The Best Idea I Ever Had or How to Claim Your Self When You Were Adopted

I was doing a meditation on the Chani app and was asked to imagine myself before conception as a spark.

I loved this idea.

I was me before other people got their hands on me and started telling stories that were painful or untrue: You aren’t wanted. You aren’t really mine. I wish you weren’t here.

Once upon a time I was a spark of an idea: one day you will exist in flesh and blood and live out this vital force energy that is inside of you.

The day I imagined myself as a spark, I thought about what it might have been like to be in the womb of a woman who would first give me up at birth and then tell me she wasn’t my mother when I called after years of searching. I wondered if she ever beat her belly, trying to kill the life inside of it. I wondered this because I have an ache deep inside when I get quiet that feels like it comes from a beat-up place: sore, afraid, exhausted. I feel sad when I think about the two people who created me because I was not important to them. It felt like I did not matter and was, at the end of the day, just a big, fat problem to get rid of and then pretend did not exist.

This is not a great story to carry around like a bag of rotten peaches in my soul.

As I thought about spark me and possibly getting beat up as an embryo, I googled the length of an average pregnany, 266 days. Then I figured out what day it would be 266 days from then: December 10th. My birthday.

The plan ran down my spine and lit me up.

I was going to be pregnant with me. I was going to start from the spark and rewire my brain by creating a different story. I was going to want me from before I was even an egg and a sperm. I was going to want me from before hello.

I was going to take care of me for 266 days like a woman carrying precious life. Even when I’m not pregnant, after all, I’m carrying precious life. This is just boot camp for my brain. I’ll trick it into nurturing mode by telling it I’m pregnant, and then when I’ve “delivered” me on my birthday, I’ll know in my bones how to give myself the care I most need and want because I will have been practicing for nine months.

I will be my own person. No one will have relinquished me. No one will have adopted me. All that will have happened is that I will have intentionally created me.

That sounds powerful and fun.

I booked a few days at my beloved Spirit Hill Farm so I could birth myself there, surrounded by welcome and beauty. I will have people I love there so I will not come into the world alone.

I will turn 60 on December 10th, and I will also be brand new to the world. I have been looking for this doorway of start over for a long time. I look forward to every day between now and then. I look forward to the life I will live as a person who tends to her own life because it is the promise of goodness and love and it is what we do as human beings: when we are at our best, we help things grow.

I invite all people who are adopted to create themselves along with me. Our life is our birthright. It’s time, I feel, to take mine back and truly make it my own.

Amen.