We
Since writing You Don’t Look Adopted, something in me has been…not right. You know when you are walking around and your kneecap feels out of alignment and you have to kick out your leg to feel that sort of sickening, awful, wonderful pop back into place thing happen? I’ve been like that, only without the pop back into place part. I could also say something in me has been out of tune. All I have to do is listen to the opening Vivaldi music playing for Chef’s Table, and every single time I get both goosebumps and teary. That music and the introductory shots of people preparing food makes me feel like I’ve summited Everest and have both an amazing view and an incredible sense of victory and of the power of being alive. The music in me yearns to be like Vivaldi, to evoke those visions and feelings inside my body, but the wrong notes are playing and I keep tripping over my own feet, mumbling, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.
When I created this blog, I used a quote from William Gass’s story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country to set the tone on the home page, “When the sky moves, fields move under it. I feel, on my perch, that I’ve lost my years. It’s as though I were living at last in my eyes, as I have always dreamed of doing, and I think then I know why I’ve come here: to see, and so to go out against new things—oh god how easily—like air in a breeze.” I first read this story when I was in my twenties, and I’m not sure a day has gone by since then when I have not thought about this line: “At last I am living in my eyes…”
The point of You Don’t Look Adopted was to say being relinquished and adopted hurt my brain, and it made me different than “normal” people. While writing it, I pretended I was standing in front of a judge, handing argument after argument up onto their bench proving that being relinquished and adopted had affected my brain and body in ways that most people, including myself, did not know about or understand. I was not living in my eyes. I was living in my nervous system, primed for a fight or a teary collapse.
I lost friends after writing that book and after seven years writing on Facebook and Instagram and here on this blog about how different I was, adoptees were, and how angry I was about not feeling understood. I wrote post after post saying, essentially, I was bought and sold. Do you know what this did to me as a human? My mother chose not to keep me. My birth father may have had non-consensual sex with her and that resulted in me. Do you know how that has affected me? Do you know what it’s like to grow in a womb where you are not wanted? Do you know what that does to a fetus’s brain and body? Many of these questions were rhetorical. I was sending the questions out, essentially, to the universe because I didn’t know the answers. I just knew I couldn’t seem to get my shit together in a way that “someone like me” should be able to. (My seventh grade teacher had once pulled me aside to ask me why I hadn’t done all the reading. I was such a smart girl after all. I had no idea why I wasn’t doing the reading. I hated it. I couldn’t focus on it. I was too busy worrying about other things. I don’t know why I struggled so much with getting my homework done.) No one knew I needed help. Not even me. I was too busy trying to keep my head above water to know that the way I was living was not exactly normal. And, at the same time, for all those people who struggle with ADD and ADHD and anxiety and on and on, it was completely normal.
When you are trying to survive, you often learn not to talk about it, just as when you are running the third lap in the mile, you don’t talk to the other runners around you because you’re too busy just trying to breathe and get to the finish line.
Something was wrong, and that something was either me or everyone around me.
I started driving from one side of the country to the other in the belief that the problem was the people around me. I’d get to California and after the dust settled, I’d see the same problems emerge, and since I didn’t know what exactly was wrong with me, I’d blame the people and the place and get back in my car and head to Massachusetts to give that place another try. Back and forth and back and forth. Still.
I’ve come full circle, and I’m back in my hometown, the place I left when I was 18 for school in the middle of the country. The winningest coach in Ivy League history was the girls’ basketball coach in my high school here in Westwood, and by a series of miracles, I got to be part of the team that is helping her write a book about leadership. I have long admired her, and so to be part of bringing her power story to the page makes me almost feel like I could make a basket if someone handed me the ball. I drove from California last year to work on this project, and I’m living in Westwood about a mile from where I grew up, in the home of my mother’s dear friend. I have the same kind of dog I had when I left here at 18, the dog that got hit by a car a few months after I left for Kenyon. I walk by my house now with Bird, and I say hi to the ghost of Polly there in the middle of High Street, and it brings tears to my eyes every time.
I think Polly’s death was when the whole adoption thing really started to unravel me. My mother had called me at Kenyon to say Polly was dead, and I had no one around me who understood the level of my grief. At the year’s end, I would leave that school, not feeling at home. I think I have been spinning ever since that phone call, not knowing how to deal with the grief of loss that was the ocean inside of me that did not yet have a name. When Polly disappeared, it was like infant me woke up and let my body feel the bottomless terror of not having my skin mother, the body my infant body thought of as my body, there.
Boy, I sure could have used You Don’t Look Adopted then. I could have gone to the school counseling center with that book in hand and said, This is my problem. Please help me.
Yesterday in the last day of the boundaries class I co-led with Joyce Maguire Pavao, Katie Kennedy read a piece she had written about becoming a “we”. It was one of the most powerful pieces of writing I’d ever heard because it spoke to my entire life. You Don’t Look Adopted was about me trying to become an I. It was me fighting to own my place on this earth and to have the courage to say that even though my mother didn’t keep me, I was still a body of value and that, for all the ways I tried to both exist and not exist, I was determined to be an I because life is short, and if not now, when? Katie’s piece took “I” and ran with it.
Being an I can like being in solitary confinement. I don’t know how many arguments I had with people who were telling me that adoptees aren’t different from everyone else. This comment used to set me on fire. Difference was the only thing I had, and here these people were, cavalierly trying to say I was just like them. I have walked out on people who loved me and who I loved because of this. They don’t know me, I would think. I can’t be near them. Friends got impatient with me, told me I talked too much about adoption. I told my adoptee friends about these people and we laughed bitterly about how stupid they were. How could I talk too much about something that took up all the space in my head? What choice did I have? These people who thought I should be fine because of all the good things in my life were crazy. They thought I’d be okay if I could just drop what was making me crazy—the insistence that I was different.
The thing was, I was not okay. I was different from everyone around me. They could finish things, connect with each other, pay their bills on time, stick around, relax and have a good time. This was all so confusing. What was real and what was in my head?
Last night I had a dream I had a thing called a pronk coming out of my chest, just above my heart. It was like an antennae with razors sticking out the sides. Any time someone got close or tried to hug me, the pronk would hurt or kill them, popping them like a bubble. In my dream, I had the sudden need to pull off the pronk. It snapped off my chest like a dead twig on a tree. At first, I panicked. There was a circle of scar tissue where the pronk had been, and it ached. It was desperate to attach to someone. I stood in the middle of the kitchen in my dream and panicked about being alone. Then something occurred to me: I love being alone. The panic must be about something else. I took a few deep breaths (dreams are amazing) and realized I was dreading being judged. Of being called weird. I live this life that family and friends seem to worry about: I’m not married. I don’t own a house or even live in an apartment. I just sort of…go from place to place. I hate when they worry about me because it makes me feel there is something wrong with me.
The fact is, I’m a writer, and I live the way I do because more than chasing security or whatever else my friends and family chase, I’m chasing the story. And so, more than anything, I value freedom.
When I dropped out of college years ago, my mother said, “What will I tell my friends?” I told her to tell them I was waiting tables in Los Angeles. I was so proud of myself. I was living in the land of stories. I was taking notes. I was living a life that fed my heart’s desire. Being like other people and not like other people is so complicated. We as humans both want to fit in and we tend to want to individuate. When you are adopted and you are both like your family of experience because you are “family” and you are not like them because you are not “blood family”, understanding what it feels like to belong can be really confusing. Am I really an I if I don’t feel I belong to a we?
It was about that time, eighteen to twenty-two, that I no longer had a sense of “we”. I had left my home to go to college, and now I was lost. I was an incomplete I, an I looking for something to complete it. This, I think, is called growing up or becoming your own person. This process is not special to adoptees. This is what human beings do. It just may take adoptees a particularly long time, and giving yourself the time is the game changer.
So much about both adoption and life is both and. Life is wonderful and painful. Life is long and short. Life is serious and funny. Life is weird and normal. So much about “I” is a paradox. So much about “we” is, too. Curiosity is a much better cribmate than disengaged.
Note to self.
All of this is to say that I don’t believe I am different from the rest of humanity. So many people are in deep pain. So many people feel fundamentally lost in their lives. So many people lost their mother in one way or another. So many people can’t focus or stay in a meaningful relationship. The Black Lives Matter campaign has taught us that white people have no idea what it means to have privilege or to not have privilege. War veterans walk around feeling isolated and lost in our culture’s refusal to understand what it means to fight for your country and then to come home to people who have no idea what you have been through. I have my own special needs as does everyone. If I say I am different from you and that you’ll never understand me, I might as well hug you and stick you with my pronk. There will be no connection between us. The braver, more real thing, I think, is to hold you close to me despite or because or our differences and to be able to accept both of us for who we are, two beings who have a brief time on this planet to figure out what we can do to become our best selves so we can help others do the same.
When I went back to watch an episode of Chef’s Table, I realized it’s not the music that makes me teary. It’s that the story of whatever chef is being told is always, always, always, the story of we gathering around an I to make a dream or a vision come true. This, I think, is life: the many supporting the one so that the seemingly unlikely or impossible can be born.
We need each other—we just do, and if you are born into a stillness that feels like the world abandoned you, wait, wait, please wait. You never know what might happen next.
