How Birth Does Not Prepare Us to Be Alive: Adoption and Skin Contact

This is the thing I’ve been circling around saying for the last four posts. The thing has more to do with a feeling than being a thing to say, and so hence the circling.

Also, I can seem really open and authentic, but sometimes I wonder how much of that is true. I am open, but the core stuff I tend to fist around because 1. I’m afraid you won’t understand 2. I’m afraid it won’t be received with the same magnitude of importance I believe it to be 3. If I articulate this buzzing feeling of wonder and awe and turn it into words, will it and I become ordinary? 4. If I give it away, what will I have left?

Annnnnyway, here goes.

As I let myself increasingly dissolve into Square One (read any one of last three posts if you are already lost), I can feel I am stepping into an energetic way of being that my life or life has been trying to steer me towards for…forever. This is how I imagine the scenario of me trying to go from caterpillar (fetus) to body self out in the world:

1.     I’m born and the gunk that covers my body as I am squeezed out of my mother’s body is a cocoon in which I am to go through the transformation stage of fetus to baby in the world (a C-section still has its own gunk). Part of the cocoon process is to be then held by my DNA mother’s body so that our corresponding DNA can help my becoming body find its edges and discover it is now a separate entity in the world. This takes months, and then years.

2.     When, instead of going to my DNA mother’s arms, I went to some untold place or person for ten weeks, I floated. The universe did not create the system of conception and birth for humans to be almost squeezed to death in the transition from in the mother to out of the mother to emerge into the world ungreeted and unheld. That’s like creating a soft serve ice cream cone but skipping the cone.

3.     So being in the world, to my subconscious now, means a sense of being unheld, of being alone, of being unsafe, of being undefined energy rather than a human being organized by the packaging of their own skin. We learn to be in relationship to ourselves and to others by being in relationship with the mother.

4.     What I am coming to understand about myself now as I allow myself all this time to be still and pay attention to the language of my body is that my subconscious, 100% of the time as far as I can tell, does not believe I am safe. It does not know that the feel of air against my skin is called being alive, it thinks me feeling the air against my skin means I am alone and am about to die.

5.     I think this final feeling is one reason people who haven’t lost their mothers early in life find it hard to pay attention to adopted people’s traumas. They don’t know what it feels like when your skin is telling you life is not good. I imagine war vets feel a similar way when they come home with their PTSD and people expect them to get over it. All that violence and fear has made their skin not a safe container.

My takeaway from all of this is that the culture doesn’t know shit about what it’s like to be me, and I need to lean into my community so, together, we can micro examine our needs and wants and get better and then excellent at meeting them.

My skin, for example, is a good place to start. How do I feed and calm this creature who is terrified and uneducated? Certainly not by hating it, calling it names, treating it cruelly. I am covered by baby me, and the first thing I can do, the thing I’m going to do right now, is to take a nap and hold it close.