Coming Out of the Fog, Square One, and the Body of Adoption
What I really want to know is what would our lives look like if we felt supported and even encouraged to live out our Square Ones to their penultimate state of not knowing and then stayed there until a new kind of knowing entered our bodies? Not because we felt the pressure of get a move on but from the same force that brings a flower from a bud to bloom? What if when a wife lost her husband our culture supported her falling apart and crying for not months but years or until she felt that climbing a tree was suddenly more down her alley than lying on the couch crying and binge watching Netflix in a state of halflife?
What if people understood the grief birth/first moms feel as well as the grief couples feel who want to create a baby “of their own” and can’t? What if we knew how to allow space for this kind of grieving? What if we knew how to ask, “Tell me more?” without hoping for healing or any other state of being for those who were suffering? What if we didn’t have to hope they were any way other than the way they were in that moment because, after all, that’s where they are?
When people ask when I, as an adopted person, am going to heal, I feel insulted. When are you going to heal? I wasn’t injured like someone who burned herself on a hot pan. I was created in a stressful situation. What you call a need to heal I call life.
If someone cuts into a cocoon to “rescue” the bug soup, the butterfly will never happen. It had to fall apart fully in order to find out what it was.
How can we as adopted people fully dissolve after the catalytic event of birth and relinquishment and adoption so we can, when the time is right, enter Square Two, dreaming and scheming, with ideas born from their own consciousness, not from a place of mirroring or people pleasing or fear? It doesn’t really work when we are babies or children because the people around us generally have no idea the impact this event has on the nervous system and the brain and the body. How can we have a baby who is falling apart when they are ours now (thinks the adoptive parent), when everything is fine, when they have their whole life ahead of them? Buck up, Buttercup. You’re safe. We’re here.
I’m thinking a full-on embrace of Square One is the stage that’s available for many adopted people after their own children have left home, after, perhaps, retirement, right about the time when the rest of the world would be expecting this person to be in Square Four, full out butterfly mode, the world as their oyster. It can feel scary and strange to fall apart like a distraught newborn when you are 60 years old. It can feel insane. Like depression. Like danger. Like what is wrong with me?
Having embraced Square One for about eight months now, it’s occurring to me that I need to let go even more. For all I took off my plate, I was still trying to hold a lot together. I was still trying to be like an adult person out in the world. But I know it’s not right because I haven’t accessed the dreaming and scheming part of my brain yet. When I try to do the ideal day exercise Martha Beck did with Andrew Huberman on his podcast, my brain refuses to see the future. It refuses to dream. It wants to go back to bed and not dream. It wants time to pass. I want to dream. I want to scheme. But I can’t force it because my body refuses to play along and dream about things I have not done or been yet. Nope, it’s saying. We’re crumbling whole hog this time. We’re going to find what’s really real in this DNA of yours. Hang on, take it easy, rest. I promise the dreams are there. You just have to give them time to emerge.
This means there was the stage of sort of coming out of the fog when my daughter was born, really coming out of the fog after she daughter left for college and then, more than ten years later, there was/is the stage of falling apart and being reborn.
This reminds me when, decades ago, someone asked me what I did for a living and I pointed to my body. “This,” I said. “This is my full time job.” I didn’t know exactly what I meant—I was a mom and a lecturer at a university, but that was what had come to mind.
I understand myself better now.
