Being a 60-Year-Old Adopted Person at Low Tide
I have had the sense the last few years that my body, my life, is thinning and the truths of things, of myself, are becoming ever more transparent to me. If I were an ocean, the moon is pulling my waters back into the deep so I can see what was underneath all along. Shells, seaglass, rocks, a mangled lobster pot.
At low tide, the only option is honesty. I think it’s why I stopped dating. When the tide is high, water, like coping mechanisms, covers all sorts of thoughts and realities one becomes used to being buried. So many people, I think, are afraid to write their stories because they are afraid of what they will see and feel if they write what is true to them. When you are in high tide, you can ride the pull of the water instead of having to walk over the detritus of what your coping mechanisms left behind: broken relationships, debt, depression, a generalized lack of self-esteem. What is the fun of dating if someone else’s affections no longer make up for the lack of my own? It doesn’t matter how much someone praises me at low tide when my feet are burning from walking on the rocks of self-hatred.
All my life I filtered myself, parsing myself out in acceptable pieces, in order to feel safe and loved. When you serve yourself up to the world in ways that attempt to mask your deepest desires and needs, you suffer. You have headaches, stomachaches, depression, chronic illnesses, a sense of not-thereness. This is when coping mechanisms such as over-work, over-exercise, over-eating, over-spending, over-sharing (or under-, for all things stated) can high-tide the foundation of your life, letting you float for a while above it all.
What if the things we fear the most, the things buried underwater, are the countless doorways into self, connection, and love? What if the things that make us feel the most shame, the most self-dismissal, the most unloved, are the very things that will lead us to freedom if we learn to soften, breathe, and stay?
Not long ago an adopted person said to me she wasn’t happy with the latest draft of her memoir because it wasn’t like the other books on her shelves.
When the ocean of you pulls back and reveals what was at bottom, there you are. Oh, the strangeness and agony of being seen. Of not being like everyone else around you, and, at the same time, being so similar.
And yet to be seen is what the soul craves. To be seen and to see.
Being born is painful for both the mother and the child. Painful is a small word for what happens to both bodies. I thought I would die when my daughter was emerging from inside of me, and I suppose at least a version of me did die. I had been an expectant mother, and then I was a mother. My daughter was inside of me, attached to my body by a cord, and then she was outside of my body and the cord was cut. We were a system and then we were two people. We were both close to death during the birth period—so many things could have gone horrifically wrong. Nature was not joking around. Being born is walking the edge of death. And that’s just the beginning of your days as a human being out in the world!
To write about your life is to be born again and again. There was the you who had not told your story, and then there is the you who is telling it, and then there is the you who told it, who made it into something real.
To write your story is to create life, life as you know it, life as only you can see it because no one, ever, will be able to see through your eyes. You birth life when you write it down. It is a generous, desperate act.
I had decided against an epidural because, I had said, I wanted to know what it felt like to give birth, but, deep in labor, I changed my mind. I didn’t know every part of me would hurt. I did not know there would be no safe place for my mind to focus on so I could catch my breath. When the doctor told me it was too late for an epidural, I had to resign myself to death. My body had no understanding of how birth was possible. My body was certain it would split in half, and yet there was no other path. The baby was coming out, and I was going to die.
I was told to push again and again.
And so I pushed.
This is why I have become a life coach. I am fascinated by how terrifying and wrong it can feel to change and grow. We need people who have done what we’re doing beside us, promising it will be okay, promising there is the other side if we just hang on, if we just keep softening into where we are so clearly headed, if not to ourselves at the moment, then to something bigger than us, something that loves us and is bringing us home.
