Blogging and Adoption

I wrote my first blog post on June 9, 2016, after my best friend from childhood created a website for me as a present because, somehow, without seeing me for years, she knew this was what I needed. I’d written and published You Don’t Look Adopted the summer before, and I was not sure what to do with all the words I had left over. In the post I mention writing an adoption handbook. That’s still in my brain.

I wrote that post in the Peet’s Coffee and Tea on Lincoln Avenue in Willow Glen, California. I wrote it on a stool, facing the wall. I wore headphones and listened to music so none of the regulars, many of whom I knew since I was also a regular, would interrupt me. When I was finished writing, I took off my headphones and went outside to post what I had written. I went outside just in case I had incurred the wrath of the universe by saying too much, by taking up too much space, by acting as if my voice and opinion mattered. I didn’t want the lightning that would come to strike me down get the others, also. They were innocent.

No lightening.

Game on.  

I wrote my next post a month later, in July. I wrote a post in August, one in September, and then, in October, I started to feel my oats. I wrote two posts on the 18th. For years, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Once I challenged myself to write one hundred posts in one hundred days. I was a firehose of words.

My mother had called me Constant Comment as a child.

 It may be annoying to others, but there’s a joy in firehousing your way verbally through life. This is what I see, this is what I think, let me share it with you. There’s something about dropping out of college three times and having countless jobs and being married and divorced twice and having your birth mother refuse to meet you and thinking and thinking about what it means to be relinquished and adopted but having no one willing to listen (without being paid) to the constant stream of bewildered and curious and pained thoughts regarding mother- and lineage-loss and the gain of the adopted life that teaches you (that taught me) that silence, according to the world surrounding you (me) is golden.  

You can only plug a firehouse for so long while adding water pressure until something’s going to give.

My friend gave me a platform to play with language, with my language.

Constant Comment was back.

When I read my first post, I’m struck by how much I had to lead with the fact that I loved my mom—writing the truth when you are adopted makes many of us terrified of whom we might hurt as we lay down our words which, instead of being a brick-by-brick kind of thing, can feel like a sword-wielding thing when you have trained yourself to use language to keep yourself self, kept.

I want to put my hand on the shoulder of my younger self who was writing this post and say, Sweetheart. It’s okay to be you. It doesn’t mean you don’t love her. I know it feels that way. I swear to all that is good, the truth shall set you free. But first, darling girl, it will give you diarrhea. Travel always with an extra pair of pants.

Hang in there. You’re going to make so many great connections with people because of what you write, and you are going to have a lot of fun figuring out who you are and what you believe. You are going to look at the world with greater curiosity because you allow yourself to blog about it. Your dad’s going to die. You are going to suffer because loss is hard.

You are also going to bloom in ways that will feel like home.

You go, Girl.

Here’s the post:

I’ve been writing a lot about what I didn’t have because I was adopted. I talk about the missing birth certificates and contact with birth parents and lack of health history, but I haven’t written much lately about love.

The other day I was out walking, and I thought about my mom, and I just lost my breath. I loved—love—her so much. I thought about how for the years that she had cancer, I wore a flight path from California to New Hampshire. The only thing more important than being with my mother for those years was being with my daughter.

And losing her has been the hardest thing I’ve faced in my life, followed only, much to my surprise, by my daughter leaving for college.

I wonder if it’s possible that some adopted kids (me) love their parents even more than non-adopted kids (I think it’s funny that many people might write “regular kids” here) do. I wonder if the knowledge that the two people who are raising you are only raising you because fate stepped in—why did you go to these parents instead of to the other thousands of parents waiting to adopt a child?—and this roll of this dice makes you attach even more deeply because, hopefully, you feel you won the roll: you not only got parents, you got the right ones.

(I know the idea of loving something more or less is actually a ridiculous concept. Love is love is love, but I guess I am talking about loving more fiercely. Or maybe I’m just competitive: I want to say I love my parents more than you love yours.)

I could talk about the fact of my adoption to my father but not with my mother. I knew I could make her cry, make her turn away from me, if I brought up the idea that I had another mother. I wonder if this also has something to do with the intensity of my love for her. I read once about a man who hurt a baby duck by mistake, and the duck then bonded with the man, following him everywhere. This sounds sick and hateful, but I wonder if the bonding to my mother wasn’t also a little bit of me being a baby duck who’d been hurt.

I’m working on my Adoption Handbook, the book I’m going to tie to the wrist of every infant or child or adolescent before he or she goes to his or her new parents, but I wanted to take a breather and say I am so lucky to be adopted, and that I love my parents very much.