone. I did not choose to make the ripples. I am living them out the best that I can.
The kindest thing you could do, the most humane, would be to see me and accept me the way I am.
It’s sort of like when Eliot was taking care of E.T. Eliot and his family tried to help E.T. “fit in”. They dressed him, put make-up on him, fed him their food, but E.T. needed to be E.T. Eliot and his family had to let E.T. hide in the closet, point to the sky, even go home.
Know what I mean?
Maybe if you accept me for who I am, I could do it for myself.
My #1 Negative Review
According to Amazon, it is this: So Bad It’s Hard to Know Where to Start
Just to put my credentials up front, since this is going to be a bad review – I am writing this as an adoptee, as a former professional writer (newspaper journalist) and as an english lit graduate. And yes, I hated this. In fact, I thought it was so bad, I have just started a ‘return’ to Amazon and as an avid reader, I very very rarely send books back, let alone stop reading them because they are, well, unreadable.
But I completely agree with other poor reviews here – especially blackdragone who nails it – Heffron is not only a poor, and lazy, writer, but has made the cardinal error (in my view) of blaming every single thing in her life that has gone wrong on her adoption. And I mean everything. At one stage she even meets a criminal, and when he challenges her about right and wrong, claims to have no moral compass...because she’s adopted.
Well – here’s the thing, speaking as a grown up, 57-year-old adoptee who never knew his dad and whose mother gave him up in a mother and baby home – being an adult is about taking responsibility. It’s about owning your choices, and owning our own decisions. No-one else is making them for you – not your spouse, not your adoptive parents, nor your biological parents, whether or not you’ve found them. Sure, I’ve made some bad decisions – haven’t we all – but not once have I thought “oh, I did that because I’m adopted – it’s therefore not my fault and I shouldn’t feel bad about it.” I have made poor decisions, I feel bad about them, I have learnt from them. That’s what being grown up is about.
I actually think this book is dangerous if it’s encouraging adoptees to think they can opt out of taking responsibility for their lives. I disagree with every other person here who says “it’s a must read for anyone involved in adoption” – no it isn’t. It’s actually a “should not read”.
As for the writing…where to start? No structure. No progression. No character depth. No real meaning, to much of it. Sections are randomly punctuated by words or phrases as if she thought “oh, that word would look neat here” – but there’s no real reason to include them. I can only describe the effect as sitting in a bar with someone who is rambling on and on about what a sh*t life they’ve had because of the way everyone has ever treated them, it’s nothing to do with them, and then they just randomly shout out words or phrases as they get increasingly drunk. That would be a bad evening in a bar. And no-one wants that.
To end on a more constructive note, having read a fair few books on the subject over the years, I would recommend “Family Wanted” (Granta Books, edited by Sara Holloway). I’ve recommended it to a few people over the years involved in adoption one way or another and have always received heartfelt thanks. It’s a simple idea with each chapter told by a different person involved in the process – an adoptee, an adoptive parent, a biological parent, siblings, etc etc – including some well-known authors. You may not always agree with the chapter’s author, but every single one is well written and – crucially – the whole book has been thoughtfully and carefully put together by a good editor. Something Heffron could have benefited from. It came out more than 10 years before her book – and it’s also much cheaper.
So – in short – spend your money in the same way you should make any decision – wisely.
Jackson Pollock Is Not For Everyone But I Sure Love His Work
Creative self-expression is complicated when those looking at the work judge it with eyes that expect to see only what they know.
The architect Louis Sullivan said “Form follows function.” The idea is that the shape of a building should directly relate to its form or purpose. I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted using a form, a shape—lots of white space, a heavy dependance on run-on sentences, the general use of free association rather than a linear narrative—that follows the function of creating a visceral text about the effects of preverbal trauma. I hear and feel what I write as much as I see it, and what I’m ultimately after is to bring myself and the reader into a wormhole where we can slip from the physical world we inhabit to the one we live in inside our heads and bodies where non-verbal trauma and experiences run the show. Really, the whole book could be seen as a lullaby that says, I see you, I see you, I see you, you are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone, losing your mother is as hard as you think it is, you are not crazy, you are not alone, we are in this together.
The “sloppiness” of my writing is intentional. I went to college. I went to graduate school. I have a BA and an MFA in creative writing. I learned the rules of how to write to be published, but the rules did not show me how to tell my story. That came when I finally listened to the story itself and let it come out the way it wanted to be told: fragmented, disorganized, flawed.
If I Can Tell My Story, Anyone Can
After years and years of teaching writing, the thing I hear most when people talk about having a story they want to tell is “But I’m not a writer.” People tend to harbor that belief because they 1. were told they weren’t a writer 2. don’t write like any other writer they know of 3. don’t experience flow when they write 4. etc. I write for those people, for the people who think they can’t write but have something inside of them I and others would love to read.
