The Adoptee Body and Movement

I started running as a thing where you are running and not just being a kid having fun when I was 13. It felt like something I had to do, like the way you feel you have to scratch when you have an itch. A crazy itch.

I started riding a bike like I meant it when I was in my twenties. This means it wasn’t just for pleasure. It was to work out.

I started doing yoga when I was thirty-two. I remember coming out of class one day and saying to a friend, “How do people live without this?”

For years, I did all three things. I had to move or I would chew off my own arm or the arm of someone else. I had to move the way a Mexican jumping bean has to jump when the bug inside of it is going nuts.

When I went to New York City to write You Don’t Look Adopted, I walked. Sometimes I would make myself go up and down the two flights of stairs a couple of times in the apartment and call that a workout. I would get down on the floor to do some yoga, and I would just stay there, not able to find the call to move.

This is a strange thing, to go from a body that has to move vigorously to a body that’s only willing to walk. I remember one tough run when I was a teenager and thinking, The day I’m old and can only walk will be a good day because I’ll be able to enjoy the experience of moving and the scenery more. Having to move can be both useful and burdensome. Especially when the move part means move house, move relationships, move careers, move states.

I tried to start up my yoga practice last year and it was like another body had stepped onto the mat. This one had no balance. This one shook in triangle. This one wanted to pass out while trying to do chatarunga. This one only wanted to stop, lie down, and hold on the way you might on a rocky boat when you realize you’re about to be seasick.

I was bodysick. I stopped trying to do yoga because I hated the unsteadiness and the sick, achey feeling I had in my body when I tried to move it.

And I didn’t know why. Was it age? Is this what the fifties feel like? Shaky? Slow?

What a bummer.

The walking was nice. At one point my chiropractor said 8 miles a day was too many for my crumbling spine, and I nodded, but I had nothing to replace that kind of movement, and I HAD to do SOMETHING, so I kept up with all the walking. I felt like a cash register whose paper had gotten jammed. I needed to keep moving to get things—something—maybe my belief system, maybe the grief and confusion in my body—moving. Something was happening, just as something had been happening the days and hours before my water broke and my daughter was born. I felt wrong, uneasy, on the edge of either dying or changing or giving birth; I didn’t know what it was, and if I asked my body to move with a great deal of energy, it wanted to pass out, so I had to stay at a walk. For seven years.

I got a Peloton bike recently, and I’ve been loving the brief workouts, loving finally sweating, but two weeks ago something shifted when, I went to a different chiropractor (I’m not in California where my other chiro was) and he basically showed me how my ab muscles were weak and so my back suffered and my butt muscles had gone to sleep so my balance and my back suffered, and something in me woke up. It’s one thing to be getting older. It’s another just to be weak. Somehow I had tricked myself into believing there was still muscle under the belly fat and that an increasingly shrinking butt was just what happened when one aged.

That day, instead of riding for 20 or 30 minutes, I rode for an hour, hard. My body was BACK IN THE GAME. I wanted to get stronger and now, faced with the knowledge that I was dealing with a body that was fundamentally okay, pushing it seemed like a good idea. Somehow in that reclaiming, my body became mine again instead of something that was beyond my control or something that was too busted to do much about. This is one reason dealing with grief is so…destabilizing…what seems so obvious in retrospect is not at all obvious at the time. While I was riding for 60 minutes, I remembered how much I loved the feeling of pushing myself to the point of gasp. My body was finally ready to go! I logged into a 5-minute ab workout on the Peloton and—it’s not like I haven’t done any sit-ups in the last seven years—but it was like I was doing them for the first time. My abs were so weak! I was reminded of the first time I tried to do a sit-up after giving birth. Oh, hello challenge. I can meet you! What I can’t meet is the brain confusion of why am I so weak there must be something wrong with me! I’m weak because I haven’t been working out is something I can confront! I needed to listen to my body more than my brain. The next day I rode for 90 minutes. I was happy all day long. It was like I’d broken through some wall and been reborn. I now had a body that was unafraid to feel.

This follows a year of waking up after having already woken up (partially—boy this acclimating to being in the world as an adoptee is a process!) while writing my book and feeling even more of the grief and loss and confusion. (If that sentence was hard to follow, know its contents were even harder to live.) I think I’ve felt to the bottom of the pit of she left me and I’m in so much trouble. I think I went to the nothing place, survived, and then rested my way to this place where I can now feel other things, such as my muscles burning from miles on the bike.

I think realizing how much relinquishment and adoption has affected your body and mind is such a complicated, confusing, all-encompassing process. I think my body said, HOLD ON. I HAVE SO MUCH TO PROCESS. DON’T BE TRYING TO DO HANDSTAND WHILE I AM TRYING TO DEAL WITH ALL YOUR REPRESSED FEELINGS AND MEMORIES. YOU CAN FUCKING WALK WHILE I HANDLE THIS SHIT. Then my body, on hold, started to lose the ability to communicate within itself—butt to feet: I got you i this balancing pose. Core muscles to back: You’re okay. You can relax. I have your, uh, back.

For years, my head has been yelling TROUBLE TROUBLE JUST KEEP ME ABOVE WATER and so I paid attention because my head is nothing if not loud. My head can be so inventive, so clever, so helpful. It can also be the car alarm that won’t shut up.

I love my mind, and I love my body. I am grateful to its stubborn dedication to its own well-being. I am, at 58, learning its language. Tired means tired. Hungry means hungry.

Sweet baby.