Adoption and Power or How Come I’m So Confused and Tired
My father died in November, so it hasn’t been a year yet. Waves of grief still come out of nowhere and take me down for a while, an afternoon, a day, a couple of weeks. I’m not just grieving him. It seems to me that grief is like a daisy chain—one connects to the next (my mom dying) connects to the next (my first mom leaving) connects to the next (and all the other losses). When this happens I feel like someone took out my batteries. It’s so hard to function. The only thing that sounds good is doing nothing. Not sleeping. Just lying there, waiting for time to pass until this recalibration of my body and mind finishes—for the time being—doing its thing so I want to get up and focus.
It’s funny the word is “lying” because when I’m comatose like that, it’s so honest. It’s a body and mind that has run out of gas and is letting nature take its course because there isn’t a gas station in the world (going shopping, eating sugar, drinking caffeine, online dating) that is going to help me at this point. I’m 59 and those gas stations don’t work anymore! My bodymind won’t fall for those tricks now. It wants the Read Deal. It wants Care, Quiet, Rest, Attunement, and Kindness.
These waves of grief that I’m feeling are so familiar. I’ve been feeling them my whole life. They are just more noticeable to me now because I understand them. It’s like if you experienced an earthquake but lived in a place where the concept of “earthquake” didn’t exist. You would not know how to describe what happened. It would be this thing that happened and scared the jelly beans out of you sort of didn’t happen because you can’t talk about it. You would be less empowered to tell your story of being in an earthquake, of being a living being, because the word “earthquake” doesn’t exist.
The word for what happened to me as a baby doesn’t exist, and so I don’t have the power I need to feel fully present and connected to others. If the word DID exist, adoption as it is would not be happening. People would not be able to bear the process.
I WANT power. I WANT to feel fully present and feel strong enough to make vital connections with others. I also NEED power to feel fully present and make vital connections with others. It’s like craving macaroni and cheese but being taped to the floor, unable to crawl to the kitchen or to the phone to call DoorDash.
Adoption is so flipping complicated. It saved my life (thank you for taking me in and loving me, feeding me, sending me to college, etc.), but it also kicked the shit out of important aspects of said saved life.
It seems to me one of my most important jobs in this life of mine is to find a way to feel agency and power. To embrace personal power. To be able to walk away from you without feeling that I’ve done something terribly wrong.
I had these thoughts and wanted to get them down before I forgot them. More later, probably.
