When She Named "Square One" Martha Beck Named, I Think, the Adoptee Predicament

I wrote the blog post yesterday about frozen dreams because I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to write the post I really wanted to write: this one.

But what the hell.

If I can’t write it, at least I can say I tried.

I want to tell you what Martha Beck said about Square One in her book Finding Your Own North Star because my jaw fell open when I read it, and it takes a lot for a jaw this tight to fall open. A. Lot.

In chapter 11, A Map of Change, Martha Beck outlined, well, change. There’s Square One (Death and Rebirth), Square Two (Dreaming and Scheming), Square Three (The Hero’s Saga), and Square Four (The Promised Land). She wrote about how “catalytic events” start the cycle of change. She wrote, “Catalytic changes literally transform your identity in your own eyes, and usually the eyes of others, so that you are identified by a new label.”

She goes on to outline three types of catalytic events: shocks (a sudden change that comes from outside of you), opportunities (they look like a lucky break), and transitions (they are slower and come from inside of you).

I wish I could just copy her book and paste it here so you could get the full picture, but that would be called stealing and I’m too lazy to steal. So I’m going to try to give you a taste of what she wrote about so you can go get the book and eat the full meal if you’re interested.

She wrote, “Not all shocks are bad news, but the are always sudden and major.” She wrote that people who experience shocks like these, “…go through denial, fear, and uncertainty. They lose old relationships and form new ones. The grieve as they relinquish the way things were and adjust to the way things are. Like anyone who’s experienced shock, they must find their core selves to make the event turn out happily.”

UH, HELLO!?

Is she not talking about what happens when adoptees realize the impact adoption had on their lives? Do so many of us hit Square One in our forties and fifties when it seems ridiculous to be AT SQUARE ONE and also thinking about things like children leaving for college, menopause, retirement, death? Did she not also use the word RELINQUISH? “They grieve as they relinquish the way things were…”

If we could have processed what was happening to us as RELINQUISHED infant or young bodies maybe we could have gone through Square One then, but since we and the people around us were CLUELESS, we had to hang out in this weird grey zone of normal, not normal—okay, not okay—healthy, sick—the liminal space of NOT KNOWING WHO WE WERE and being surrounded by a culture who thought WE ADOPTEES KNOWING OURSELVES DID NOT MATTER.

It’s like adoptees hang out in space until they hit some wall, wake up, and have to face the extent of the damage that came not from hitting the wall but from losing one planet and being put on another with no one there to explain to us what had happened and why we were feeling the ways we were feeling.

Here is why waking up and finding yourself in Square One can feel like REALLY BAD NEWS: “Square One is a time of fundamental death and rebirth, the period during which you mourn your ole life and begin exploring your new one. The wonderful thing about this is that it gives you a chance to choose a new identity.”

This kind of opportunity for change is great except what if you’ve formed a whole life around the person who grew up being? What if you have a spouse, children, a career, pets, a mortgage? What if you wake up one day, find yourself in Square One, and Talking Heads it—This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. What if you wake up one day and realize that being thrown into trauma brain at birth or shortly after, you never got a chance to find out who you really were? What if you want a do-over but what if you are so exhausted from maintaining your status quo that you’re not sure you can even shut the frig, never mind re-invent yourself?

What if you want to be born again with the adult brain you have so you can decide if you even like…well, your entire life?

Yikes!!!

Okay. I’m exhausted from trying to shove these jewels into a manageable post. All I can say is, we’re in this together and please read this book so we can talk about the confusing predicament of Square One.

For me, reading this book showed me that the confusion I’ve felt the last seven years since writing You Don’t Look Adopted wasn’t just a weird, uncomfortable, sometimes frightening stretch of time: it was Square One!! The great news is that Square Two is Dreaming and Scheming, and while I could barely do these things for the last seven years (a scary feeling), the light is coming back into the rooms and suddenly I’m a dreaming machine.

Oh, the relief! I’m not dead! I was just…in Square One, and even though seven years seems like A LONG TIME TO BE IN ONE FUCKING SQUARE, oh well. I’m really, really looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Boy oh boy they DO NOT MENTION THESE STAGES IN ANY OF THOSE ADOPTION PAPERS MY PARENTS GOT AND TUCKED AWAY.

I wonder why.