For the Adoptive Mom Who Wondered Just How Many Times Her Daughter Would Hit Bottom

You said your daughter’s therapist wondered how many times your daughter would hit bottom.

I already know the therapist isn’t adopted. You didn’t have to tell me.

You both, you and the therapist, wonder how deep the bottom actually is. Each time you think that must be the bottom, it turns out there was more room for your daughter to fall.

I think about your daughter, about her hitting bottom, and then hitting it again, and again, each time a little more dangerous and deeper than before. 

I think about the time 21-year-old me got in a man’s car after he’d turned around when he noticed I looked lost. I was lost. I was in Pasadena after sleeping with a man I’d just met, and the man had taken my car keys mistakenly to work. This was before cell phones. I wanted to get home to Eagle Rock, so I just started walking, and the man with the juice box saw me, picked me up, took me to Eagle Rock. I asked him to drop me off at the 7-11 so he wouldn’t see where I lived, and when he asked for my number, I made one up. I was scared the whole time. I still don’t know why I got in his car other than I really wanted to get home.

 I think about sleeping in a rest area in my car when I was twenty-two so I didn’t have to get a motel room as I drove across the country.

I think about all the times I went home with men for the night when no one but us knew where I was.

I think about the cheap cocaine I did while waiting tables because the pastry chef would hand me a little bundle of folded paper some nights and it was so fun to fly. I think about why I didn’t care what I was putting in my body. What if it killed me? Well, so what?

I think about the time I swam under a tunnel of rocks, not knowing where the other side was. My daughter was with me then, above ground. That one still makes me sick to remember. The others I can deal with—I’d made risky choices, but I’d always been okay. The other choices didn’t have a six year old waiting for me to surface.

The other events I can chalk up to I didn’t really know better, but that one still haunts me. I did know better—always put her well-being first—and yet I did it. What was I thinking?

I also think about the time when I’d gotten in big trouble, yet again, and had gone home to my parents because there was nowhere else for me to go. I couldn’t stop crying. I cried and cried. Finally, my dad said, That’s enough. Stop crying. That was a new kind of bottom for me. That was the one where I had to face that no one, including myself, knew what was wrong with me. No one, including myself, it felt, could help me. This was when I needed a therapist who had also been adopted to help me understand what I was feeling, to help mirror me. Instead, I turned to food, boys, riding my bike, and trying to make a success, yet again of school. It was a slow, painful climb up.

And I did climb up.

And I did hit even deeper bottoms for years to follow.

The one time I did MDMA in a therapeutic setting showed me, I think, true bottom. I was sinking into mud, choking on it. I saw I could not save myself and that there was no one around who could save me, either. Bottom was you are alone and you are about to die. Bottom was heart breaking and terrifying. 

I don’t know how I am going to get through this, I had said to my therapist. She said she’d never worked with an adoptee who hadn’t died in some way when doing MDMA (I might be making this up—I was, after all, on MDMA—but it’s what I heard her say.) and to just hang on. I did. I kept breathing even though I was watching myself suffocate, and then something shifted, and the mud disappeared, and I was safe.

But I knew now what I carried inside of me—the terror that at any moment I was going to die—reliving the moment or the time my body realized the mother was not going to hold me and everything was too much too soon too fast.  

I think being born is its own kind of bottom for our bodies and minds. The reward for that kind of brutality is the kindness of the mother’s body on the other side. You almost die so you can be held, so you can know what the bottom feels like, so you can know what coming out the other end and surviving feels like.

But when you are not held, not kept, by your mother, you do not learn to law of bottom and you spend your life, perhaps, trying to find it so you can finally truly come up for air.

It was a relief for me to know I carried that dark terror in me. It was a relief to know the trauma was even worse than I had imagined. I made more sense to me. I treated myself with more kindness, with more respect. I was a baby who had thought it was going to die. I deserved so much love. I deserved to be held, to be rocked, to be reminded again and again that I was safe.

I had to hit bottom, apparently, until I finally found it. My body knew I carried something dark and awful in me. My mind just had to catch up (or I had to take MDMA and go to a place so dark my everymind thought it would kill me to see) and let me see it so I could also see that it was something I could survive.

Hitting bottom is the best thing that can happen to some people. It’s where you find your will. Your spine. Your curiosity. What new thing will I have to do to survive? This is what movies teach us—the protagonist has to lose everything in order to find themselves. The shit really has to hit the fan for things to get good.

The director of the movie Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón, could have saved millions of dollars on set design and CGI if, instead of casting a woman into deep space, untethered, he’d shot a scene of a baby separated from their mother. Both scenarios show someone hitting bottom I am all alone and am going to die here. The difference is that if he had shown the baby scene, the audience would think that because there were doctors and nurses and social workers and maybe even adoptive parents on the scene the baby would not feel in crisis and alone.

Unless, of course, the audience was adopted. Then it would be Sob City.

These people would be seeing home base in the sense of loss and impending death. This is home for those who lost their mothers: terror and grief. This is the new felt safety. This is the place that pulls us to it like a magnet.

Until we learn what is happening and work to change our brains and physical responses to the world.

To the mom: hang in there. Get a therapist. Take good care of you. It’s not your job to fix your daughter or maybe even keep her safe. I don’t know what your job is aside from loving her. I wish I had better advice for you. I wish I knew what my mother could have done when I was in my twenties to make me a little less dangerous to myself. I think the best thing my mom could have done was to take really good care of herself, to chase her dreams, to worry about me a little less. To let me fall.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s terrible advice.

If my mom had been happier, I think I might have been, too. If my mom had been less fearful of her own depression maybe I’d would have been less fearful of mine.

I don’t know.