I got divorced from my daughter’s father over twenty years ago, and the reason why just hit me today. I was driving home from walking Bird in the woods, and I remembered the night before our wedding and how I got into a funk thinking about the fact that my future husband’s father died in his fifties of a heart attack.

I imagined my future husband, a man I adored, disappearing.

I think I split off my emotionally from my future husband the night before we got married because I could not reconcile the idea that I was going to promise to be with him forever with the knowledge that he could, at any moment, die. Divorce was inevitable because I never fully showed up since I couldn’t even begin to deal with attachment and loss.

I was thinking that when your mother leaves you when you are born, maybe you don’t have the muscle memory or the body memory of what it means to stay or to believe that another person will stay with you even if your adoptive parents and friends partners and others do! Maybe my body only knows to expect the leaving. I know there are plenty of adoptees who are in long-term relationships and they are able to stick like glue to their partner. I think that’s the opposite response to abandonment. I will never leave.

I am learning the language of staying with my dog.

When you have a child, you know that the child will grow up and leave you, but when you get a dog, the dog is with you until death, unless, as I tried to do early on with Bird, you freak out at the idea of forever like I did and try to give your new dog to whom you’re getting attached to a friend. Luckily, I only lasted 24 hours before something in my brain resigned itself to both commitment and loss, and I got Bird back. I’d had this idea that I could do so many things if I weren’t “tied” to taking care of Bird, and yet for the 24 hours I was “free"“, all I did was to walk on the beach, cook food, work outside, and sit at my desk and write. All things hat were more enjoyable when he was around. Walking on the beach by myself felt as if I had left my heart in the car. What was the point of being free if I didn’t have my heart?

I have this stunned feeling when it comes to my dog because the commitment is real. I really, really plan on being there for him 100% until the day he dies. It’s fascinating to watch myself try to negotiate how I’ll handle his death. I watch myself get cold, tell myself I’ll be fine when he leaves. The other day I took him to Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and for the first time ever, Bird ran away and I couldn’t find him for a couple of minutes. The cold part of me was resigned to his disappearance, and that part would have gotten into my car and driven away if the other, struggling to have a voice part didn’t start calling, “Bird! Bird!” Even if he didn’t want to be with me (this is my brain!!), I was going to try to find him. When we reunited by the grasses, he was clearly as relieved as I was (is the story I like to tell myself).

The fact is, I am going to learn what it’s like to love something with my whole heart and then deal with the pain of loss when it happens. I am learning that controlling my life by only having me in it is a shallow kind of freedom. It’s like standing by the edge of the water and never diving in it.

This conscious dedication to love feels like one of the most significant things I’ve done in my adult life. I’d asked Amy Geller to help teach me about love because she’d done the thing I was so afraid to do: she’d met someone and she’d said yes. She’s an adoptee and a therapist and is brilliant on so many levels, but particularly when it comes to the heart. I learned from her, and I am moving forward.

Baby steps.